Roger Stone Will Get to Read Secret Parts of the Mueller Report Before You Do

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WASHINGTON — Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report may still be available only in redacted form to the general public, but one of Mueller’s key suspects will soon get an exclusive look: Roger Stone.

Stone won access to still-secret portions of Mueller’s report about Trump-campaign ties to Russia on Thursday, after the judge granted his request to review select passages for information relevant to his trial.

The decision marked a small victory in an otherwise dreary day for Stone, whose bid to dismiss the case over a laundry list of complaints, including allegations of political bias, was rejected by the judge.

“Stone points to nothing that would substantiate his attribution of his indictment to his political views,” Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote in a 56-page opinion. Stone’s “supposition is made up out of whole cloth.”

Stone, one of Trump’s oldest political advisors, was arrested in January and accused of lying under oath about his attempts to reach out to the renegade transparency group WikiLeaks, which published Democratic emails hacked from by Russian cyber-spies in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign. The seven-count indictment charges Stone with making false statements, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

Read: Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Mueller’s 5-Hour Testimony

Now, Stone will get to review the portions of the Mueller report that center around the Trump campaign’s ties to WikiLeaks, in some of the most-redacted pages in the document’s first volume.

Among other selections, the judge will allow Stone to read seven pages that are almost completely covered up in the public version of the Mueller report, under the heading: “Contacts with the Campaign about WikiLeaks.”

Stone’s own “braggadocio” was a big part of why he got caught up in Mueller’s probe, Jackson wrote Thursday.

Stone, who spent decades as a GOP political operative, had boasted publicly about his communications with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign before reversing himself and saying that his earlier claims were baseless.

“It is fair to say that Roger Stone has no one but himself to blame for the fact that he was investigated by the Department of Justice,” Jackson wrote.

“There is no question that when he chose to take credit for the Wikileaks release and to tantalize the public with hints that he had inside information about more to come, he chose to place himself directly in the vortex of the issues that became the focus of multiple law enforcement, counterintelligence, and congressional investigations,” the judge wrote.

Stone’s trial is set to begin in November in Washington DC.

Cover: Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Donald Trump, accompanied by his wife, Nydia Stone, leaves federal court in Washington, Tuesday, July 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Sait Serkan Gurbuz)