A federal judge tossed out a lawsuit alleging that President Donald Trump’s campaign and former adviser Roger Stone worked with WikiLeaks.
“Plaintiffs assert that defendants engaged in a conspiracy with unidentified Russian agents and WikiLeaks to publish hacked emails,” the judge wrote Tuesday. “The Court will grant defendants’ motions to dismiss, deny plaintiffs’ motion, and dismiss plaintiffs’ suit without prejudice.”
The suit was brought by former Democratic National Committee finance chief of staff and former LGBT finance chair Scott Comer and two donors, Roy Cockrum and Eric Schoenberg.
Comer’s claimed damages included that the Trump campaign caused his grandmother to “deduce that he was gay” because of “innuendo and suggestive language” in work emails.
The judge said the lawsuit cited a summer 2016 meeting with a “Kremlin-connected lawyer” and Donald Trump Jr., but that the DNC hack began in July 2015.
“By June 9, 2016, Russian agents already had access to the emails that concerned plaintiffs … there is no allegation that DNC emails were discussed,” the judge wrote. (RELATED: WikiLeaks: James Clapper ‘Gets Literally Everything Wrong’ About DNC Hack Timeline)
The judge said the court “need not accept inferences drawn by plaintiffs if such inferences are unsupported by the facts.”
The plaintiffs said the exposure of emails in the DNC hack “deterred existing donors from further supporting the DNC’s financial efforts.”
Ultimately, the Washington, D.C. judge dismissed the case over a technical issue, saying the Trump campaign and Stone were based outside of the court’s jurisdiction. And the judge cautioned that the ruling “does not represent a ruling on the merits of plaintiffs’ claims.”
“Plaintiffs seek to establish jurisdiction by citing events that happened outside the District, events that happened well before defendants allegedly joined the conspiracies, and events after the conspiracies achieved their objective on July 22, 2016,” the opinion said.
The lawsuit is not the same one that was the DNC brought against Trump in April, which Trump gloated would force the DNC to provide evidence under the discovery process that it withheld from the FBI. (RELATED: Democrat Infighting Erupts Over DNC Lawsuit Against Trump Campaign)
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