
The Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit against the Trump campaign, Russia, and WikiLeaks last April, accusing the entities of conspiring to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump by hacking the DNC and disseminating stolen emails during the 2016 campaign.
Last week, several of the high-profile defendants in the case filed documents asking the suit be dismissed.
The 2016 Trump campaign, distinct from Trump’s already-formed 2020 campaign committees, fought back Friday, saying in court documents that the suit should be dismissed and echoing Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the Russia accusations only seek to “explain away [the DNC] candidate’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election.”
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... [T]he various defendants maintained that while the hacking may have been against the law, it was allegedly done by the Russians before the particular contacts with the Trump campaign, which the DNC suggests concerned the stolen material, a timeline that they said immediately challenged the basis and scope of the conspiracy as alleged in the lawsuit.
“The DNC thus alleges -- unburdened by any actual facts -- that President Trump’s campaign… conspired with Russia and a hodgepodge of others to publish materials stolen from the DNC’s computer systems,” the campaign’s filing says. “But the DNC does not claim the Campaign had any role in hacking its systems and stealing the materials -- it attributes that only to Russia. Nor does the DNC claim the Campaign played any part in publishing the stolen materials -- it attributes that only to Russia and WikiLeaks.”
The Trump campaign also said the DNC failed to show it “aided and abetted Russia” after the hack, as alleged, even if campaign officials and then-candidate Trump himself enthusiastically promoted WikiLeaks’ DNC and Podesta releases.
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... [T]he campaign argued that “praising the results of others’ efforts… is not tantamount to directing those affairs. If it were, every journalist that credited the disclosures with providing useful information could similarly be said to have directed” the leak campaign.
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In its own motion to dismiss Friday, WikiLeaks argued that it is not alleged to have had any part in the actual hacking, and that it published the DNC material on First Amendment grounds ...
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Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s filing defended his attendance at a now-infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian attorney who had offered damaging information on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton – evidence, the DNC said, of a Trump-Russia conspiracy. In his defense, the filing says that the DNC suit does not allege that Kushner, an adviser to Trump, knew about the prior communication regarding damaging material, that he knew the material had been obtained illegally nor that he “did anything other than attend and listen, or that he agreed to do anything following the meeting.”
Donald Trump Jr., another named defendant who attended the meeting and knew about the potentially damaging information on Clinton, did not enter a filing with the others ...
Other figures in the Russia probe, like former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, a purported intermediary between the Trump campaign and Russia-linked individuals, and Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser who boasted of communications with Assange, also filed documents challenging the DNC suit and casting their roles as innocuous.
The Russian government, for its part, asked the court to throw out the lawsuit last month, claiming it was protected from such litigation.
Major players in Trump-Russia drama seek to dismiss DNC suit alleging international conspiracy (ABC News)