A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit that the Democratic National Committee filed against the Trump campaign, the Russian government, WikiLeaks and various Trump campaign officials over alleged involvement in the hacking of Democratic Party email accounts during the 2016 presidential race.
U.S. District Judge John Koeltl rejected the central theory of the racketeering suit: that the Trump campaign, campaign aides and allies abetted the theft of the emails by encouraging WikiLeaks to publish the messages and by urging that they be released when they would be of maximum political benefit to then-candidate Donald Trump.
Koeltl said such actions were protected by the First Amendment when taken by people not involved in the actual hacking.
“Even if the documents had been provided directly to the Campaign [and] the Campaign defendants … they could have published the documents themselves without liability because they did not participate in the theft and the documents are of public concern,” the judge wrote in an 81-page opinion. “The DNC cannot hold these defendants liable for aiding and abetting publication when they would have been entitled to publish the stolen documents themselves without liability.”