“Trump Lawyers at Jones Day Resist Discovery Demand in DNC Hack Suit”

NLJ:

President Donald Trump’s campaign lawyers at Jones Day pushed back Thursday against a nonprofit group’s pursuit of documents related to the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee, assailing the request as a “last-ditch effort to launch a fishing expedition into the president’s and the campaign’s files.”

The new court filing by the Trump campaign’s outside legal team came in response to a lawsuit alleging that the Trump campaign and one of its high-profile informal advisers, Roger Stone, conspired with Russia and WikiLeaks to publicly release emails stolen from Democratic National Committee servers in the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit, organized by the nonprofit Protect Democracy Project and filed in Washington federal district court, claims the release of the emails caused emotional stress and harm to a pair of DNC donors and a former staff member of the committee—all named plaintiffs in the case—whose emails and sensitive personal information were obtained in the breach.

The Jones Day legal team, including partner Michael Carvin, said the discovery process would interfere with the ongoing criminal investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Robert Mueller III, the special counsel leading the investigation, would be forced to coordinate “not just with congressional committees but also with these private plaintiffs.”

“Discovery also threatens to prejudice individuals who have been or will be indicted, by potentially requiring them to sit for civil depositions despite their privilege against self-incrimination,” Carvin wrote.

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