MANHATTAN (CN) – The Russian Federation, WikiLeaks and Donald J. Trump for President — all three are named as defendants Friday in a federal complaint that casts the trio as partners in the cyberattack that crippled the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Filed in the Southern District of New York, the same venue where an active criminal investigation of Trump’s personal attorney was confirmed last week, the massive lawsuit hurls a dozen charges against at least 15 people and entities, including Donald Trump Jr. and five key players from the the president’s former campaign team: Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone.
The mammoth lawsuit itemizes alleged and admitted criminality among that crew in an ongoing investigation by Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller, which already has netted an indictment against Manafort, as well as guilty pleas from Gates and Papadopoulos.
“The Trump campaign was a racketeering enterprise,” one subsection of the 66-page complaint declares.
Papadopolous acknowledged in October that he lied about his Russia contacts, whereas Gates copped a plea deal while maintaining his innocence in February.
Still fighting his charges, Manafort pleaded not guilty earlier this year and had a federal hearing Friday to attempt to dismiss the counts against him by attacking the scope of Mueller's authority.
Represented by the firm Cohen Milstein, the DNC alleges that the enterprise began with a coordinated effort between WikiLeaks, Trump’s associates, and Russian-linked intelligence operatives and oligarchs to swing the election.
“The conspiracy constituted an act of previously unimaginable treachery: the campaign of the presidential nominee of a major party in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” the complaint states.
Alan Futerfas, an attorney for Trump Jr. and the Trump Organization, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.
After a day of a radio silence, Trump responded to the lawsuit in his signature style: via Twitter.
"Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats," he tweeted. "This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Wendy Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails."
Apparently mistaking the former DNC chief with a late feminist playwright, Trump tweeted an amalgam of the names of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and "The Heidi Chronicle" scribe Wendy Wasserstein. The president then deleted the original tweet to correct his error.
President Trump is not a party to the complaint, which also takes aim at Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate and Guccifer 2.0, identified here as the hacker who penetrated the DNC’s computers and passed off its contents to WikiLeaks.
The website founded by Australian-born Julian Assange has been off the grid since London’s Ecuadorean Embassy cut off Assange’s lines of communications more than three weeks ago. They could not be reached by press time.