Stone Push-Back on Mueller Report Scrutinized by Judge

WASHINGTON (CN) — A day after special counsel Robert Mueller explained for the first time why he did not charge President Donald Trump personally with a crime, attorneys argued Thursday that still-murky details in Mueller’s report invalidate Roger Stone’s indictment.

"The entire backdrop is that there was a conspiracy, otherwise what did he lie about?" Robert Buschel, a lawyer with the firm Buschel & Gibbons, said of the obstruction charges against Stone. "In Congress, we were talking about whether the Russian state talked with the Trump campaign or any of its associates."

Buschel laid out his argument this morning at a hearing in Washington before a skeptical-appearing U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson.

"Does it say it didn't occur?" Jackson asked the attorney, prompting Buschel to argue that the lack of evidence provided by Mueller indeed proves that the investigation did not establish obstruction of justice.

Stone says the redacted version of Mueller’s report could shed light on evidence against him, given Stone’s work for Trump as a campaign adviser in 2016. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kravis said today that the government has discretion when it comes to releasing portions of the report to the public.

"There is no legal authority that the defense can point to that requires the government to release these types of materials," Kravis added.

Buschel pushed back meanwhile by saying his legal team is entitled to review the counsel's findings, even with no sign from the special counsel in his written report or in public statement that there may be evidence relevant to Stone's indictment.

"Maybe they do say something that suggests that this is because of Mr. Stone's campaign activities [in the report]," Buschel said, adding that the court had been provided a version of the report and the defense required an unredacted version as well to properly make their case.

"I did not receive the entire Mueller report," Jackson said firmly as a point of clarification, adding that she only read sections and not the entire unredacted report.

Stone attorney Bruce Rogow also said the indictment should be dismissed on the grounds that the special counsel investigation took funds allocated for an independent counsel, rather than directly appropriated to Mueller’s team by Congress.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Zelinsky meanwhile sparred with the lawyer on the relevance and weight of the phrase “independent counsel,” which he noted appears in lowercase in the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 — legislation passed in response to the Nixon Watergate scandal that mandates financial-disclosure rules for public officials.

“He is saying that at the time of the indictment and the grand jury investigation the money was being improperly spent,” Zelinsky said of Rogow's argument. “But as a matter of paperwork [the government] relied on a different appropriation ... as a box-checking exercise we can point to one appropriation over another.”

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