Roger Stone Assistant Andrew Miller Fought His Subpoena Far More Aggressively than His Former Boss

I want to look at a notable asymmetry in the way Roger Stone and his former assistant Andrew Miller responded to being subpoenaed by Robert Mueller’s team.

As I noted in an update to this post, in November 2018, Mueller’s team subpoenaed Stone after Chuck Ross published texts Stone gave the journalist so he would publish a bullshit claim that Randy Credico was Stone’s back channel.

Pointing to the text messages, Stone asserts that Credico “lied to the grand jury” if he indeed denied being Stone’s contact to Assange.

“These messages prove that Credico was the source who told me about the significance of the material that Assange announced he had on Hillary. It proves that Randy’s source was a woman lawyer,” Stone told TheDCNF.

Ross published five sets of texts, four of which he clearly attributed to Stone.

The text showing Credico reminding Stone that he had an earlier source by itself actually undermined Stone’s claim to HPSCI that Credico was his source. Emails FBI already had in possession showed Credico’s comms with Stone post-dated Stone’s public claims to have had an intermediary to Julian Assange.

By providing texts to Ross Stone had told HPSCI he didn’t have, he provided all the evidence needed to be found guilty of one charge in his eventual indictment. In addition, unbeknownst to Stone, Credico didn’t have some of his own texts, including some of the ones that Stone had retained. So by providing them to Ross, Stone made it clear he had texts that were otherwise unavailable.

The fact that Stone had those texts, from a phone he stopped using in 2016, also contributed to the probable cause that the phone would be in one of Stone’s homes when the FBI searched them.

The affidavit supporting the search of Stone’s homes makes it clear that Stone did comply when the FBI subpoenaed him for texts he was freely willing to share with Chuck Ross, though the description of it as “recent[]” may suggest that Stone stalled a bit.

The government has only recently obtained text messages between Stone and Credico during some period of the campaign in 2016 from Stone’s subpoena production, issued after media reports in November 2018 stated that Stone’s attorneys were able to extract text messages between Stone and Credico from a phone Stone stopped using in 2016.

Still, Stone complied with a Mueller subpoena with nary a public squawk.

Compare that with a new detail the files released last week make clear about Andrew Miller’s year long fight of a Mueller subpoena. We knew that, after Miller agreed to an FBI interview with no counsel on May 9, 2018, he then commenced a year-long subpoena fight to avoid testifying before the grand jury, with an inordinate amount of legal fuckery. We knew that the very last thing that occurred under Mueller’s authority was the final negotiation for Miller’s testimony — though the grand jury Miller appeared before was actually not Mueller’s, suggesting Miller’s testimony was needed for the ongoing investigations still hidden in court filings released last week. (Prosecutors subpoenaed Miller to be available for Stone’s trial but never called him, so his testimony did pertain in some way to the lies Stone told HPSCI.)

What we didn’t know before last week is how much Stone communicated with Miller while the former assistant launched this subpoena challenge. After he met with the FBI, an August 2018 warrant makes clear, Stone and Miller spoke by phone. They did the next day too, when Mueller subpoenaed Miller. Miller stalled in a variety of ways for a month. Then, on June 14, after Mueller moved to force Miller to testify, Stone and Miller emailed five times. That’s the period when Miller got a new lawyer, Paul Kamenar, who led Miller’s subpoena challenge to the Supreme Court, all the while claiming Miller was challenging the subpoena it for libertarian reasons. Between May 23, 2018 and August 3, 2018, as that challenge was proceeding, Stone and Miller exchanged over 100 emails. (Chief DC Judge Beryl Howell, who authorized the August 3 warrant, had just ordered Miller to testify as soon as possible, which led directly to his appeal.)

The difference in response to the subpoena may simply reflect that Miller launched the challenge to Mueller’s authority that Stone otherwise might have made. Or it may reflect that there’s no defense to a subpoena if you’re selectively feeding the subpoenaed materials to the press.

But it also might suggest that Stone viewed whatever testimony Miller provided to be more damning to Stone than turning over texts that would prove that Stone’s claim that Credico was his back-channel to Assange was bullshit.

On April 24, Kamenar filed a notice of appearance as Stone’s lawyer in his prosecution and will represent Stone for the appeal.

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27 replies
  1. Frank Probst says:

    This one has always bothered me. Andrew Miller was supposed to be a peripheral figure to the whole Russia conspiracy, but he fought awfully had to avoid testifying, and while the government now has him nailed down on what he says he knew about…well, some unknown stuff…we still don’t know how this piece fits into the whole puzzle. The way that they had him positioned to testify in the Stone trial was just weird. If memory serves, the Feds flew him down from Alaska. At the beginning of the trial, I had the sense that he was more important to the prosecution than any of the witnesses that they actually called. And then…crickets. The logical conclusion is that he was there just in case one of the other witnesses testified, or DIDN’T testify, to a certain fact or set of facts. That didn’t happen, so whatever scenario the government was anticipating didn’t play out in such a way that Miller was needed.

    But what was it the government was worried about? Was it a prosecution witness suddenly changing their testimony? Or was it a defense witness who either didn’t testify a certain way about some subject, or didn’t testify about some subject at all. (And that last one includes the possibility of a witness who wasn’t even called to testify.)

    @bmaz
    If you’re the prosecution team, could the treatment Miller got be consistent with him being a potential rebuttal witness? That would be a way to signal to the defense that they were going to get burned if they went into certain territory. Could this have been the prosecution’s way of saying, “Don’t even think about it.”?

    • bmaz says:

      Sure, any of that is possible. Also may have been a warning in case the defendant was thinking about taking the stand (he never really was, but you think ahead).

    • emptywheel says:

      I’ll write this up someday. But it’s fairly clear prosecutors came to the trial prepared to explain WHAT Stone’s back channel was. Then, someone was interviewed on the Saturday of trial — I don’t rule out it being Stone. Then, then next day back, they changed their tactics somewhat, and Miller was told he was STILL needed, except he would only be used as a rebuttal witness.

    • bmaz says:

      Hey, you make nearly $10 million in donations to Harvard, and you too can have a small part time office. I don’t see anything shocking about that.

      • earlofhuntingdon says:

        That plus the carrot and stick of suggesting he might fund individual researchers and projects, or walk away and give it all to Yale or Columbia. Manipulation might be commonplace among Ivy League administrators, but most of them were probably pikers compared with Epstein.

        • bmaz says:

          Yeah. I’m not suggesting Harvard looks good here, but if you have big tranches of money to give, all colleges want to work with you. Even ones with gazillions of dollars of endowments. Pretty safe guess Epstein is not in the top ten of horrible people Harvard has sucked off of. He is the soup de jour though.

      • P J Evans says:

        With your own personal furnishings? It sounded like a full-time office to me, the kind that department heads and full professors might get.

        • bmaz says:

          Sure, depending on your contributions, maybe. I have no idea. But this goes on all the time.

    • pdaly says:

      Tangential to your point, the Telegraph article includes a Getty image of a red brick building at Harvard. It is not the location of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

      Unlike The NY Times which chose an image of the Memorial Church on campus for their story about sex offender Epstein, the Telegraph chose a picture of the Dillon Field House. It houses a lounge overlooking athletic fields, the offices of varsity coaches, and the locker rooms for football, baseball, and men and women’s lacrosse and soccer.

      https://www.gocrimson.com/information/facilities/dillon_fieldhouse

  2. Savage Librarian says:

    I wonder if this connection to Concord Management and Consulting, LLC (and, thus, to Putin’s chef, Prigozhin) has any more relevance now than it did before, especially since Kamenar is now involved in Stone’s appeal.

    “Mueller fights Russian firm’s attempt to ‘intervene’ in Roger Stone aide’s appeal” – 8/29/18
    …..
    “Paul Kamenar, Miller’s attorney, told ABC News that “Concord has the better argument than the special counsel does that intervention should be granted” in Miller’s appellate case. “I suspect the Court of Appeals will grant Concord’s motion,” Kamenar said, adding that the court’s decision could come as soon as this week.”

    https://www.yahoo.com/gma/mueller-fights-russian-firms-attempt-intervene-roger-stone-214518085–abc-news-topstories.html

    • emptywheel says:

      I don’t think so. It was just a way to challenge Mueller for which there was no precedent w/o actually paying for good appellate lawyers to think up some new basis for appeal.

      • Savage Librarian says:

        Thanks, Marcy,…and about that mystery name ending in R…would you be suggesting that it might be Miller?

        • tvor_22 says:

          Actually, I take that back. I was just going by what someone else said in a previous thread, but I decided to actually verify it.

          I think it’s now between five to six characters long. It is actually a little longer than STONE.

        • tvor_22 says:

          Mercer(s) had multiple contacts with Assange via Cambridge Analytica. John Jones QC was a CA conduit, but he allegedly jumped in front of a train on August 19th of 2016 (two of his aids went on to work for Cambridge Analytica). Then there was Kaiser, but her contact with Assange was later on (KAISER is a touch short to fit redactions.)

        • Savage Librarian says:

          I already suggested Mercer on the 5/1 post and Marcy kindly responded,”Mercer (probably Rebekah, not Robert) is an interesting suggestion. It’s not that though: the Mercers had a problem with Stone (it shows up in 302s), and if Stone wanted to get to them, he would have — and did — go through Bannon.”

        • tvor_22 says:

          LOL. I was actually expecting Wheeler to shoot down my idea at any second. Sigh. Well MERCER fits perfectly. If anyone has any other suggestions I’d be happy to load them into GIMP to see if they fit my CSI style redaction analysis.

        • tvor_22 says:

          BTW. MILLER does KIND of fit, but I think it could be a whisker short. MILLER doesn’t make sense to me though because he worked with Stone for over a decade. No need for introductions from Ortel, or arranging Pizza dinners while *****R is in Town.

      • Rugger9 says:

        It seems the ones arrested were the ones that went beyond verbal abuse, but I could be wrong. Yeah, the state of Jefferson still is a thing in the far northeast, not too far from Grant County and Malheur in Oregon.

    • MB says:

      These gatherings seem to be multi-purpose, part shutdown protest, part Trump rally, part anti-vax rally, part “2nd amendment” rally. Trump, president (among other things) of toothless rules and regulations. 2 weeks of declining infection numbers as part of phase 1? Those are just words, worth as much as the paper they are printed on. I have a friend whose daughter has been anti-vaxer since prior to the pandemic, and I sure hope she lets her kids get vaccinated when a vaccine is actually available.

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