Former Trump adviser Roger Stone, indicted by the team of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, departs Federal Court after attending his arraignment hearing, where he pleaded not guilty, in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

A D.C. federal district judge has ruled against a motion by Roger Stone over evidence obtained through 18 search warrants issued in his case, finding that the longtime conservative political operative failed to show that the affidavits contained knowingly false statements.

Stone had sought an evidentiary hearing over warrants, alleging that the affidavits used to back the warrant applications included false facts and should be thrown out.

But U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia, in an opinion unsealed Tuesday, found that Stone came far short of the benchmark needed to even call the search warrants into question, never mind block the evidence obtained through the warrants.

U.S. District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

Stone provided two statements from cybersecurity experts who claimed it was unlikely that servers for the Democratic National Committee servers were hacked by Russian actors, as found by the private cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and the U.S. intelligence community.

"But merely conclusory contentions, or suggestions that an affiant was negligent, will not be sufficient to support a request for an evidentiary hearing," Jackson wrote in the new opinion.

Jackson filed the opinion under seal last week, but it was made public after both Stone's lawyers and federal prosecutors said Monday they had no objections to it being unsealed.

In the opinion, Jackson said that Stone needed to show that those who signed the sworn affidavit used for the warrants knowingly made false statements and that those statements were key in a court deciding there was probable cause to issue the warrants.

"In short, defendant must demonstrate that the issuing judge or magistrate was misled. Defendant has not come close to meeting this standard," Jackson wrote.

The judge wrote that the "fundamental problem" with Stone's effort is that he did not identify "any statements in the eighteen affidavits that he claims are deliberately false or were made in reckless disregard for the truth."

"Defendant's original motion completely failed to 'point out specifically the portion of the warrant affidavit that is claimed to be false,' as required" under the legal standard, Jackson wrote, "and it could have been denied on that basis alone."

She continued that Stone's attorneys "endeavored to cure the problem in his reply, but as was apparent at the hearing, his efforts still fall short."

Jackson had pressed the GOP strategist's attorneys during a July hearing over which statements in the affidavits they believed to be knowingly false and not simply based off the findings by Crowdstrike and intelligence officials. The legal team, which is led by attorneys Bruce Rogow and Robert Buschel, struggled to directly answer Jackson's questions at the time.

This ruling is another setback for Stone. Jackson has repeatedly ruled against him in court proceedings ahead of his November trial. She last month rejected Stone's motion to dismiss the charges against him.

The judge also slapped Stone with a gag order earlier this year after he posted an image on Instagram depicting Jackson on the bench with a crosshairs in the corner. She tightened that gag order in July, blocking Stone from posting on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter after she determined that he had violated the terms of the order through Instagram posts that referenced filings in his case.

However, Jackson did hand Stone a partial win by ruling last month that he could view some redacted parts of Mueller's report that referred to him and his case.

Stone's attorneys are scheduled to come face-to-face with Jackson in federal court in D.C. this week, at a Wednesday morning pretrial conference.

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