Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist and Roger Stone associate, has filed a federal lawsuit accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of illegally searching his phone records and leaking grand jury information.
Corsi, an avid supporter of President Donald Trump, recently claimed he faces indictment by Mueller.
Attorneys for Corsi, 72, filed the lawsuit Sunday night in U.S. District Court in Washington. In addition to Mueller, it targets the Justice Department, the National Security Agency, the FBI and the CIA. The attorneys are demanding $100 million in “general and compensatory damages” and $250 million in “punitive damages” from the agencies.
In the complaint, Corsi’s lawyers argue that their client’s Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable or unwarranted government searches and seizures was violated when “each and every one” of the defendants looked through his digital records without a warrant and probable cause.
The complaint also accuses Mueller of directing his staff to leak information from his grand jury about Corsi to the media. Special counsel spokesman Peter Carr declined CNBC’s request for comment on the court filing.
Mueller’s team has reportedly investigated for months whether Corsi learned in advance that WikiLeaks had received Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, which U.S. intelligence services have concluded were stolen by Russian intelligence officers. WikiLeaks published troves of Democratic National Committee emails in 2016 during the presidential campaign.
A draft court filing, which was reportedly prepared by Mueller’s team before plea deal negotiations with Corsi were scrapped, showed emails sent by Corsi to longtime Trump confidant and Infowars colleague Roger Stone about WikiLeaks.
Corsi, a former Infowars employee who pushed the “birther” conspiracy questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship, has denied that he knew ahead of time about the hacking and release of Podesta’s emails.
A lawyer for Corsi did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing.
The filing outlines a view of Mueller’s ongoing probe of Russian election interference that mirrors Trump’s denunciations of the special counsel.
Like Trump, Corsi claims in the document that the special counsel “and his leftist and Democrat partisan” prosecutors are compromised by political bias and other conflicts. The president has repeatedly railed against what he calls Mueller’s team of “Angry Dems” on Twitter.
Corsi also accuses the special counsel of trying to make him lie under oath that he was a liaison between Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the publication of stolen Democrats’ emails.
Trump has made similar claims. He accused the special counsel in mid-November of “threatening” witnesses “to come up with the answers they want” without regard for “how many lives [they] ruin.” He later called Mueller “a conflicted prosecutor gone rogue.“
Corsi and Stone have emerged as central witnesses in the Mueller probe, which is also looking at potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Days before the lawsuit, Corsi filed a complaint against Mueller with the Justice Department, addressed to acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. Legal experts told NBC that the complaint was meritless.
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