Paul Kamenar (R), attorney for Andrew Miller, pictured here with Peter Flaherty, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, claims that Mueller’s investigation isn’t being properly supervised. | AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Legal Roger Stone associate fighting Mueller in court slams ‘problematic’ Russia probe

A longtime Roger Stone associate challenging special counsel Robert Mueller’s authority in federal court lashed out on Tuesday at the lead Russia investigator in his first public comments about the case.

Andrew Miller, the former Stone aide who remains in contempt of court for refusing to appear before Mueller’s grand jury, said in a radio interview Tuesday that he agreed to be the front man for the lawsuit seeking to oust the special counsel from his post because of the way he was treated after the FBI questioned him earlier this year at his mother’s house in St. Louis.


“I’m not going to be a victim to my government,” Miller said, describing a two-hour interview this spring where FBI agents delivered a subpoena demanding documents and his appearance before a Washington D.C. grand jury.

“I was happy to speak to the FBI when they came to my house and I talked to them until they had no more questions,” he added. “I would have been probably happy to do some kind of teleconference situation. But the fact of the matter is when I spoke to the prosecuting attorney there was such disdain in his voice about me coming to D.C. and how I had to be there and they were going to force me out there. That’s problematic.”

“I’m not a criminal. I’m a witness,” Miller added. “So why am I being dragged across the country? I don’t live in the Northeast. They’re the ones who get paid to do this. Why is he not flying to me?”

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The government typically reimburses grand jury witnesses for their travel expenses, including airfare and lodging. Witnesses are paid $40 per day when they are required to be in court but they are not reimbursed for lost wages.

A Mueller spokesman declined comment on Miller’s remarks, which came during an interview with radio host Michael Caputo, another longtime associate to both Stone and President Donald Trump who himself has been a witness in the special counsel’s investigation.

Caputo on the radio show explained how he helped connect Miller with his attorneys in the lawsuit, which from its start has been about challenging the Mueller subpoena in order to get the special counsel booted from the job on constitutional grounds.

“I think I’m allowed to say balls on the radio. You’ve got balls the size of maracas,” Caputo told Miller, who he described as a longtime family friend.

Miller attorney Paul Kamenar, who also appeared Tuesday morning on Caputo’s Buffalo-based radio program, is arguing that only a Senate-confirmed presidential appointee has the authority to name a special counsel. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, in his capacity as the acting attorney general because of Jeff Sessions’ recusal due to his role on the Trump 2016 campaign, doesn’t fit that description. Kamenar also claims that Mueller’s investigation isn’t being properly supervised.

Lawyers for Miller and Mueller – who counters that he has ample legal authority and supervision on the Russia investigation — are scheduled to argue the case Nov. 8 before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The judges — announced on Tuesday — are Karen Lecraft Henderson, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush; Judith Rogers, an appointee of President Bill Clinton; and Sri Srinivasan, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

Kamenar in the Tuesday radio interview predicted he would lose at the appellate level. “That court is populated with a lot more liberal Obama appointed judges,” he said. “I don’t know whether I will win in that court. Quite frankly, I’m not expecting to.”

But Kamenar also said that he expected to find a friendlier audience at the Supreme Court with the arrival of new Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a former top lieutenant during Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation into Clinton who has spoken publicly about the dangers of sprawling probes and the notion that sitting presidents shouldn’t be subject to criminal investigations while in office.

“He would be a good ally because he has talked about these cases before in terms of presidential power and also limiting the power of the government in many cases and he’s also written about this very issue of the constitutionality of the independent counsel,” Kamenar said. “He’d be a great justice to rule on the case.”

Miller would need four votes to get his case onto the Supreme Court docket, and Kamenar said Kavanaugh could help make that possible by the end of the current term or at the start of the next one in October 2019.

If he won at the Supreme Court, Kamenar said all of Mueller’s active investigative work would be scratched from the books except for the guilty pleas from former Trump aides Michael Flynn, Rick Gates and Paul Manafort.

Mueller’s interest in Miller appears centered around his connections with Stone, the self-described dirty trickster who has come under scrutiny because of his contacts with Russians who U.S. intelligence agencies say hacked into Democratic email accounts and then released them publicly through websites such as WikiLeaks to try to take down Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Stone has said he’s prepared for an indictment in the Mueller probe, though he also expects it won’t be related to his work in the last White House campaign. He has long denied having any contact with Russians during the 2016 campaign, and he has said that he had no first-hand knowledge that Russians were responsible for breaking into the personal email account of top Democratic officials.

Prosecutors for Mueller have interviewed at least nine Stone associates as part of their work, including former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg and Kristin Davis, the former prostitution ring manager known as the “Manhattan Madam.”

Miller and Stone previously worked together on political campaigns. But Miller on Tuesday said that his assignments with Stone during the 2016 campaign centered primarily on helping to arrange media interviews.

“I basically told them I know nothing of Russia, I know nothing of Wikileaks, I really know nothing of anything that Roger Stone or anyone has been doing unless it’s somebody wanting to get him on MSNBC and they had emailed,” Miller said. “Besides that, I’m out of the loop here, I know nothing.”

Stone’s mission during the 2016 campaign, Miller added, was more about making a dollar than getting Trump elected president. “They don’t really get what Stone was doing,” Miller said. “He was selling books for himself. At the end of the day, it’s a bookselling game.”

