WASHINGTON – Roger Stone is in trouble again with the judge handling his criminal case, this time for a newly released book he wrote calling special counsel Robert Mueller "crooked" — which he only recently brought to the judge's attention.

Stone's lawyers filed a sealed document on Friday alerting US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson that Stone's book was coming out and that part of it might violate the Feb. 21 gag order she imposed on Stone, if he'd written it after her order took effect. But, they contend, Stone submitted the section at issue to his publisher in January, and they're asking the judge to clarify that the book doesn't violate her order.

The book isn't new. It's a rerelease of a book that Stone, a longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, published in 2017 about the 2016 election. The new version features a new title — he renamed it from The Making of the President 2016 to The Myth of Russian Collusion — and a new introduction, which is dated January 2019. In that introduction, Stone refers to Mueller as "Crooked Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller," and claims he was on Mueller's "hit list" because he'd served as a longtime adviser to Trump.

"I am being targeted not because I committed a crime, but because the Deep State liberals want to silence me and pressure me to testify against my good friend," Stone wrote.

In a redacted version of Stone's Friday filing that was made public on Monday, Stone's lawyers blacked out a description of the part of the book at issue, but prosecutors filed a notice with the court on Monday confirming that it's the new introduction that Stone wrote. Prosecutors also noted that Stone's book is available online — a copy of the introduction is accessible via the preview function on Amazon's website.

The government also alerted the judge to a now-deleted Instagram post that Stone put up over the weekend with a photo of himself and the text, "Who Framed Roger Stone," a nod to the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Prosecutors also included a link to a news article about the post speculating whether it might violate Jackson's gag order.

Jackson's order prohibits Stone from making public comments, including via social media, "about the Special Counsel's investigation or this case or any of the participants in the investigation or the case." The judge specified that Stone could proclaim his innocence and ask for donations for his legal defense fund, but that was it.

In an Instagram post on Feb. 18, three days before Jackson entered the gag order, Stone promoted the upcoming rerelease, posting a photo of the book cover, which says that the latest version includes "an explosive new introduction." Stone's lawyers wrote that the introduction "could have contravened the Court's Order" if it was written after Feb. 21, but they said it was all written before; Stone submitted the draft and went through edits in mid-January, they said.