Trump campaign attorney Michael Carvin (pictured) argued that the Democrats’ lawsuit should be dismissed. | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images Trump campaign urges court to toss out WikiLeaks hack lawsuit

President Donald Trump’s attorneys on Tuesday asked a federal judge to toss out a Democratic-driven lawsuit that accuses his 2016 campaign of conspiring with Russian operatives to publish stolen Democratic National Committee information on WikiLeaks.

The case, filed in July by two Democratic Party donors and a former DNC staff member, contends that both the Trump campaign and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone invaded their privacy by working with Russia to disseminate the hacked DNC emails and other campaign files that became an embarrassing but central storyline during the closing months of the 2016 presidential race.


But in a 51-page reply brief delivered to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Trump campaign attorney Michael Carvin countered that the Democrats’ lawsuit should be dismissed because the plaintiffs failed to provide any “factual grounds” that the Republican campaign “conspired with Russian agents” to publish the stolen DNC data.

“This is a meritless case,” Carvin wrote. “Plaintiffs do not assert the Campaign helped steal the emails in the first place — only that it conspired to publish them after they had been stolen.”

Carvin in his brief advanced several other reasons why U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle, appointed by President Bill Clinton, should toss out the case.

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While Trump isn’t personally named as a defendant, Carvin argued the lawsuit “foreshadows a fishing expedition” if allowed to proceed, opening the door to a full-fledged, court-approved investigation involving the president’s tax returns, his real estate projects and past business relationships and financial ties.

“This lawsuit threatens to interfere with the president’s ability to discharge his duties,” Carvin wrote, citing judicial precedents designed to protect the president from private lawsuits that can drain time and resources in legal discovery. “It is obvious that Plaintiffs plan to do just that here.”

While Trump himself has repeatedly insisted he isn’t under investigation in matters related to the Russian hacking of the election, Carvin in Tuesday’s brief specifically mentioned special counsel Robert Mueller’s work examining the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, as well as ongoing congressional work, as reasons to block the separate private lawsuit that would touch on many of the same issues.

“Worse, this lawsuit threatens to interfere with a pending criminal investigation,” Carvin wrote. “A parallel civil case, with parallel discovery proceedings, handled by a group of self-appointed private investigators, will surely complicate those efforts.”

The Trump campaign lawyers also argue that the case was filed in the wrong jurisdiction since the president’s campaign is located in New York, and because the plaintiffs live outside Washington D.C. They also maintain the case should be dismissed because both tort law and the First Amendment “prohibit liability for revealing documents about public issues, even if the documents also happen to include some private facts.”

The original lawsuit — organized by Protect Democracy, a government watchdog group run by former Obama administration attorneys — alleges the hack of the DNC led to the release of personal information, including Social Security numbers and other data, that exposed them to data theft and other privacy invasions. One of the plaintiffs, Scott Comer, a former DNC finance department chief of staff, said in the lawsuit that the public disclosure of his emails revealed internal fights with co-workers and details that led his grandparents to deduce his sexual orientation.

“These revelations strained relationships with family and friends and ended some of Mr. Comer’s relationships altogether,” Comer’s attorney argued in the lawsuit, which named both the Trump campaign and Stone as co-defendants.

Stone said in an email to POLITICO that his attorneys would file a separate motion to dismiss the Democrats’ lawsuit later Tuesday.

“I worked with the Russians to hack the DNC e-mails? Hell, the plaintiffs can't prove the DNC was hacked, never mind that the Russians did it,” Stone wrote, adding that the case was “a frivolous and highly partisan waste of the court's time for which some lawyers will get sanctioned.”

A statement from Protect Democracy said the group’s attorneys were reviewing the Trump campaign motion “and will respond in due course.”

“But we are confident in our claims,” the group added. “We stand by the strength of the suit and by the courage of the plaintiffs to stand up for their legal rights.”