Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative and adviser to President Donald Trump who was charged with lying to Congress, posted a photo Monday on Instagram of a judge presiding over his case in which she appears to be next to a crosshairs symbol.

The post comes days after the judge, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, rejected Stone's effort to get his case reassigned to a new judge.



Jackson had also previously ruled that Stone couldn’t talk to news outlets in front of her courthouse.

Stone, 66, took to Instagram to bring attention to special counsel Robert Mueller, saying he used “legal trickery” to place his case in front of Jackson, a US district judge in the District of Columbia. Stone's case is being prosecuted jointly by Mueller's office and the US Attorney's Office in Washington.

“Through legal trickery Deep State hitman Robert Mueller has guaranteed that my upcoming show trial is before Judge Amy Berman Jackson , an Obama appointed Judge who dismissed the Benghazi charges again [sic] Hillary Clinton and incarcerated Paul Manafort prior to his conviction for any crime,” Stone wrote in the caption to the photo, including the hashtag #fixisin.

Since January, Stone has posted regularly to the photo-sharing website to claim that he did nothing wrong with regard to charges that he lied to Congress about his contact with WikiLeaks. Last month, a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, indicted Stone on one count of obstructing Congress, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and one count of witness tampering. He pleaded not guilty at a Jan. 29 hearing.

The photograph — a version of which appeared earlier on a site pushing false conspiracy theories — featured a target symbol near the judge's head. The symbol is also associated with the Zodiac killer.



Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel's office, declined to comment.

Instagram’s terms of service states that the service will “remove content that contains credible threats or hate speech” and that “serious threats of harm to public and personal safety aren't allowed.” An Instagram representative said the post was a violation of the social network's rules.