The ruling came as Democrats\u00a0increasingly have sought to tie<\/a>\u00a0the Trump team to illegal activity in Russia, in spite of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings that the campaign in fact refused multiple offers by Russians to involve them in hacking and disinformation efforts.<\/p>\n President Trump, in a tweet late Tuesday, noted that the judge in the case, John Koeltl, was appointed by Bill Clinton. The president called Koeltl’s decision “really big ‘stuff'” and “yet another total & complete vindication and exoneration.”<\/p>\n The DNC had asserted in court filings\u00a0that the Trump team’s meetings “with persons connected to the Russian government during the time that the Russian GRU agents were stealing the DNC’s information” were\u00a0“circumstantial evidence” that they were conspiring with the Russians to “steal and disseminate the DNC’s materials.”<\/p>\n The suit did not allege that the stolen materials were false or defamatory but rather sought to hold the Trump team and other defendants liable for the theft of the DNC’s information under various Virginia and federal statutes, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, Wiretap Act, Stored Communications Act, Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and laws protecting trade secrets.<\/p>\n However, Judge Koeltl,\u00a0sitting in the Southern District of New York, wrote in his\u00a081-page<\/a>\u00a0opinion<\/a>\u00a0Tuesday that the DNC’s argument\u00a0was “entirely divorced” from the factual record in the case.<\/p>\n The DNC first filed its suit in April 2018, and the defendants responded that the First Amendment legally protected the dissemination of stolen materials.<\/p>\n “In short, the DNC raises a number of connections and communications between the defendants and with people loosely connected to the Russian Federation, but at no point does the DNC allege any facts … to show that any of the defendants — other than the Russian Federation — participated in the theft of the DNC’s information,” Koeltl said.<\/p>\n “Nor does the DNC allege that the defendants ever agreed to help the Russian Federation steal the DNC’s documents,” he added.<\/p>\n The DNC claimed the defendants illegally compromised their trade secrets contained in some of the stolen documents — including donor lists and strategies. But, the judge said, any such claim to trade secrecy was lost when the documents became public in the first place, and in any event, the newsworthiness of the matter trumped the trade secrecy issue.<\/p>\n “If Wikileaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC’s political financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them ‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or\u00a0other media outlet,” the judge wrote. That, he said, would elevate a privacy interest impermissibly\u00a0over the First Amendment rights of people and media outlets to disseminate matters of “the highest public concern.”<\/p>\n Koeltl went on to describe multiple hacking efforts\u00a0directed by Russians at the DNC, in which\u00a0Russians “hacked into the DNC’s computers, penetrated its phone systems, and stole tens of thousands of documents.”<\/p>\n
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