Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued two grand jury subpoenas for a social media consultant hired by Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, before the 2016 election, Reuters revealed Wednesday.
While Mueller's office declined to comment, a lawyer for Jason Sullivan, the consultant, confirmed the subpoenas were delivered to his legal team last week. Sullivan heads the social media firm Cyphoon.com, and Stone supposedly hired him to help with strategy for a pro-Trump political action committee established by Stone.
The development gives some indication of the direction of Mueller's probe into allegations that Russians attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election and that members of the Trump campaign may have known about or even been involved with those efforts.
The subpoenas, Reuters notes, "suggest that Mueller is focusing in part on Stone and whether he might have had advance knowledge of material allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence and sent to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published it."
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Stone appeared before the House Intelligence Committee in September and denied allegations of collusion with Russians during the election, but as The Hill points out, "Stone has made contradicting statements about whether he knew in advance that WikiLeaks was going to publish a trove of hacked Democratic National Committee emails."
Citing sources familiar with Mueller's investigation, Reuters reports the special counsel "has been probing whether anyone associated with the Trump campaign may have helped Assange or the Russians time or target the release of hacked emails and other social media promoting Trump or critical of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton," which suggests there could be more subpoenas in the pipeline.
The subpoenas issued to Sullivan reportedly require the social media consultant to appear before a grand jury on May 18 in Washington, D.C., and to "bring documents, objects, and electronically stored information," the details of which were not publicly disclosed.
