WASHINGTON — Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team alerted Judge Amy Berman Jackson of an image briefly posted to Roger Stone’s Instagram with the title “who framed Roger Stone.”
Under the terms of a gag order put in place last month, Stone and his associates are prohibited from talking about the case and Mueller’s Russia investigation.
In a filing on Monday, prosecutors cited a report from CNBC that was part of a multi-image post. The “who framed Roger Stone” title, a play on the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” was then deleted. The posts were designed to help Stone raise money for his legal defense fund.
Jackson has yet to weigh in on the image. She imposed the gag order after Stone posted an image of her on his Instagram page. In the background was a symbol that looked like a rifle scope.
Prosecutors noted the posting of the image, but did not explicitly say it was a violation of Stone’s gag order.
On Friday, Jackson asked Stone’s lawyers to explain why they did not inform her of the publication of another book authored by Stone. The book is called “The Myth of Russian Collusion,” an update of a 2017 tome that Stone wrote on the 2016 election.
Stone’s legal team said the book was published on Feb. 19, and distributed to hundreds of retailers in January.
“To the best of Stone’s knowledge, information, and belief, not a single word in the book was created after February 21, 2019,” his attorneys wrote in a court filing. That is the date that the gag order was imposed.
Stone is asking the court to clarify that the publication of the book will not violate the order. His attorneys said it did not occur to them at the Feb. 21 hearing on the gag order that Stone’s previous writings would be an issue.