which had been leaked to WikiLeaks. According to Nunberg, who claimed he spoke to the paper after being asked to do so by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Stone joked to him that he had taken a trip to London to personally meet with Assange, but declined to do so, had only wanted to have telephone conversations to remain undetected and did not have advance notice of the leaked emails. The other source, who spoke on anonymity, stated that the conversation occurred before it was publicly known that hackers had obtained the emails of Podesta and of the Democratic National Committee, documents that WikiLeaks released in July and October 2016. Stone afterwards denied that he had contacted Assange or had known in advance about the leaked emails. In May 2018, Stone's social media consultant, Jason Sullivan, was issued grand jury subpoenas from the Special Counsel investigation. On July 3, 2018, U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle dismissed a lawsuit brought by political activist group Protect Democracy, alleging that Trump's campaign and Stone conspired with Russia and WikiLeaks to publish hacked Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 presidential election race. The judge found that the suit was brought in the wrong jurisdiction. The next week, Stone was identified by two government officials as the anonymous person mentioned in the indictment released by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that charged twelve Russian military intelligence officials with conspiring to interfere in the 2016 elections, as somebody the Russian hackers operating the online persona Guccifer 2.0 communicated with, and who the indictment alleged was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign. Charges Arrest and indictment On January 25, 2019, in a pre-dawn raid by 29 FBI agents acting on both an arrest warrant and a search warrant at his Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home, Stone was arrested on seven criminal charges of an indictment in the Mueller investigation: one count of obstructing an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering. The same day, a federal magistrate judge released Stone on a US$250,000 signature bond and declared that he was not a flight risk. Stone said he would fight the charges, which he called politically motivated, and would refuse to "bear false witness" against Trump. He called Robert Mueller a "rogue prosecutor". In the charging document, prosecutors alleged that after the first WikiLeaks release of hacked DNC emails