A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit alleging the Trump campaign and longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone conspired with Russia and WikiLeaks to publish hacked Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 election.
U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle made it clear in her ruling Tuesday, however, that she was not ruling against the merits of the case, but rather the location of its filing.
“Washington D.C. is not the proper venue for plaintiffs’ suit,” Huvelle wrote. “It bears emphasizing that this Court’s ruling is not based on a finding that there was no collusion between defendants and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.”
Two DNC donors, Roy Cockrum and Eric Schoenberg, and a former DNC staffer, Scott Comer, filed the suit last year, after the WikiLeaks organization published emails stolen from the DNC and Clinton campaign during the election.
Stone attracted scrutiny after he appeared to anticipate the documents’ release, tweeting in August 2016 that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta’s “time in the barrel” would soon come. In the past, Stone has said the DNC hack was an “inside job” and that the Russians were “most likely” behind the WikiLeaks emails dump.
The anti-Trump group Protect Democracy, which helped to file the suit dismissed Tuesday, said it may refile elsewhere. “It is clear that the Court recognizes that there is sufficient evidence to suggest a conspiracy between the Trump Campaign and the Kremlin, but believes this case belongs in a different court,” the group’s director Ian Bassin said in a statement.
[Also read: Senate Intel concludes Russia interfered in 2016 presidential election, preferred Trump over Clinton]
