Corsi sues Mueller over alleged grand jury leaks, seeks $350M in damages: report
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Jerome Corsi, the conservative author accused of lying under oath to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, filed a federal lawsuit late Sunday accusing Mueller of leaking grand jury items and various constitutional violations, including illegal surveillance, reports said.
Politico reported that the newly filed suit claims that Mueller tried to get Corsi to give testimony that Corsi said is false. He is reportedly seeking $100 million in actual damages and $250 million in damages due to injury to his reputation. The CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency were also named in the suit.
The author has theorized that investigators hoped that he would admit to a connection with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange. The connection would bolster their Russian collusion investigation, he said. A link between Corsi and Assange would make it easy to tie in President Trump's former adviser Roger Stone, he said.
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American intelligence agencies have assessed that Russia was the source of hacked material released by WikiLeaks during the 2016 election that damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mueller’s office is trying to determine whether Stone and other associates of President Trump had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans.
Corsi, the former Washington bureau chief of the conspiracy theory outlet InfoWars, rejected a deal with investigators that would have required him to plead guilty to perjury. He said he could not lie to something he knew to be false, even if it meant living out his life in prison.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to Fox News for comment.
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The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington and named Mueller as the defendant. The suit claims that Mueller and his team “demanded” that Corsi falsely testify that he acted as a liaison between Stone and Assange. Politico reported that the suit accuses Mueller of unconstitutional surveillance through the NSA program that was exposed by Edward Snowden, PRISM.
"Defendants Mueller, DOJ, NSA, CIA, and FBI have engaged in ongoing illegal, unconstitutional surveillance on Plaintiff Corsi, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the USA FREEDOM Act as well targeted ‘PRISM’ collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Sovereignties Immunity Act at the direction of Defendant Mueller," the suit said, according to Politico.
National security lawyer Bradley P. Moss has pointed the lawsuit's apparent misciting of "the Foreign Sovereignties Immunity Act" rather than "the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."
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"Larry Klayman (Corsi's lawyer) is alleging 4A violations by Mueller against Jerome Corsi in reliance upon section 702 of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act," Moss tweeted. "He meant the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He wrote FSIA."
Fox News' Bradford Betz and The Associated Press contributed to this report