Mueller wants Roger Stone case slow-walked to trial citing vast amount of evidence

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Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, speaks to the media outside court January 25, 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The evidence collected in the criminal case of President Donald Trump’s longtime political advisor Roger Stone is “voluminous and complex,” special counsel Robert Mueller said in a court filing Thursday.

Mueller said in the Washington, D.C., federal court filing that that evidence includes “multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information,” as well as search warrant documents, financial records and communications in a raft of electronic devices spanning “several years.”

Read the filing here.

The special counsel requested that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson label the case “complex” in light of the scope of the potential evidence. Doing so would exempt the case from the time constraints of the 70-day “speedy trial period.”

Stone, 66, was arrested at his Fort Lauderdale, Florida home in a pre-dawn FBI raid Friday and charged with obstruction, witness tampering and making false statements to Congress as part of Mueller’s ongoing probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and vowed that “there is no circumstance where I would testify against the president.”

The longtime GOP campaign operative and self-described dirty trickster does not oppose Mueller’s request for a time exclusion, the filing said. Stone’s attorney, Peter Farkas, declined CNBC’s request for comment.

The government also said it “recently seized” and is currently reviewing devices from Stone’s home, apartment and office, which appear to include cell phones, computers and hard drives.

Stone is accused of lying to Congress about his communications with top Trump campaign officials regarding WikiLeaks’ releases of information damaging to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Stone has consistently denied collusion with Russia during the campaign. He was released on $250,000 bond on the same day he was arrested.