At a brief hearing Friday morning in Washington, Justice Department attorneys said they would prefer to try the case against Trump ally Roger Stone in October given the "voluminous" amount of information they seized from Stone's residences. Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson replied that she would prefer a summer time frame for the trial, but would set a timeline at the next hearing in March.
Still, federal prosecutors’ desire to push Stone's trial all the way into the fall suggests reports that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will soon wrap up were greatly exaggerated.
Judge Berman also said she would consider issuing a gag order in the case, explaining, "This is a criminal proceeding and not a public relations campaign." In other words, Stone is gag-worthy. But Berman added that such an order wouldn't prevent Stone from talking publicly about topics unrelated to the trial.
Both parties in the case will have the opportunity to file their responses about the gag order by next Friday. Stone, second only to Donald Trump in his desperation for media attention, has declared he would fight "the deep state" on a gag order.
Stone is facing a seven-count indictment in which he is accused of lying to congressional investigators during their exploration of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Federal investigators say they obtained an extensive amount of information when they executed a search warrant on Stone's residences last week. Specifically, "multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information consisting of, among other things, FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results (e.g., Apple iCloud accounts and email accounts), bank and financial records, and the contents of numerous physical devices (e.g., cellular phones, computers, and hard drives)."
The next hearing date is set for March 14.