Russia wants DNC’s election-hacking lawsuit thrown out

The Russian government is arguing that a federal court should dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Democratic National Committee alleging that Moscow’s military spies, the Trump campaign, and the WikiLeaks organization conspired to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump. In a letter and statement to the State Department and a judge in the Southern District of New York, Russia’s Ministry of Justice argued that the United States’ Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act protects the Russian government from such lawsuits. In particular, the lawsuit’s naming of the GRU military spy agency as a defendant takes the litigation out of bounds on the basis that “any alleged ‘military attack’ is a quintessential sovereign act,” said a Nov. 6 statement by the ministry’s Department for International Law and Cooperation. The Russian government also warned that if the suit is allowed to proceed, it exposes American spy services such as the National Security Agency — an arm of the Defense Department — to “a tidal wave of civil litigation” in foreign courts.