Hernandez lawyer suggests Russians hacked jailhouse calls

A lawyer for Aaron Hernandez suggested Tuesday that the Russians could be behind his client’s leaked jailhouse phone calls in 2014.

“It could be a Russian hacker, with all respect, like WikiLeaks, who was able to backdoor into the system,” George Leontire, Hernandez’s lawyer, said during a pretrial hearing at Suffolk County Superior Court.

The former New England Patriots tight end was back in court for a hearing on his upcoming double murder trial.He is accused of fatally shooting two men he allegedly bumped into at a Boston nightclub in 2012.

Hernandez is already serving life in prison for the murder of Odin Lloyd.

The phone calls in question were accessed while Hernandez was in a Boston jail awaiting trial on the Lloyd murder.The Suffolk Sheriff’s Department, which oversees the jail, has confirmed the calls were hacked.

Much of the discussion at the pretrial hearing centered on the hack, NECNreported.

Lawyers are concerned that attorney-clientprivilegecould have been breached when unknownand unauthorized people accessed Hernandez’s calls.Securus Technologies, the Dallas-based company, operated the jail’s recorded inmate call database. Hernandez is suing the company in federal court.

Leontire used Russian hackers to illustrate the idea that Hernandez and his defense team are in the dark about who accessed the calls and why.

“We don’t know,” he said.

Hernandez is set to go to trial for the 2012 murders in February. He was pleaded not guilty in the deaths of Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu.