© Yuri Gripas / Reuters
Special Counsel Robert Mueller
Special Counsel Robert Mueller
Mueller on Tuesday asked a federal judge in Washington for an order to protect voluminous evidence sought by lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting LLC, one of three companies and 13 Russian nationals charged in a February indictment alleging election meddling via social media. Prosecutors have uncovered evidence of other individuals and entities who are "continuing to engage" in similar activities.
The legal battle between Mueller and Concord's attorneys highlights the tension between intelligence-gathering, which is cloaked in secrecy, and the U.S. legal system, which entitles criminal defendants to review evidence against them. Lawyers for Concord, a company linked to a longtime associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, have been negotiating to obtain documents from the special counsel to mount a legal defense.
The Russians are accused of producing propaganda, posing as U.S. activists and posting political content on social media as so-called trolls to encourage strife in the U.S. The evidence includes between 1.5 and 2 terabytes of data and involves U.S. residents not charged with crimes who the government says were unwittingly recruited by Russians to engage in political activity, prosecutors wrote.
Comment: We wonder if Mueller and his team ever imagined that any of the Russian companies or individuals would even respond. Now they're in a pickle: forced to potentially turn over the 'evidence' based on which the Russians are accused. And Mueller either can't or simply won't do that. Said 'evidence' may turn out to be quite revealing, and that could be inconvenient for Mueller's sham investigation. So they're stuck trying to create conditions under which the defendants will give up their request, i.e., by saying they will only turn over documents once Prigozhin enters the U.S. and appears personally before the court.