moonofalabama | Assessment:
- It is not by chance that this indictment was published now, a few days before the first summit between Donald Trump and the Russian President Vladimir Putin and shortly before the successful soccer world championship in Russia ends. The release intends to sabotage the talks.
- The indictment describes a wide ranging operation but includes zero proof of anything it alleges.
- Mueller likely hopes that the indictment will never come in front of a court. The alleged stuff would be extremely difficult to prove. Any decent lawyer would ask how the claimed information was gained and how much of it was based on illegal snooping by the NSA. Something the U.S. would hate to reveal.
- It is unlikely that there will ever be a trial of these cases. The indicted persons are all Russians in Russia and none of them is likely to be stupid enough to follow an invitation to Las Vegas or to Disney World.
But who knows?
lawfareblog | Before turning to what the indictment alleges, and what we can learn
from it, it’s worth zooming out to an important macro point about the
investigation that led to this action: This was the investigation over
which the president of the United States fired James Comey as FBI
director.
This is the investigation Comey confirmed on March 20, 2017, when he
told Congress, “I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to
confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is
investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016
presidential election.”
This was also the investigation that multiple congressional
committees have spent more than a year seeking to discredit—most
recently Thursday, when two House panels hauled the former deputy
assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Department, Peter
Strzok, a career FBI agent who worked on the Russia probe, up to Capitol
Hill for 10 hours of public, televised, abusive conspiracy theorizing.
When the president of the United States derides the Mueller
investigation as a “witch hunt,” and when congressional Republicans
scream at FBI agents, this is the investigation they are trying to
harass out of existence.
It is, therefore, fitting that this indictment comes less than one
day after the astonishing display House Republicans put on in the Strzok
hearing. If Mueller had been trying to remind the public of what the
investigation is really about and what the stakes are in it, if he had
been trying to make a public statement in response to the Strzok
hearing, he could not have timed this action better.
