Special counsel Robert Mueller is in the fight of his life.
Mueller’s case about Russian election meddling is collapsing.
And the special counsel is battling to protect a secret that could blow up his case for good.
When Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian internet marketing companies, he never expected the case to go to trial.
But attorneys for Concord Management, LLC showed up and entered a not guilty plea.
That meant Mueller would have to put his cards on the table and actually show his evidence.
Facing the prospect of being forced to show what could be paper thin evidence, Mueller’s team is fighting tooth-and-nail to keep his evidence under lock and key.
Mueller’s team filed a motion claiming they could not comply with the defense’s discovery requests because,
“At a high level, the sensitive-but-unclassified discovery in this case includes information describing the government’s investigative steps taken to identify foreign parties responsible for interfering in U.S. elections; the techniques used by foreign parties to mask their true identities while conducting operations online; the relationships of charged and uncharged parties to other uncharged foreign entities and governments; the government’s evidence-collection capabilities related to online conduct; and the identities of cooperating individuals and, or companies. Discovery in this case contains sensitive information about investigative techniques and cooperating witnesses that goes well beyond the information that will be disclosed at trial.”
Another red flag for critics was Mueller raising the specter of alleged Russian interference in the midterm elections.
Mueller’s indictment against the Russians alleged they spent $1.25 million on their election ads.
That is a drop in the bucket.
Political experts point out you couldn’t even swing one single House race with that type of ad buy.
And Mueller’s arguments that Russians are running interference campaigns leads to another question: Why hasn’t Mueller indicted them?
If his office knows Russian agents are attempting to interfere in the election, why haven’t they blown up the scheme publically?
The whole situation stinks.
And it’s obvious to everyone.
In a May 27th interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani blasted the indictments as “phony.”
Giuliani declared:
“That’s a pretty phony indictment. They are not showing up for anything. You think they are coming here to be — to be tried? That is like a paper indictment on which the press can fawn all over it, and it will be nowhere.”
It has been accepted as an article of faith in the media – as well as much of the American public – that the Russians “meddled” in the elections.
But Mueller has not indicted any Russians for the emails hacks of the Democrat National Committee or Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Nor has any evidence been made public that would back up the claim the Russians were behind the cyber attacks.
Mueller had no problem indicting the Russians he claimed were behind the social media ad campaigns, so critics are wondering if the lack of an indictment for the email hacks means there really is no evidence the Russians were responsible.
The lack of evidence pinning the hacks on the Russians is also leading critics to question if Mueller filed a “show” indictment against these Russian nationals and companies just to demonstrate he was making progress on the case.
If Giuliani is correct – and Mueller’s conduct suggests he is – than these indictments were a farce and Mueller’s motion is a desperate attempt to cover up the fact that his case is nothing more than a house of cards.
We will keep you up to date on any new developments in this story.
