https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-12/mueller-seeks-order-protecting-evidence-in-russia-troll-casehttps://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/mueller-warns-that-election-politics-meddling-by-foreigners-is-still-happening.htmlQuote
Mueller asked a federal judge in Washington for an order that would protect the handover of voluminous evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting LLC, one of three companies and 13 Russian nationals charged in a February indictment.
That protection plan would bar any of the defendants to review the evidence found until they appear before U.S. court.
Civil liberties spidey sense tingling.
Mueller is
again seeking to wriggle out from under the concord threat of discovery. First it was delaying tactics and trying to oppose a speedy trial. Then it was gimmicks like dumping terabytes of untranslated russian social media posts into the docket to spam the trial to death. Now he's directly asking the judge to keep the evidence hidden for citing a nebulous national security need, right in the vein of bush/obama, except this time citing the election interference as the threat itself. Except unlike those, this is in the discovery process of a trial
So mueller is effectively trying to restrict the discovery and deny the russians the ability to read the evidence against them. He's doing it by demanding they appear in court first, which he knows they don't want to do and that he'd be trying them in abstentia as is.
On one hand, this is a dangerous civil liberties game he's digging at, trying to both prosecute an entity and deny their right to discovery. They have a right to a speedy trial, they have a right to know the evidence against them. If Mueller can't produce that evidence, his only option should be to drop the charges. That's how it works in our legal system. For him to try to have his cake and eat it too by saying he wants to keep the trial ongoing but refuse to turn over the evidence without conditions is dangerous, even if he's technically worming his way around discovery by making it
possible.
On the other hand, we need to look at that old question I've taken so many runs at about Mueller's motivations: Are they political or professional? Is he really the unbiased investigator bringing fair justice, or is the special counsel being used as a political or geopolitical bludgeon? That's where this is worrying. Because as Mueller has laid it out, the Russians could dodge his discovery protection tactic by showing up in court tomorrow. But if they did that, he would have them arrested on the spot and detained so they couldn't return to Russia. He's transparently attempting to coerce them into giving up their discovery by attacking the shield of extradition they've been using to exploit his trial, and while turnabout is fair play and that speaks to some gray area bout civil liberties, what its really damning for is the political implications. Because if all it took was them showing up to thwart his national security argument, the Russians could just send over a sacrifice lamb and seize those materials all the same. To russia its nothing, they have plenty of disposable people. But to Mueller it would be a PR coup, he'd get to say he's making his first Russia
arrest. But the interests of his role as prosecutor cannot be that kind of political grandstanding, not if he's truly the consummate professional he's been made out to be. If he was just interested in sorting out the truth behind russian interference and prosecuting it, then its totally irrelevant whether he gets to claim one throwaway ruskie or not. It looks more like he's trying to either avoid being embarrassed by dropping the case or score a victory in optics by seizing some random russian.