themarketswork

a common sense approach to a liberal world

The Absurdities of Mueller’s Indictment

by

The Mueller Indictment targeted the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a “troll factory” in St. Petersburg.

It turns out that Mueller seemingly formulated his indictment primarily from information contained within three articles.

A March 16, 2015 article in Radio Free Europe.

A March 24, 2017 article in the Russian business magazine, RBC.

An October 17, 2017 article in the Russian business magazine, RBC.

The articles are in Ukrainian. Google Translate becomes helpful.

From the 2015 article:

In the “Trust Ministry”, approximately 400 people, who change one at a time for 12 hours, sit around the computer around the clock and write in blogs – mostly in “Live Journal” or “VKontakte”. There are several departments. In one they are engaged in the blogosphere, in another they are preparing TK – technical tasks, in the third one – they comment on the news in Russian and foreign media , in the fourth – mount photos in photoshop.

It’s the third article, Investigation of RBC: How the “Troll Factory” Worked in the U.S. Elections by Polina Rusyaeva, Andrei Zakharov that proves most interesting:

The [October 22, 2016] event in Charlotte was promoted in Facebook on behalf of the BlackMattersUS community, which has nothing to do with the Black Lives Matters. The organization’s connections go far beyond the US – to Russia, St. Petersburg, ul. Savushkina, 55.

By mid-2015, the “factory” had grown to 800-900 people, and the arsenal of tools had expanded – video, infographic, memes, reports, news, interviews, analytical materials and their own communities were used. And already in January 2017, together with the RT channel, the Internet Research Agency, was mentioned in the report of the US intelligence services Russia’s interference in the election of the US president.

Following the release of the Mueller indictment, one of the authors of Investigation of RBC: How the “Troll Factory” Worked in the U.S. Elections, Andrei Zakharov, gave an interview to Worldviews.

The Washington Post reprinted the transcript here.

From the transcript:

WorldViews: You’ve read the Mueller document. What was your reaction to it?

Andrei Zakharov: Well, of all the people who are mentioned there, only some people were the real top managers of the troll factory.

Like [Mikhail] Bystrov, who’s been the head of all its legal entities for a long time. He’s a former policeman. Another guy is [Mikhail] Burchik. We wrote about him. He was the executive director of the troll factory for a long time. And the last guy is Jeyhun Aslanov. He was and I think he’s still with the head of American department.

The other staff mentioned are very incidental. I mean, it seems like they put down all the names they could get. Some were people who worked there in 2014 — but most of these guys didn’t work for the troll factory for a long time. They didn’t even work there during the elections. Like Krylova, she didn’t work there then. [Aleksandra Krylova is one of the two named Internet Research Agency employees the indictment said traveled to the United States in 2014.]

It looks like they just took some employees from the that American department whose names they could get. But the American department was like 90 people. So my reaction was that, for me, it was like that curious list of oligarchs and Kremlin authorities where they put the whole Forbes list and the whole Kremlin administration on it. It’s very strange.

I was also very surprised that they wrote private about the private messages of one girl [Irina Kaverzina]. She wrote to relatives that FBI is following them and so on. I think they read her emails. I was very surprised by that. But generally, they seem to have got people who were not careful — who used their own email accounts or registered Twitter accounts to Russian phone numbers.

WV: I saw some people on social media who suggested that the Mueller team must have read your report. Do you think that’s true?

AZ: That they read it? Probably. Some of your U.S. colleagues used to contact me. Maybe some of them worked for your government, I don’t know. Nobody who said they were from Mueller’s team contacted me. I’ve never told people more than we wrote anyway.

WV: Do you think that Americans misunderstand the troll factory then?

AZ: It was very strange when your media started to look into the groups. It was almost like a competition, you know. “We found out that this group was operated by Russians!” but then you’d look at this group and you’d find it only had 100 members.

For some time, it looked a lot like your colleagues were just going after facts and not really analyzing it. There was that big investigation of those Macedonian guys, remember? They established fake pro-Trump groups, and their groups were huge. But even though it was said that these Macedonian guys influence American people, everybody forgot about it.

Also, everyone has focused on the pro-Trump groups. What we saw was that they were trying to spread tension in the society, talking about problems people had with black people, Islam and so on. They organized anti-Trump rallies also. Yes, they were active against Hillary [Clinton], but they were not always pro-Trump. They were also active after the election.

Adrien Chen, who wrote a 2015 article about Internet Research Agency, made contact with Mikhail Burchik on February 16, 2018 after Mueller’s Indictment was released. Burchik was one of the thirteen Russians named in the Mueller Indictment – and one of the names mentioned in the Zakharov interview.

Chen wrote an article about the encounter:

“I think it’s бред ),” he said, using a Russian word for nonsense. I was struck by the parenthesis at the end, which is the smiley face emoticon on the Russian Internet. He seemed, in general, sanguine about the case, mocking the idea that he might have played a role in the U.S. election. He said that he lives in Russia and doesn’t know anything about the U.S. besides “Washington is the capital of USA.”

He said that nobody had called him, and that he had received no official notice about the charges.

Burchik is probably guilty of at least some of the accusations made in the Mueller Indictment – but this exchange highlights the ridiculousness of the entire investigation.

Meanwhile, as the Gateway Pundit reported “the Russian ads mentioned in Mueller’s indictment were already released by the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017.”

You can find the release by the House Intelligence Committee here.

A sample of one of the ads is provided here.

From the article:

Democrats want you to believe these Russian Facebook ads flipped the election to Donald Trump. But at least half of the ads are pro-Hillary. And Russia claims half of their paid ads ran after the election and 25% never ran at all.

This would appear to be backed up by Rob Goldman, Facebook’s VP – Advertising.

He made the following comments after Mueller’s Indictment was handed down:

I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.

The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election.

The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions.

Americans were literally puppeted into the streets by trolls who organized both the sides of protest.

Russian spies attempted to sell a fake video of Trump with a hooker to the NSA.

The Mueller Indictment is reminiscent of the infamous Russian Report – Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections (covered here and here).

The Russia report was the third in a series.

The first report established the Russians attempted to intervene in our election. By the DNI’s own acknowledgement, the Russians have historically done so.

The second report was meant to directly tie Russian hacking to the election. What the report actually did was use technical language to describe a generalized hacking process – and the means by which hacking and phishing can be generally prevented.

The third report – done by the DNI (Clapper) – took data from the first two reports and then packaged it into a media friendly publication that used broad assertions, sweeping statements and very little factual data.

The report was created by a joint effort between the CIA (former Director John Brennan), FBI (former Director James Comey) and the NSA (current Director Mike Rogers) – and assembled by the DNI (former Director James Clapper).

The joint report contains one significant caveat:

CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has only moderate confidence.

Actually, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers stated in Senate hearing testimony that his confidence did not reach even this threshold:

I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy, I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations and in the end I made that call.…It didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources.

It looks as though the Mueller Indictment is more of the same.

The entire Russia Narrative pushed incessantly by the media has been a calamitous waste of money and resources. Of course the Russians tried to interfere and create division. They always do.

Nevertheless, some were impressed.

Alan Rozenshtein, now in the private sector, was one of the DOJ lawyers present at that mysterious April 25, 2016 FISA meeting that took  place at the White House.

From a timeline:

  • April 25 2016 – Two WH meetings between FBI Counsel James Baker and Trisha B Anderson (FBI), Tashina Guahar( DOJ), John T Lynch (DOJ), John (Brad) Wiegmann (DOJ), Alan Rozenshtein (DOJ), Norman (Christopher) Hardee (DOJ), and Iris Lan (DOJ). DOJ attorneys Tashina Guahar, Christopher Hardee, Brad Wiegmann are FISA attorneys.

Birds of a feather…

 

newer post  Devin Nunes – An Interview, 10 Questions & Phase II

older post  Resignations, Demotions & Some Details – Complicity at the FBI & DOJ