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"Concord M& C..is accused of funding the troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency. But [someone from] Concord leaked [documents] to reporters..targeting Mueller" This is a HUGE story, icymi. Read this article. #SundayThoughts
2-"..Experts say Kremlin proxies have targeted their rivals and other disfavored individuals by exploiting U.S. courts to pursue bogus claims via “superficially legitimate lawsuits,” Anders Aslund, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in a recent report.
3-"He worked as an economic adviser to the Russian government from 1991 to 1994. The Kremlin proxies have done so not only to perpetuate global harassment campaigns against their perceived enemies, Aslund argued, but also to “enrich themselves through bad faith claims made
4-"possible by the Russian state’s abuse of disfavored individuals and their businesses.” When Mueller indicted Concord in February 2018, along with two other corporate entities and 13 Russian nationals allegedly connected to the Internet Research Agency, it seemed highly
5-"unlikely that the indictment would result in a trial, because Russians cannot be extradited to the United States. But Concord unexpectedly hired the well-connected American law firm Reed Smith to fight Mueller, arguing that the charges should be dropped because the special
6-"counsel was illegally appointed. The judge in the case, Dabney Friedrich, has twice refused to dismiss the case and recently lambasted Concord’s American lawyers for submitting “unprofessional, inappropriate and ineffective” court filings, and the legal battle has raged on.
7-"Now, according to the Mueller filing this week, unidentified actors working out of Russia appear to have weaponized the U.S. discovery process to Concord’s benefit. More than 1,000 files on the website that hosted the leaked documents “match those produced in discovery,”
8-"the special counsel said. The documents were published from a computer with a Russian IP address, according to Mueller, and whoever released them clearly “had access to at least some of the non-sensitive discovery produced by the government.” But forged documents were mixed
9-"into the trove, too, apparently in an attempt to accuse Mueller of characterizing American websites and Facebook pages such as Occupy Democrats as Russian disinformation operations. The website also inserted irrelevant documents into folders with unique names—known only to
10-"those with access to the discovery materials—and characterized them as the sum total of Mueller’s evidence “in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation,” the special counsel said...In October, legal and national-security experts expressed concern to ABC News that, in
11-"the Concord case specifically, the Russian government may be trying to use the discovery process in a “graymail” strategy designed to make Mueller drop the case in order to prevent sensitive U.S. national-security information from being made public. Mark Zaid, an attorney
12-"based in Washington, D.C., who focuses on national-security law, said he viewed the latest incident involving Concord and the hoax website “as part of a consistent strategy by the Russians to hinder, obstruct, and derail” Mueller’s probe. “One wonders whether pursuing the
13-"criminal charges against the Russians was worth the difficulty and these current problems,” Zaid said, “particularly given the odds of ever gaining custody of any individual is unlikely.” But the Concord case is just one example of this phenomenon—and it “helps expose the
14-"deliberate efforts of the Russians to continually attack our democratic systems,” he added...Michelle Estlund, a criminal-defense attorney who focuses on international criminal prosecutions and politically motivated prosecutions, told me last year that the problem is that
15-"while the U.S. courts operate in good faith to assist Russian authorities, the Russian courts frequently do not...The issue arose again just last month, when the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment against the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. According
16-"to prosecutors, Veselnitskaya had tried to obstruct an investigation into her client Prevezon, a company founded by a Kremlin ally that was accused of laundering millions of stolen Russian taxpayer dollars through Manhattan real estate. Veselnitskaya had secretly worked with
17-"the Russian government to draft a document purporting to be an independent assessment made by Russian prosecutors saying that Prevezon was innocent of laundering funds, the indictment said. That document was then filed in federal court in an attempt “to affect the outcome”
18-"of a lawsuit filed against Prevezon by federal prosecutors, according to Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. The scheme threatened “the ability of our courts and our government to ensure that justice is done,” he said. And it worked: The court decided to deny
19-"the U.S. government’s motion for summary judgment against Prevezon based on the fraudulent document, according to the indictment. Mueller, for his part, appears to have foreseen how the Russians connected to Concord (it is owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is often referred to
20-"as “Putin’s chef”) might try to exploit the legal process: In June 2018, he asked Friedrich, the judge, for a protective order that would prevent Concord’s lawyers from sharing any discovery documents with the Russians named in the troll-farm indictment, as well as with other
21-"foreigners, such as lawyers outside the United States. If the data were to be distributed outside of American law firms, Mueller said, “foreign individuals may try to use that avenue as a way to obtain sensitive materials as part of an intelligence collection effort.”
22-"The hoax website aimed at discrediting his investigation largely failed, but seemed to prove Mueller’s prescience, beyond any doubt."
~Excerpts from Natasha Bertrand, The Atlantic, 2/2/19
~Excerpts from Natasha Bertrand, The Atlantic, 2/2/19
