By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Why do I get the feeling that special counsel Robert Mueller – the former FBI director – is running a bluff with this rather extraordinary indictment of 13 Russians accused of an elaborate plot to disrupt the 2016 presidential election? I’ll tell you why…
The 13 Russians are charged with running a massive but shrouded so-called “social media trolling campaign” which Mueller maintains was intended, at least in part, at helping Donald Trump, the successful Republican candidate, defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 American Presidential Election.
In what purports to be but really are not new and detailed allegations as I will get to shortly, Mr. Mueller delineates illegal Russian meddling during the campaign that resulted in Donald Trump taking residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at least until January 20, 2021. According to the indictment, the effort was funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy Russian restaurateur, and carried out through a St. Petersburg-based Russian organization known as “the Internet Research Agency,” consisting of a sophisticated, energetic and extensive disinformation campaign intended to sway political opinion in the United States in the run-up to the election. The tactics involved included internet postings being made using the names of actual Americans without their participation or knowledge, Russian operatives posing as American activists and putting on public events or political rallies, paying actual Americans, witting or unwitting, to promote the candidacies of some politicians, together with outright advertising on behalf of certain candidates or paying people, most of them presumably American citizens, to promote or oppose candidates…
According to the indictment, “Mikhail Ivanovich Bystrov, Mikhail Leonidovich Burchik, Aleksandra Yuryevna Krylova, Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva, Sergey Pavlovich Polozov, Maria Anatolyevna Bovda, Robert Sergeyevich Bovda, Dzheykhun Nasimi Ogly Aslanov (who is also known as Jayshoon Aslanov or Jay Aslanov), Vadim Vladimirovich Podkopaev, Gleb Igorevich Vasilchenko, Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, and Vladimir Venkov worked in various capacities to carry out defendant organization’s interference operations targeting the United States. From in or around 2014 to the present, defendants knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other (and with persons known and unknown to the grand jury) to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”
Although I lack the legal expertise to say for sure, I will accept as true for the purposes of discussion Mr. Mueller’s assertion that “interfering” in a U.S. election is illegal. I take it there would be evidence at trial, if there were to be a trial, of this “interference.” I nevertheless have some difficulty here…
What is interference? Does that mean influencing an election? Well, all sorts of things influence elections. The candidates themselves, who are legitimate, influence elections. By definition, political rivals, that is candidates running against one another, interfere with elections and with each other. They interfere with the message being put out by their opponents by contradicting their opponents and disputing what they are saying. This interference is part and parcel of campaigning. Since, presumably, one candidate would very likely win if that candidate’s opponent refused to campaign, we might reasonably assert that any candidate who wins an election in which the opposing candidate campaigned interfered in the election. Yet Mr. Mueller has not sought, nor has a grand jury returned, indictments of all of the elected office holders in the U.S. So, I ask again, what is interference?
Perhaps the crime here is not interference, per se, since all candidates and their supporters are interfering in the electoral process. Rather, perhaps, the crime is that non-U.S. citizens were involving themselves in the electoral process. Ah, now we are getting somewhere. But wait. Am I to interpret that to mean that foreign nationals who weigh in on or in any way get involved in campaigns in the United States are violating U.S. law? That sounds to me like a whole lot of journalists the world over – in Canada, in Mexico, in England, in France, in Italy, in Germany, in Spain, in Georgia, in the Ukraine, in Russia, in China, in Japan, the list goes on and on – have broken U.S. law. Conceivably something or anything they have written might impact the outcome of a U.S. election, and they have therefore interfered in the U.S. electoral process…
Perhaps that is not what Mr. Mueller means. Perhaps he means people such as Mr. Prigozhin or Mr. Bystrov or cooperatives such as the Internet Research Agency working to convince Americans to vote for one candidate or another or to not vote for one candidate or another are violating U.S. law. But, it seems to me, there might be some flaw in that if the same U.S. law does not prohibit U.S. citizens from working to convince citizens of other countries to vote for one candidate or another in their countries or to not vote for one candidate or another in their countries. The record is pretty clear that not only have some selected U.S. citizens, but has the U.S. government itself, interfered in the electoral process in Iran, Italy, Greece, Germany, Australia, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Viet Nam, among several others. Yet no U.S. federal grand jury has indicted any U.S. citizens for this activity…
Mr. Mueller offered all of this information about the Internet Research Agency as if it was something new and the product of a competently-run U.S. government investigation. Actually, very little of that information was new. By reading the work of the Russian journalist Andrey Zakharov, I have known since 2015 about the activity of Mikhail Bystrov and Mikhail Burchik and Jeyhun Asinov. There was interesting information available in the same timeframe with regard to another operation that was run by some Macedonians to sway American voters. I’ve not seen any indictment of the Macedonian trollers. More recently, in October, Mr. Zakharov together with Polina Rusyaeva published an even more comprehensive article delineating the activity of the St. Petersburg troll factory. There are a whole bunch of people the world over and in our own country pretending to be something they are not and saying things they know to not be true to influence others. I see no action being taken against them…
I believe Mr. Mueller is bluffing. The indicted Russians are not in custody and are  not likely to ever face trial. Yet, one of those indicted Russians could send an attorney here or hire an American lawyer to march into federal court and declare: “My client contests that he has committed any kind of crime. There are inaccuracies in the indictment which demonstrate that the U.S. Government is prejudiced against my client and his co-defendants. Accordingly, he does not believe he can receive a fair trial in this venue and he has used his prerogative as world citizen outside the jurisdiction of the United States to remove this matter to the International Tribunal in the Hague.” Once before that august court, the defendant would then be free to put on his defense, replete with demonstrations of how the United States and its agents overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953; deposed Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954; prevented the election of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1964 and then had him assassinated in 1973 after he won in 1970; forced Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from office in 1975; and involved itself in a propaganda and disinformation campaign in the 1990 Nicaragua elections that brought about President Daniel Ortega’s loss to opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro. Would Mr. Mueller venture to the Netherlands to prosecute the case in such a circumstance, where he had to pit the U.S. record of meddling in foreign campaigns against that of the Russians? Or would he tacitly admit he is bluffing by refusing to recognize the International Court’s authority, and insist on a show trial here in our own country?