July 19, 2018
Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intel officers slams into the law of unintended consequences
By Thomas Lifson
Robert Mueller's indictment of 12 officers of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, was purely for domestic propaganda purposes. The case was never intended to come to trial because it was presumed by Mueller that Russia would never extradite its own intelligence officers, and thus no holes would be poked in the purported evidence by defense counsel. Thus, the accusations in the indictment would be taken as dispositive by the mainstream media, and the theory that Russia was behind Donald Trump's victory would gain support with an official imprimatur.
Mueller tried this before, with his indictment of Russian entities that supposedly supplied Facebook advertising, only to unexpectedly face a defense team hired by one of the entities, Concord Management. His response has been to delay and obfuscate, quite shamefully (dumping four terabytes of untranslated Russian documents in response to discovery requirements), and then pass off the prosecution to "outside prosecutors" so his team can escape accountability for their phony indictment.
In his second round of indictments purely for show, Mueller tried to avoid the danger of a defense being mounted by making the indictments criminal and naming defendants who are real individuals who would face prison if convicted.
Of course, anybody with half a brain would see that once the United States legitimizes criminal indictments of foreign intelligence officers in this way, other nations will apply the same logic to our own intelligence operations. And the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul (an Obama appointee) tweeted:
McFaul and his MSM allies are apoplectic (to the point of using the F-word in a Daily Beast headline) that president Trump has not ruled out extradition.
This places McFaul and the Trump-haters in the position of arguing that no rational leader would extradite his own country's foreign policy and intelligence officers. This means that Meuller's indictment was ridiculous.
Caricature of Mueller by Donkey Hotey