Ordinarily, U.S. prosecutors are wary of releasing highly specific accounts involving foreign-intelligence targets, in order to protect the “sources and methods” that allow the government to pierce electronic communications and hidden dealings. But, Sipher said, this thirty-seven-page indictment suggests that Mueller’s team made a strategic decision to include a level of detail that will help it elicit relevant documents from businesses and banks. The indictments open the way for “discovery that otherwise may not be allowed or would be hard to do without a charging document,” he said.
In its particulars, the indictment, which charged thirteen Russian nationals and three organizations with multiple conspiracies and frauds, fills in the details of an “active measures” campaign that had been described in general terms by analysts and journalists over the past year. It offers a playbook for manipulating American democracy using a mix of classic espionage, private-sector social-media tools, and partisan ideology. The operation, centered on the now infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, extended to scores of undercover staff and associates in multiple countries, including the United States, and deployed a range of political gambits.
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The indictment underscores the degree to which Mueller’s investigation has defied the ability of the press and pundits to predict its course with any precision. Hardly any analysts had assumed that Mueller would make a prominent early move to indict a little-remembered campaign aide, George Papadopoulos. And there was little to suggest, in advance, that Mueller would then lay out the international conspiracy at the heart of Russia’s interference. In other words, Mueller has been trolling the press—reminding us that he is often many steps ahead of us, and operating on a timeline of his own.