Mueller Team Comes Up With New Excuse To Avoid Sharing Their 'Evidence' Against 'Russian Troll Farm'

Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that confidential discovery material provided to a Russian company accused by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of being a troll farm was stolen, altered and made public on social media "as part of a disinformation campaign" to discredit Mueller's Russia investigation.

Prosecutors made the claim in an 18-page filing in federal court in Washington arguing that representatives of Concord Management and Consulting LLC should not be permitted to view additional sensitive evidence outside of the United States because it "unreasonably risks the national security interests of the United States." Specifically, the Mueller team claims that the evidence in question "identifies uncharged individuals and entities that the government believes are continuing to engage in operations that interfere with lawful U.S. government functions". The evidence also allegedly identifies "sources, methods, and techniques used to identify the foreign actors behind these interference operations."

Concord Management and Consulting is one of three Russian companies indicted by a federal grand jury in February 2018 for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election through "information warfare." The company pleaded not guilty in May.

Prosecutors allege that on Oct. 22, a "newly created" Twitter account, @HackingRedstone, tweeted, "We've got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the [Internet Research Agency] and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!” The tweet included a link to a webpage that contained file folder names and folder structure matching the material Mueller produced.

We examined the material and found a hodgepodge of already-public documents and copies of known IRA memes, padded with corrupt ZIP files made from gigabytes of random congressional proceedings. We dismissed the leak as a fake.

When no other reporters took the bait, “HackingRedstone” released the same documents publicly in an announcement on Twitter. “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!”

The FBI investigated and, according to the new filing, also found that the 300,000 files were mostly “junk material that has nothing to do with this case," according to the filing. Mueller believes it was a deliberate attempt to “make it appear as though the irrelevant files... were the sum total evidence of ‘IRA and Russian collusion’ gathered by law enforcement in this matter in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation.”

But Mueller notes that about 1,000 files directly matching real documents from the discovery were sprinkled among the fakes, “apparently randomly.”

“The 1,000+ matching files include images of political memes from Facebook and other social media accounts that, as alleged in the indictment, were posted and reposted online by the Internet Research Agency, and were produced in non-sensitive discovery,” the filing reads. “Many of those images are presumably still available elsewhere on the Internet.”

Perhaps more significantly, the mostly-fake discovery was organized into folders with very similar names and organization as the real files handed over to Concord.

In other words, somebody used the real Mueller discovery material as a template to craft a more convincing fake. “The file names and structure of the material produced by the government in discovery are not a matter of public record,” Mueller noted.