Team Mueller Moves To Dismiss Concord Management Case

I say "Team Mueller" because although the headline reads Justice Dept. Moves to Drop Charges Against Russian Firms Filed by Mueller the case was still being run by a Team Mueller prosecutor. This result has been long expected.

The case was based--as was usual with all the Mueller cases--on a novel legal theory:

Team Mueller claimed that this somehow constituted a fraud against the FEC.

The motion now states that to go forward to trial would expose "details about law enforcement’s tools and techniques for investigating malign foreign influence":

A trial of this case risks publicizing sensitive law enforcement information regarding measures used to investigate and protect against foreign influence over the political system. The government and the Court have invoked and utilized the Classified Information Procedures Act, 18 U.S.C. App. III, to protect classified information. ... But even with those procedures in place, trial in this matter would expose additional details about law enforcement’s tools and techniques for investigating malign foreign influence, among other crimes, potentially undermining their effectiveness. Moreover, as described in greater detail in the classified addendum to this motion, a classification determination bearing on the evidence the government properly gathered during the investigation, limits the unclassified proof now available to the government at trial. That forces the prosecutors to choose between a materially weaker case and the compromise of classified material.

Given that the actions of Concord as described in the indictment were completely public, it's difficult to imagine what sensitive techniques would be compromised.

The bottom line is that this is another black eye for Team Mueller. As Techno Fog puts it:

Techno Fog
@Techno_Fog 

Wow. 

The DOJ moves to dismiss the charges against the Russian Company (Concord) who conducted the alleged "information warfare against the US". 

The troll case will be dismissed w/ prejudice. 

How embarrassing for Team Mueller.

Techno Fog's entire thread contains entertaining examples of how Concord's lawyer, Eric Dubelier, "[ran] circles around Special Counsel and DOJ lawyers." Nor did Dubelier spare Judge Dabney Friedrich (a Trump appointee, but married to Mueller protege Matthew Friedrich), as described by Politico:

During one prickly back-and-forth, Dubelier accused the judge of favoring the prosecution in the case and of reading pre-written rulings from the bench after pretending to entertain arguments from both sides. 

"You've already reached a decision," he said, also complaining that her "tone" suggested he was "doing something sneaky." At one point, Dubelier also uttered "excuse me" to interrupt the judge — something rarely seen in federal courts. 

"I'm not going to argue with you about the way I'm running my courtroom," Friedrich replied, noting that judges aren't required to hold hearings on motions at all. 

"Seems to me there are two rules: rules for them and rules for us," Dubelier said.

ADDENDUM: I think sundance gets the big picture exactly right--it was a PR stunt for the Russia Hoax:

The prosecution was always just a farce.  The ridiculous Russian indictments were only created to give some sense of validity to a premise that did not exist; and to allow the Robert Mueller investigation to continue operating when there was never a valid justification for doing so.

This was perhaps the biggest shell game operation, with a non-existent pea, using the DOJ and FBI to give the impression that something nefarious had happened; when factually the ‘Russian Conspiracy Narrative’ was all just one big hoax upon the American people.