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Monday, March 16, 2020

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.

15 comments:

  1. I'm gonna guess that the "classified" excuse and the rest of the malarkey is to hide the paucity of the prosecution's case and avoid exposing the embarrassing "old man behind the curtain pulling the levers," vis-à-vis The Wizard of Oz.

    Besides, the indictment served its purpose, though the Mueller gang didn't expect to actually have to show up in court The indictment was just window dressing for asserting the Russia hoax/coup, etc.

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    1. If you guess that, you'll get no pushback from me.

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    2. Just off the cuff here:

      Weissmann et al were hoping they could either (a) file enough phony charges and coerce enough pleas to manufacture a plausible case against Trump which would destroy him legally... or politically...or (b) failing that, incite Trump into defending himself against phony charges to the extent where they could charge him with obstruction of justice. A high risk strategy since, as we now know, there was no case to be made.

      They failed.

      Two consequences now unfolding:

      1 As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'When you strike at a king, you must kill him'.

      2 As Hosea 8:7 (and Chuck Schumer) instruct: Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

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  2. I just read the underlined red from the above Concord response. Is it really the Mueller gang's contention that Concord prevented the FEC and DOJ from performing their job?? LOL!

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    1. Somebody hadda do it, right? :-)

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    2. I have a slightly different take, mostly a feather-spitting rant based on what Forbes says in his first post.

      Mueller cashed in big with these fake indictments, TV, press, www, for months, the implication of which was that Trump was dirty and in bed with the Russians. My feather-spit(below):

      Mueller doesn't lose here. He & his evil lawyer toads moved the ball up and down the field, at will. They got out of these indictments what they needed back when it actually mattered.

      Now, when nobody gives a damn, some unnamed DOJ hack or group of hacks says, "Oops! My Bad!" and btw, the only reason we're dropping the case is b/c it might reveal some powerful magic, the secret sauce we use to grab ginger-haired TRAITORS!

      You know how CNN & MSM will report this, if they bother reporting it at all. The needle won't move; nothing will change. Not only is this not victory, it isn't even justice because justice would have put a few Mueller gangsters in the pokey, at least for a night or two.

      And what is this I'm hearing about John Solomon saying not to expect prosecutions in response to the Durham investigation? Huh?

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  3. I like "Undercover Huber's" take on this:

    >>Undercover Huber
    @JohnWHuber
    The lesson: don’t bring what is really a counterintelligence case best fought in the dark by the IC against Russia into the public legal system to be ham-fistedly prosecuted by DOJ just for the sake of some weak-ass “narrative” to helps rogue prosecutors indirectly attack Trump<<

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  4. The US Justice Department should apologize publicly to Concord Management and should compensate all of Concord Management's legal expenses.

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  5. Nobody should ever forget Rod Rosenstain's facilitation of, and full complicity therewith, in ALL of these phony Russia charges. I recall his glee in making his press announcement only a few days prior to Trump's summit with Putin in Helsinski. He's a disgrace whose participation in the Russia Hoax needs full exposure.

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  6. "They got out of these indictments what they needed back when it actually mattered"

    Exactly my opinion as well. Just so everybody could go around saying "but those 31 indictments (or whatever the number was)".

    I'm wondering if Trump would declass the details of this case, so everyone could see what a load of BS it was?

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    1. Speaking of declassification, whatever happened to that sharp little roadster? I remember Trump passed the reins over to AG Barr and Barr..Bueller? Bueller?

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  7. $40 million dollars later, lives destroyed, the country at each other's throats, Mueller declares victory and goes home to live the good life.

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  8. I agree with Titan 28 above. The ChiCom flu (or Xivirus) is a god send for the treason plotters. I expect lots of loose ends to be dropped/tucked away and memory-holed as quietly as possible while attention is focused elsewhere.

    "This was perhaps the biggest shell game operation, with a non-existent pea...."

    And this was no doubt apparent to Judge Friedrich the very first day. Will she be sanctioned for obviously willing participation in a conspiracy to hijack the Republic? Almost certainly not. There may not be "Obama judges" but there definitely are Deep State and Never-Trump judges. Yet another nail in the coffin of Public Trust of the judiciary.

    Another question just popped into my head. Why is a defendant retracting a plea greeted with such wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of a judge, yet a prosecutor can get a dismissal (after bankrupting the accused), using an excuse that would have been obvious to a secretary before they finished typing the first sentence of the charge, and gets zero blowback about wasted time and public funds, much less destroying someone's life/reputation.
    Tom S.

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