What Happens When You Prosecute in Public

Most governments don't prosecute Information War activities in court because it forces a country to give up too much information about sources and methods to get a conviction.  So, it should not be a surprise to anyone that when the Special Council tried to do it, too much information went straight to the public.  The Russians are going to make this as painful as possible and they have already started.

The Wall Street Journal article says "hackers obtained and leaked confidential information" that Robert Mueller linked to the disinformation campaign used in the 2016 election.  The indictment linked that case to the documents that were posted and named the Internet Research Agency and private companies in Russia to the campaign.  These were covert operations run by the Russian government and they do not like the idea of having them coming to court.  It reminded me of John Carlin's book the Dawn of the Code War.  He says sometimes law enforcement "was not always the right tool to solve a problem" which I don't think covers half of the problem here.

If you want to undermine a covert operation, you do it with another covert operation that doesn't expose some of the ways you know what Russia is doing.  In court that is going to be very obvious.  The defense always says, "It wasn't us."  You have to prove how you know it was them, and you can't use articles in the New York Times and Washington Post to prove it.  You can't interview witnesses unless Russia gives them over and you believe what they have to say.  I like Mr. Mueller a lot, but he knows there are limits to what he can get and to what those witnesses can say.  The attempt has just started to give up secrets that go deep into the sources and methods of how we know what we know about these Russian operations.

The Special Prosecutor would be better served to not be involved in things that are linked to intelligence service operations in the US and should have known better than to bring criminal charges on these kinds of operations (two others charges are made by the Justice Department against the GRU on tampering with the Anti-Doping Agency the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (“FIFA”) and other locations to find information about ongoing investigations.  The Russian agents succeeded in releasing information on 250 athletes in over 30 countries).

Russia has deniability on these cases and wants us to reveal how we knew what we knew so it can discredit those sources as soon as they are known.  They control their press and the agencies named, so they have the ability to do it.  These are Friends of Putin who were indicted.  Do we think he is willingly going to see them prosecuted?  Guess again.