In some ways, special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for their hacking and attack on the 2016 presidential election is Mueller’s least surprising move yet—but it might also be his single most significant.

News that paid employees of the Russian government—military intelligence officers, no less—interfered and sought to influence the 2016 presidential election, coming just days before the victor of that election will meet Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, amounts to nothing less than an international geopolitical bombshell.

Blow by Blow

The new charges, which come in an 11-count, 29-page indictment, lays out Russia's alleged efforts in the excruciating detail and specificity that has become the Mueller investigative team's hallmark. They also undermine President Trump’s long-running efforts to obfuscate whether the US could determine who was behind the attacks. He’s previously speculated that it could be “some guy in his home in New Jersey,” and said, “I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?”

While some of the details had previously been laid out in a DNC lawsuit, Friday’s blockbuster indictment is the first official blow-by-blow from the US government. It makes clear the attack was coordinated and run by the Russian military, the hacking team commonly known by the moniker Fancy Bear, which Mueller’s indictment names publicly for the first time as two specific units of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff—known by the acronym GRU—that are called Unit 26165 and Unit 74455. (The hackers got their public Fancy Bear moniker from the security firm Crowdstrike, which spotted the phrase “Sofacy” in some of the unit’s malware, reminding analysts of Iggy Azalea’s song “Fancy.”)

The same unit, according to public reports, has been involved in attacks on French president Emmanuel Macron, NATO, the German Parliament, Georgia, and other government targets across Europe.

Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein announced the charges at a noon press conference Friday, following a tradition that has seen Mueller’s indictments handed down on Fridays, and breaking what had been more than four months of silence since Mueller’s last set of new charges.

As the Justice Department said, “These GRU officers, in their official capacities, engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and released that information on the internet under the names ‘DCLeaks’ and ‘Guccifer 2.0’ and through another entity.”

Not only was it the GRU, the Justice Department said, but it was at least 12 specific, identified intelligence officers: Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, and Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev.

'Our response must not depend on who was victimized.' Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein

Mueller’s indictment, returned this morning by a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, focuses on two distinct efforts by the GRU: First, the hacking of the DNC, the DCCC, and the attack on Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff that famously included the theft and leaking of campaign chair John Podesta’s risotto recipe; second, the hacking of a state election board and theft of a half-million voters’ information, as well as related efforts to target an election software company and state and local election officials.

Each of Mueller’s indictments, as they have come down, have demonstrated the incredible wealth of knowledge amassed by US intelligence and his team of investigators, and Friday was no exception. The indictment includes the specific allegations that between 4:19 and 4:56 pm on June 15, 2016, the defendants used their Moscow-based server to search for the same English words and phrases that Guccifer 2.0 used in “his” first blog post, where “he” claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker and claimed to be solely responsible for the attacks on Democratic targets.