At a closed-door meeting on February 15, the justices are scheduled to consider what additional portions, if any, of the Supreme Court’s file on the dispute can be opened up. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images mueller investigation Mueller role confirmed in subpoena battle with mystery firm

Attorneys from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office are the prosecutors locked in a mysterious grand jury subpoena fight that a state-owned foreign company has taken all the way to the Supreme Court, court records now confirm.

A docket unsealed by the U.S. District Court in Washington shows two prosecutors from Mueller’s office, Scott Meisler and Zainab Ahmad, are handling the dispute on behalf of the special counsel.


The country and the company resisting Mueller’s demand for information have still not been publicly identified, but the district court and a federal appeals court confirmed this week that Atlanta-based Alston and Bird is representing the firm at the center of the fight.

Alston and Bird’s clients have included Russian interests including a Russian oligarch, although it’s unclear if the present fight involves a company from Russia or elsewhere.

The dispute has proceeded with unusual secrecy, including — until now — the names of the lawyers for both sides being withheld by the three different federal courts to grapple with the matter.

However, with journalists pressing for more access to the details of the fight, the district court released a docket sheet Wednesday laying out a timeline of the filings in the dispute. With no fanfare, the same court posted a slightly less redacted version of that docket online Thursday.

The new version revealed the names of Meisler and Ahmad, as well as four attorneys for the foreign company: Brian Boone, Ted Kang, Emily Costin and Karl Geercken.

On Friday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unsealed a document also naming Boone and Kang as lawyers for the company in that court. The Friday order making that document public also discloses that the opposition to unsealing the records has come from Mueller’s prosecutors, at least in recent weeks.

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Meisler is an appellate lawyer who has worked on Mueller’s prosecution of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Ahmad, who worked previously as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, is assigned to the case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Last month, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press asked the Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit to unseal more information about the legal imbroglio.

“It looks like it is the government that is resisting disclosure and that the company wanted the public to know that fact,” said Ted Boutrous, who is representing the Reporters Committee in its bid to unseal details of the case. “Absent some extraordinary order that we don’t know about, there is nothing stopping the company from revealing its identity and we are hoping it will do so now that its lawyers have gone on the record with their identity in this filing.”

Boone and Kang did not immediately reply to a request for comment Friday.

The government’s explanation of the need for some of the more extreme secrecy in the case, such as the deletion of prosecutors’ names and titles from the public record, has not been disclosed. However, in a Supreme Court filing last week, the Justice Department said it believed some more information in court filings there could be released without harming grand jury secrecy.

A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined to comment Friday, but acknowledged that Meisler and Ahmad are assigned to Mueller’s team.

POLITICO first reported last October that the court fight appeared to involve Mueller’s prosecutors. Shortly after a deadline on an appeal the firm was pursuing, a man entered the appeals court clerk’s office and said he needed a copy of the filing just submitted by the special counsel. The law firm representative refused to identify himself to a reporter who was present.

Another hint came from records showing D.C. Circuit Judge Greg Katsas — who formerly worked as deputy White House Counsel under President Donald Trump — recused himself from the dispute.

CNN has reported that it observed prosecutors from Mueller’s office emerging from Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s courtroom in September and October along with Kang and Boone. Kang’s page on the Alston and Bird website touts his involvement in Mueller-related matters.

“Representing numerous entities and individuals in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election,” the page says.

So far, the firm has failed to get much traction for its arguments that the company should be immune from the grand jury demand because the firm is effectively part of a foreign government. Both Howell and a three-judge D.C. Circuit panel rejected those arguments.

When the firm took the issue to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts briefly stayed Howell’s contempt order and the $50,000-a-day financial penalty Howell imposed for defying her order. However, the high court lifted that stay several weeks ago.

After that ruling, the two sides squared off again in front of Howell over whether she has power to enforce the financial sanction. She denied the firm’s motion to declare the order unenforceable, a docket made public this week shows.

While the Supreme Court turned down the company’s bid for emergency relief, the firm’s petition asking the justices to review the lower court rulings remains pending at the high court.

At a closed-door meeting on February 15, the justices are scheduled to consider what additional portions, if any, of the Supreme Court’s file on the dispute can be opened up.

Disclosure: Gerstein serves on a governing board of the Reporters Committee.