Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

In a densely detailed and staggeringly specific indictment, a federal grand jury guided by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III threw the book today at 12 members of the GRU—the Russian military intelligence agency—charging them with cybercrimes and attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The named defendants include Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, and Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, but the scope and sweep of the crimes described—the hacking of emails and computers; the infiltration of U.S. election infrastructure; and the distribution of stolen electronic information—and the fact that the multifaceted operation was run by the GRU dispel the idea that its principals could have been rogue elements. The scheme had to have been officially approved and ordered by former KGB director Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, to use his patronymic, who goes diplomatically unmentioned in the indictment.

These new hacking charges, combined with the February indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian organizations with the malicious use of social media to meddle with the U.S. election process, flatten President Donald Trump’s insistence that Mueller is leading a witch hunt. Real witches working out of Russia, it seems, abound. According to the indictment, Russian military officers purchased computer infrastructure with bitcoin and proceeded to hack the computers of U.S. politicians, implanting “X-agent” malware on the computer networks at the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Having liberated emails and documents, the Russian officers disseminated the hacked materials using invented personas, such as DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0.


While detailed and specific, the indictment is filled with masked references to people and an organization whose identities are well known and could well be named in a future indictment or court proceeding. For example, one primary outlet for Guccifer 2.0’s stolen trove, the indictment states, was “Organization 1.” From context, we can assume Mueller is talking about Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks group. Beginning on July 22, 2016—several days before the Democratic Party’s nominating convention—WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of DNC emails. “[S]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for use to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing,” reads one communique from Organization 1 to Guccifer 2.0 quoted in the indictment (paragraph 47).

In a Friday press conference announcing the charges, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the Russians corresponded with several Americans in their efforts to distribute the hacked materials but was not prepared to claim that any of the Americans knew they were in contact with Russian intelligence officers. According to the indictment, one “U.S. person” who communicated with Guccifer 2.0 and maintained “regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” sounds a lot like political trickster Roger Stone (paragraph 44). But Stone told CNN today it wasn’t him—although his denial seemed artfully semantic. “I don’t think it was me because I wasn’t in regular contact with members of the Trump campaign,” Stone told the network. “My contact with the campaign in 2016 was Donald Trump.” Say what? There was only one person who mattered on that campaign—and that was Trump.

Nowhere in the indictment does Mueller draw a line that connects the Russians directly to Trump, but Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum discovered a dotted line that might link the two. Paragraph 34 of the indictment states that the Russians broke into computers containing “test applications related to the DNC’s analytics” and copied them. In a tweet, Applebaum writes, “Mueller is suggesting Russians stole Clinton campaign election analytics. If they gave that to the Trump campaign, then how is that different from Nixon’s Cuban burglars breaking into Democratic campaign offices?”

Everybody and his sister filed a tweet, a short paragraph or a whole piece today to alert us to the fact us that the indictment tells us that the Russians tried for the first time to spearphish Hillary Clinton’s emails on July 27, 2016. That’s the very day that candidate Trump asked them to do so at a press conference. “I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” Without arriving at a definative conclusion, the Atlantic’s David A. Graham takes the best shot at unscrambling the reality omelet and figuring out whether coincidence or Trump’s suggestions prompted the Russians’ timing. “Trump had good reason to believe that Russia was listening,” Graham writes. “The previous month, his son, Donald Jr.; son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians who they believed were offering damaging information about Clinton.”

The official White House response to the charges of the indictment was as evasive as Stone’s was semantic. Instead of condemning Russian attempts to futz with the U.S. election (a point made by Washington Post reporter Shane Harris) and warning Putin to back off, the White House wrapped itself in a defense coil. “Today’s charges include no allegations of knowing involvement by anyone on the campaign and no allegations that the alleged hacking affected the election result,” White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said. “This is consistent with what we have been saying all along.” Left unmentioned are the numerous occasions when Trump ridiculed the notion that Russia had played a role in the DNC hack.

If Putin approved the plan to disrupt the U.S. elections, why wasn’t he indicted as well? Yahoo investigative reporter Michael Isikoff put this notion to Steve Hall, a former CIA Moscow station chief and the CIA Russian operations head under President Barack Obama. “There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin is the intellectual author of this,” Hall told Isikoff. “So remind me again who President Trump is sitting down with on Monday?” Hall went on to suggest that when Trump sits down with Putin in Helsinki, he should ask the Russian president to ship the newly indicted officers to the United States for trial.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. At the beginning of his administration, Trump declined to second the intelligence community’s appraisal that the Russians had interfered in our election. He passed again on scolding the Russians when Mueller brought charges against them for using social media to undermine the political process of 2016. Today, Trump passed once more on rebuking the Russians for sullying our election and political apparatuses after given ample proof by investigators that such defilement took place. If I had to guess what the two men will talk about when they sit down for their one-on-one, my bet is that Trump will apologize for Mueller smearing Putin’s reputation. And then he’ll give him a pardon.

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Don’t send spearphishing attempts to [email protected]. My email alerts were hacked by the Russkies decades ago. My Twitter feed is beset with malware. My RSS feed says, “Extradite me, if you think you can.”

