Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russia’s impact on the 2016 election entered a new phase Friday, as his team indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations for their “conspiracy” to illegally influence the US presidential campaign.

It was an indictment unprecedented in American history—a direct and public charge that America’s main foreign adversary meddled extensively, expensively, and expansively in the core of the American democratic process, attempting to influence voters, spread disparaging information about the Democratic nominee, and “help” presidential candidate Donald Trump take office.

The new charges were simultaneously unveiled by Mueller and expanded upon in rare public remarks by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who oversees Mueller’s investigation. It's the first time that Mueller, who previously charged or received guilty pleas from four Trump aides, has brought criminal charges that deal with the core of his mission, to investigate Russia’s influence in the most recent presidential campaign.

"The indictment alleges that the Russian conspirators want to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy," Rosenstein said in his prepared remarks. "We must not allow them to succeed."

A Historic Indictment

While earlier indictments and charges have pointed to individual meetings and mysterious contacts between the Trump campaign and various Russian nationals, Friday’s surprise indictment—another political bombshell in an investigation that has at every step surprised the public—is the first to directly link the activities around the campaign to a large, sophisticated operation directed and funded directly from Russia itself that involved social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and involved fake accounts like @TEN_GOP, aka “Tennessee GOP.”

Those charged involve a cadre of so-called “specialists” and “translators” who worked on the Russian campaign efforts, as well as a much more notable name: Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a wealthy Russian oligarch who is close to President Vladimir Putin and is known as “Putin’s cook,” for his history of running a fast-food stand. Prigozhin, who is alleged in the indictment to have overseen the operations, was long known to have been involved in the election efforts; he and some of the companies indicted by Mueller were part of the December 2016 sanctions levied by President Obama.

Mueller’s 37-page indictment—impressive for the sheer level of detail that the special counsel and US intelligence agencies appear to have collected as part of the wide-ranging counterintelligence investigation—paints a picture of an online campaign that dates back at least to 2014 and extends right through the election itself, an effort that involved the spreading of fake news and the careful curation of online identities that purported to be politically active Americans.

"Russian conspirators want to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy. We must not allow them to succeed." Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein

While the indictments do not directly point to any knowing involvement of the Trump campaign, they do cite unwitting campaign contacts with the Russians and begin to put hard numbers to the size and staggering scale—including a monthly budget of more than $1.2 million, “hundreds” of employees, and undercover travel to the United States—of Russia’s attempts to use “information operations” to aid Trump and disparage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting some of the most famous hashtags of the election, like #Trump2016, #MAGA and #Hillary4Prison, as well as paid political advertisements featuring phrases like “Vote Republican, vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment.”

The indictment marks the first public sign of an as yet hidden avenue of Mueller’s investigation—the “information operations” conducted by the notorious troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg—and a sign that Mueller aims to investigate the full breadth of Russian activities surrounding the campaign.

The indictment says that some of the involved Russians traveled to the United States “under false pretenses for the purposes of collecting intelligence,” built an extensive infrastructure of computer systems inside the United States to help obscure their activities, and focused their activities on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia & Florida.” Their efforts include the establishment of fake—and real, stolen—identities that included Paypal accounts and fake drivers’ licenses. On Friday, Mueller's team also filed an indictment for Richard Pinedo, an American who has pleaded guilty to identity theft and selling bank account numbers opened under those names.

The Troll Factory

Much of the indictment focuses on the mysterious IRA, located at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg. IRA employees were allegedly tasked with writing social media posts on divisive political issues, focusing especially on creating “political intensity through supporting radical groups.” According to the indictment, they created pages on Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms to spread content around issues like immigration and religion; a group called Blacktivist, which had previously been linked to Russia, garnered at least 360,000 likes on Facebook for its Black Lives Matter posts before being outed.