It’s now clear that the Russian government will face no significant consequences for its unprecedented interference in the American political system in 2016, or at least none that will outweigh the tangible and intangible benefits it has reaped from its brazen attack on this country’s democracy.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller unsealed an indictment on Friday against twelve Russian agents for conspiring to commit cyberattacks targeting Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the most recent presidential election. The new court filing offers a broad, detailed account of how a hostile foreign government undermined American democracy. President Donald Trump’s first and only reaction to the news was defensive and self-serving.



“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 spokesperson Lindsay Walters said in a statement. “This is consistent with what we have been saying all along.” The White House did not even bother to condemn Russia’s actions.



Paul Manafort’s legal woes and Michael Flynn’s guilty plea show that Mueller can hold people accountable when they’re under American jurisdiction. This time, however, the special counsel’s indictment is somewhat toothless. Moscow will never extradite its own operatives. It’s virtually certain that the military intelligence officers named in the court filing will never appear before American judges and juries. And as long as they avoid travel to a country that would do so, federal prosecutors won’t be able to touch them.

Friday’s indictment is significant nonetheless for what it describes. In 29 pages of bloodless prosecutorial language, Mueller sketches out a concerted and methodical effort to corrupt the American democratic process. “The object of the conspiracy was to hack into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” the filing says.