Zuckerberg: Facebook contacted by Mueller probe

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed Tuesday that his company has been contacted by special counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Media reports earlier this year disclosed that Mueller's team had interviewed at least one Facebook employee, and Mueller subsequently secured an indictment of alleged Russian trolls in part based on their activity on the social media network. But Zuckerberg's testimony in today's Senate hearing was the first time Facebook has confirmed the information.


Zuckerberg at first said "yes" when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) asked if Mueller's office had served subpoenas on the company. But then the CEO added: "I want to clarify that I actually am not aware of a subpoena. I think there may be, but I know we’re working with them."

Asked if he himself had spoken to Mueller's team, Zuckerberg said: "I have not."

He went on: "I want to be careful here because that — our work with the special counsel is confidential, and I want to make sure in an open session I’m not revealing something that’s confidential."

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On another question relevant to Mueller's probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Zuckerberg told Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that he didn't know whether any of the user data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica were ever stored on servers in Russia.

"I don’t have any specific knowledge that would suggest that," he said. "But one of the specific steps that we need to take now is go do a full audit of all of Cambridge Analytica’s systems to understand what they’re doing, whether they still have any data, to make sure that they remove all the data. If they don’t we’re going to take legal action against them to do so."

He said that for now, Facebook has "temporarily ceded that in order to let the U.K. government complete their government investigation first."

Klobuchar also asked if there was overlap between the Facebook users whose data Cambridge Analytica harvested and the users who saw ads purchased by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that Mueller's prosecutors accused of spreading misinformation during the campaign.

"We're investigating that now," Zuckerberg said. "We believe that it is entirely possible that there will be a connection there."

Eric Geller contributed to this report.

