ANONYMOUS USE OF THE INTERNET AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH ON TRIAL

SOME OF THE ENTITIES INDICTED BY MUELLER NEVER EXISTED.

AN ENTIRE COMPANY THAT HE INDICTED WASN'T EVEN IN EXISTENCE DURING THE CAMPAIGN.

WHAT HE CLAIMS WERE RUSSIANS COULD HAVE BEEN ANYONE WHO CHOOSES TO USE A PSEUDONYM ON THE INTERNET.

THE MILLION-PLUS PAGES OF HIS EVIDENCE ARE WRITTEN IN RUSSIAN, UNTRANSLATED TO THIS DAY. 

In 2007, Russian was the primary spoken language of 851,174 Americans at home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In fact, the Russian American population is estimated at approximately 2.9 million people and is the second largest ethnic market of the total foreign-born population of 28.4 million.

WHAT IF IT WAS SOME OF THOSE VERY RUSSIAN-AMERICANS WHO WERE DECIDEDLY REPUBLICANS, WHO WERE DOING WHAT MILLIONS OF CITIZENS WERE DOING, SIMPLY TRYING TO GET THOSE RUNNING ON A GOP TICKET ELECTED?


ACCORDING TO THE MUELLER TEAM'S STATEMENTS IN COURT, INTERNET ANONYMITY IS SEEN AS A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY, SINCE THEY CLAIM TO HAVE UNMASKED THOSE 'RUSSIANS' WHO WENT 'PHISHING' TO GARNER VOTES FOR TRUMP BY MEANS OF ANONYMOUS ACCOUNTS.


BUT THIS GOES FURTHER BACK THAN 2016.
ANONYMITY HAS BEEN UNDER SERIOUS ATTACK FOR OVER A DECADE; IT JUST HADN'T BEEN INDICTED YET.

Anonymity on the Internet Must be Protected


Is Anonymous a threat to national security, or just trolling? - The Verge


BBC - Future - The reasons you can't be anonymous anymore


Anonymity in America: Does National Security Preclude It


EVEN WITH ALL THOSE CHARGES/ACCUSATIONS, WHAT MUELLER'S TEAM REFUSES TO ACKNOWLEDGE EVERY DAY IS THE FACT THAT HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE, THAT, IF THERE WAS NO ELECTORAL COLLEGE, SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN 'QUEEN'.

HILLARY WON, AND WHAT THOSE "RUSSIAN" INTERNET ACCOUNTS DID WAS NO
WORSE THAN WHAT ANY AMERICAN WHO USES SOCIAL MEDIA BY PSEUDONYM DID TO TRY TO GARNER VOTES FOR "THEIR CANDIDATE".

SO, WHO IS MUELLER REALLY AFTER?
ANONYMOUS INTERNET USERS, USING FREEDOM OF SPEECH TO SAY WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANT TO SAY ON SOCIAL MEDIA, WITHOUT VIOLATING TERMS OF SERVICE, OF COURSE.

The heart of the Defense argument is that the indictment doesn't charge a crime.

"It charges conspiring to interfere with an election... There is no statute of interfering with an election."

U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich is expressing doubts about Mr. Mueller’s unique prosecutorial adventure, though she is not saying she will dismiss the charges, as Mr. Dubelier has requested.

The indictment is one of two against Russian entities that together stand as Mr. Mueller’s showcase prosecution in the Justice Department’s 27-month investigation into supposed Trump-Russia collusion. He has yet to charge a Trump associate with election interference.

A review of the transcript of an Oct. 15 hearing shows the judge’s reservations.

She said of Mr. Mueller’s team, “They’ve got a heavy burden at trial to prove that knowledge.” She was referring to awareness that Concord knowingly defrauded the Federal Election Commission, the Justice Department and the State Department.

“And I agree, at trial, if this case survives, they’re going to have to show that Concord and others conspired and had the specific intent to defraud,” Judge Friedrich said.
“I will give you, Mr. Dubelier, this is an unprecedented case, for sure,” the judge said.

The attorney had argued that there is no specific federal law against interfering in a U.S. election. He said there are no previous prosecutions on defrauding the FEC by using fake social media personas.

ADD TO THE ABOVE, THAT THERE EXISTS NO STATUTE FOR THE ALLEGED CHARGE, THE FACT THAT ONE OF THE COMPANIES INDICTED BY MUELLER DID NOT EVEN EXIST WHEN THE ALLEGED "ELECTION INTERFERENCE" TOOK PLACE!

SOME OF THE "RUSSIAN INDIVIDUALS" NAMED IN THE INDICTMENT NEVER REALLY EXISTED, ARE PSEUDONYMS USED BY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS.

THESE ACCOUNTS COULD HAVE BELONGED TO ANYONE, INCLUDING THE CIA, NSA, FBI, ANYONE.
HOW WOULD MUELLER EVER BE ABLE TO PROVE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, LET ALONE A FEDERAL COURT, WHO WAS BEHIND THOSE FAKE ACCOUNTS?

HE WANTS US TO TRUST HIM?

YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP, FOLKS!

The reason the Concord Management attorneys called the case a ‘proverbial ham sandwich’ was because one of the entities indicted by the Mueller team, Concord Catering, was not even in existence at the time the crimes were alleged to have taken place.

AS REPORTED BY THE WASHINGTON POST:

Head attorney for the Russian defendant, Eric A. Dubelier of the Washington D.C. based Reed Smith law firm, stated, “If they show me that they did exist, then we would probably represent them also.”

The Redd Smith firm represents Concord’s founder, Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, a Russian businessman nicknamed “Putin’s chef” because of his close ties to President Vladi­mir Putin.

The request [made by defense attorneys], prosecutors have said, included asking for identities of online platforms discovered by federal investigators and any related, charged or uncharged individuals; names of potential witnesses; any statements, recordings or surveillance of Concord employees; and any instances since 1945 in which the U.S. government interfered with elections or political processes of other countries.

ACCORDING TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, THAT LIST OF AMERICA MEDDLING IN FOREIGN ELECTIONS WILL BE A VERY LONG ONE!

AFTER ALL, AMERICA TAUGHT THE WHOLE WORLD HOW IT'S DONE.

“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”

Loch K. Johnson, the dean of American intelligence scholars, who began his career in the 1970s investigating the C.I.A. as a staff member of the Senate’s Church Committee, says Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades, whenever American officials were worried about a foreign vote.

“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,” said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”

A Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record for both overt and covert election influence operations. He found 81 by the United States and 36 by the Soviet Union or Russia between 1946 and 2000.

Mr. Levin said. “...the methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by the United States and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or disinformation to newspapers.”

His findings underscore how routine election meddling by the United States — sometimes covert and sometimes quite open — has been.

The precedent was established in Italy with assistance to non-Communist candidates from the late 1940s to the 1960s. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their expenses,” said F. Mark Wyatt, a former C.I.A. officer, in a 1996 interview.

Covert propaganda has also been a mainstay. Richard M. Bissell Jr., who ran the agency’s operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote casually in his autobiography of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.”

A self-congratulatory declassified report on the C.I.A.’s work in Chile’s 1964 election boasts of the “hard work” the agency did supplying “large sums” to its favored candidate and portraying him as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.”

The United States’ departure from democratic ideals sometimes went much further. The C.I.A. helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

This broader history of election meddling has largely been missing from the flood of reporting on the Russian intervention and the investigation of whether the Trump campaign was involved.

The testy exchanges came in the first response to the special counsel’s allegations that the Concord firms financed — and Prigozhin approved and controlled — the operations of a third corporate defendant, the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg. Prosecutors contend IRA served as the hub of the ambitious conspiracy and fraud to trick Americans online into following and promoting Russian-fed political propaganda about the campaign.

LET THIS FACT SINK IN:

SOME OF THE 'RUSSIAN INDIVIDUALS' NAMED BY MUELLER DID NOT/DO NOT NOW EXIST.

THE NAMES WERE ATTACHED TO SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS....SOCIAL MEDIA, WHERE HARDLY ANYONE IS WHO THEY CLAIM TO BE, WHERE PSEUDONYMS ARE MORE COMMON THAN BLUE SKIES ON A CLOUDLESS DAY.

MUELLER EXPECTS AMERICANS TO AGREE THAT THEY ARE SO STUPID, SO COMPLETELY DUMBED-DOWN, SO HOPELESSLY GULLIBLE THAT SOMETHING THEY READ ON SOCIAL MEDIA WOULD CAUSE THEM TO CHANGE THEIR VOTE IN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

IT GETS EVEN CRAZIER AS ONE READS THE ACTUAL TRANSCRIPTS OF THIS LAUGHABLE, ENDLESS CASE.

THE 'RUSSIANS' SHOW UP...SORT OF  

Lawyers defending one of three Russian companies indicted with the 13 Russians, Concord Management, showed up for court, something Mueller probably never dreamed might happen.

Mueller’s team was caught off guard because they never expected this.

They immediately asked the judge for more time but the judge denied their pleas noting that they were the ones who indicted the Russian company in the first place.

As the case proceeded, the Concord attorneys noted that another of the three companies indicted by Mueller was not in existence at the time of Mueller’s indictment. They called this a case of Mueller indicting the proverbial ‘ham sandwich’.

At a subsequent court appearance, the attorneys representing Concord stated that the corrupt Mueller team’s allegations of 13 Russian individuals impacting the 2016 election were “made up” nonsense.

The individuals were not even real.

The Mueller team had tried to align these individuals with Concord Management.

Concord Management’s lawyers revealed that Mueller’s team had ignored over 70 discovery requests they had made for information in the case. In response Mueller’s team offered to give Concord Management’s lawyers a massive amount of social media data from those dangerous trolls who sought to influence the US election and the majority of the data was in RUSSIAN.

Mueller’s team INITIALLY offered to give Concord Management’s lawyers a massive amount of social media data from those 'dangerous trolls' who sought to influence the US election, stating that the majority of it is in RUSSIAN.

When the defense attorneys asked for that to be turned over, SUDDENLY the Mueller team decided that they wouldn't hand over the alleged "proof", citing "national security issues", BUT they admitted they themselves" have NOT translated all those million-plus pages, so the question now becomes, HOW THE HELL DO THEY KNOW THEY HAVE PROOF OF ANYTHING IN THOSE DOCUMENTS?

PLEASE READ THIS AGAIN: Mueller’s lawyers don’t have English translations to the Russian social media posts but we’re supposed to believe we were influenced by these posts MADE IN RUSSIAN?

May 166 2018, Politico reported:

"The contentious but brief court session was the first hearing in the case before Judge Dabney Friedrich.

The fireworks at [the May 16, 2018] hearing came after one of those defense lawyers, Eric Dubelier, complained to Friedrich that the government hadn’t responded to or even acknowledged more than 70 discovery requests he made last month.
Instead, prosecutors have offered a massive quantity of social media data from accounts that were allegedly set up under fake identities for the purpose of influencing American politics.

“There are a lot of defendants in this case,” Dubelier told the court on Wednesday. “It appears we’re the only one that is going to show up.”

“We had a very brief call on Friday initiated by the government,” Dubelier said.
He said prosecutors told him much of the information was in Russian, but they had no translations. “I said, ‘How do you know what’s in it?’”

“I anticipate we are going to get this massive dump of social media accounts in Russian. This is an American court,” the defense attorney added. “That’s not what we’ve asked for. What I’d like to get is information that actually helps us defend our client.”

Prosecutor Jeannie Rhee disputed that prosecutors were being recalcitrant.

Asked by Friedrich whether the case would involve classified information, Rhee replied, “We would hope not, Your Honor.” However, she said some of the materials have “national security sensitivity.”

Friedrich set another hearing in the case for June 15.
THINGS ARE STILL DRAGGING ON AND ON AS MUELLER HUSTLES TO GET WHAT HE WANTS.

The flimsiness of the cases against all the Russians is underscored in this one case Mueller is being forced to prosecute.

Almost immediately, it became clear that Mueller’s 'crack team' (or is it 'Mueller's team on crack'?) was not ready for prime time.

Concord Management’s legal team was back in court October 15 2018, and the hearing didn’t go well for the government...again.

The judge asked some very pointed questions about how the government intended to prove the case. But it wasn’t apparent just how bad the hearing went for Team Mueller until the transcript of the hearing became available.

OCTOBER 'SURPRISES' 
The Defense hits at the Special Counsel.
The Special Counsel didn't have the evidence, so they "make up a new crime that has never been charged in the history of the United States"
"The real Department of Justice" never would have brought these charges.

SO, IF YOU NEED A CHARGE MAKE ONE UP?
AS THE SAYING GOES, 'NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION' RIGHT?
If the judge lets this insanity fly, it opens the floodgates for millions of Americans to be prosecuted for the same thing Mueller is trying to prosecute imaginary Russians for!

October 23 2018:
MR. DUBELIER: So if that's the theory of liability here, what that means is that if two or more people whether they're Americans or foreign people, pretend to be someone they are not on social media and the government wants to, they can indict you for a 371 violation later. All they would have to say is it was important to the government to know your true identity for some reason or another.

DUBELIER THEN ASKS:

The Special Counsel lawyer appears.

Court (Judge): Don't you need to show they had a legal duty to report w/ the FEC to proceed with a conspiracy charge?

Special Counsel: No.

THE COURT: It's hard to see how revealing identities at political rallies and not revealing identities on social media, how that is evidence of intent to interfere with a U.S. government function as opposed to to confuse voters.

[Note: this means they can be charged even if their conduct and goals were legal]

The Defense got back up, hitting the Special Counsel for interpreting the law so broadly that such charges could turn EVERY anonymous internet users into criminals.

"The supervisors from the Dept of Justice ought to be over here listening to this argument, because this argument is beyond belief"

"They want to be able to regulate what people say on the internet" by removing anonymity.

THERE YOU HAVE IT, GENTLE READERS.
ACCORDING TO THE SPECIAL COUNSEL WE WHO USE PSEUDONYMS ON THE INTERNET, WHO WISH TO BE 'ANONYMOUS' ARE ALL GUILTY OF CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

According to the SC argument, WE are all guilty of conspiracy.

ALL IS QUIET FOR NOW, BECAUSE MUELLER BOUGHT A LITTLE TIME, BUT WHY WOULD HE NEED TIME?

THIS HAS DRAGGED ON FOR A YEAR NOW!
MAYBE HE'S DIGGING UP DIRT ON THE DEFENSE TEAM, THE JUDGE, FIND SOMETHING TO MAKE THEM BACK OFF AND LET HIM PRETEND HE HAS A CASE?

27 Dec 2018
Update: DOJ requests a 30-day extension to review ~3,000 pages of documents. Lots of sealed docs. "the Government will attempt to reach an agreement with the Applicant regarding certain or all of the documents at issue". 

Agreement? We want everything.

New deadline of 1/28/19.

Team Mueller is on the ropes.
Even Mueller-friendly sources seem to think the case is in trouble.
This is from Talking Points Memo:
"The issue is a complicated point of criminal law, but it could jeopardize the only count in the indictment that implicates Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin. Concord Management, along with Prigozhin and his other company Concord Catering, are alleged to have funded the internet trolling effort, and have been charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Unlike Concord Management, Prigozhin has not submitted to the court’s jurisdiction and is not actively defending the case.

In a troubling sign for Mueller, Friedrich on Thursday evening ordered prosecutors to file more briefings on the conspiracy to defraud the United States count. The judge’s order came after a hearing Monday, where she grilled prosecutors on what they would need to prove in court.

“If Congress wanted to prohibit any foreign involvement in an election, they could do it, but they didn’t do that,” Concord Management’s attorney Eric Dubelier said at a hearing Monday. “They carved out what you can’t do. They never said to foreign people you can’t talk and say what you want to say about a political candidate in the United States.”

Dabney, in her order Thursday night (OCT.24,, 2018), is now asking for prosecutors to square their arguments during the hearing with what’s alleged in the indictment.
She specifically pointed to lines in the indictment about defendants’ alleged failure to report their lobbying to the Justice Department or their expenditures to the FEC. She also noted the case law prosecutors cited that she said, in doing so, showed them conceding that they have to show that the defendants had a duty to report.

“Should the Court assume for purposes of this motion that neither Concord nor its co-conspirators had any legal duty to report expenditures or to register as a foreign agent?” Friedrich asked in the order. “Specifically, should the Court assume for purposes of this motion that neither Concord nor its co-conspirators knowingly or unknowingly violated any provision, civil or criminal, of FECA or FARA by failing to report expenditures or by failing to register as a foreign agent?”

If the conspiracy charge that Concord Management is attacking is thrown out, other charges in the indictment will stand against other Russian individuals and companies.

The Internet Research Agency — the organization that according to Mueller, employed the social media trolls — was charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, as were two individual Russians. Internet Research Agency along with four Russian individuals, have also been charged with aggravated identity theft.

What the Judge is saying is that, as things stand, the conduct listed in the indictment simply doesn’t add up to a violation of the laws alleged in that indictment.

NOTHING ADDS UP, NOTHING EVER DID.





____________________________________

Sources not cited above:


18 U.S. Code Chapter 29 - ELECTIONS AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES



THIS SITE SIMPLY BECAUSE IT COLLECTED ALL THOSE TRANSCRIPTS IN ONE PLACE.
THE TEA ROOM IS OF NO POLITICAL AFFILIATION, LOATHING ALL POLITICAL PARTIES AND POLITICIANS EQUALLY.



THIS TWITTER  SITE BECAUSE WHOEVER GATHERED AND POSTED ALL THAT NEEDS CREDIT.






//WW