Special counsel Robert Mueller just indicted 13 Russians and three Russian companies for allegedly mounting a sophisticated and wide-ranging effort to help Donald Trump win the White House.
The 37-page document outlining the charges is potentially good news for the White House all the same.
That’s because the indictment explicitly states that the Russians were posing as Americans when they communicated with “unwitting” members of the Trump campaign. In other words, as far as this indictment is concerned, nobody on the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with the Russians who were just indicted.
And what the indictment doesn’t say is also good for Trump: It doesn’t say this operation was directed, funded, or carried out by the Russian government or Vladimir Putin himself, and it doesn’t say the interference had any effect on the outcome of the 2016 election.
That helps bolster the core arguments Trump and his allies have been making for months: that there was no collusion, and that Russian meddling isn’t what got Trump elected. And indeed, shortly after the indictments were announced, the president tweeted: “The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!”
But it’s not all roses for Trump. The indictment outlines a vast conspiracy by Russian operatives to help Trump win the election, involving thousands of fake social media accounts and numerous staged pro-Trump rallies in multiple states across the country.
The sheer magnitude of the document — which outlines the movements and activities of 13 separate individuals and three businesses in minute detail — also shows for the first time just how much investigative muscle the Mueller probe really has. So if there is anything to find on Trump or his associates, Mueller almost certainly has the ability to find it.
Those are the biggest revelations in the indictment, but there are several other interesting and surprising takeaways from it. Here they are:
- The Russians didn’t just support Trump and try to denigrate Hillary Clinton — they also supported Bernie Sanders (ostensibly as a way to further thwart Clinton). The indictment says the operatives were told to “use any opportunity to criticise Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them).”
- They tried to encourage black voters in particular to support Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
- The Russians worked to smear other Trump opponents, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
- The Russians organized rallies against Trump just to sow political discord in the country. In fact, they held two rallies in New York — one “show your support for President-Elect Donald Trump” and the other “Trump is NOT my president” — on the same day.
- The Russian operatives recruited and paid actual Americans to “engage in political activities, promote political campaigns, and stage political rallies” — but, again, the indictment makes clear that these Americans did not know that they were communicating with Russians. They thought they were just grassroots activists from the US.
- The Russians were told to gin up “political intensity” in the US by “supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation and oppositional social movements.” To do so, they created social media pages on Facebook and Instagram around issues including immigration, religion (particularly Islam), and the Black Lives Matter movement.
- The operatives purchased ads on Facebook to promote allegations of voter fraud by Clinton and the Democrats.
None of the Russians in Mueller’s crosshairs are likely ever to see the inside of an American courtroom. That means the new indictment will stand, at least for now, as the federal government’s most detailed public description of just how far some Russians were willing to go to help Trump win the presidency — and of the kinds of tactics they could use to meddle in this fall’s midterm elections as well.