Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team has filed its first charges against Russians. On Friday afternoon, the Justice Department indicted 13 Russian people and 3 Russian companies, accusing them of conspiring to interfere with “US political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”
Read: Mueller’s indictment of Russians for interfering with US elections
13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities were just indicted as part of the Robert Mueller investigation.
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Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
The indictment focuses primarily on propaganda efforts of one Russian group in particular: the Internet Research Agency. The group’s operations — social media posts, online ads, and rallies in the US — were “primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump,” the indictment claims.
Importantly, the indictment does not allege that the outcome of the election was changed, and it does not allege that any Americans or anyone on the Trump campaign was aware of or involved in this Russian effort. It does allege that some of the defendants posed as US persons and “communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign.” (Mueller’s investigation has so far resulted in charges against four Trump associates on separate matters.) Read the full indictment here.
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