Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:09 PM, for 10h 02m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred fifteenth day.
On this day in 1905, professional baseball arrives for five Wisconsin cities with the formation of the Wisconsin State League.
Recommended for reading in full:
Natasha Bertrand writes Russia Is Attacking the U.S. System From Within:
Last year, I detailed how Russia has figured out how to use the U.S. immigration courts and so-called “Red Notices” issued by Interpol to harass and even detain its enemies. But it doesn’t end there. Experts say Kremlin proxies have targeted their rivals and other disfavored individuals by exploiting U.S. courts to pursue bogus claims via “superficially legitimate lawsuits,” Anders Aslund, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in a recent report.
When Mueller indicted Concord Management and Consulting in February 2018, along with two other corporate entities and 13 Russian nationals allegedly connected to the Internet Research Agency, it seemed highly unlikely that the indictment would result in a trial because Russians cannot be extradited to the United States. But Concord unexpectedly hired the well-connected American law firm, Reed Smith, to fight Mueller, arguing that the charges should be dropped because the special counsel was illegally appointed. The judge in the case, Dabney Friedrich, has twice refused to dismiss the case and recently lambasted Concord’s American lawyers for submitting “unprofessional, inappropriate and ineffective” court filings, and the legal battle has raged on.
Now, according to the Mueller filing this week, unidentified actors working out of Russia appear to have weaponize[d] the U.S. discovery process to Concord’s benefit. Over 1,000 files on the website that hosted the leaked documents “match those produced in discovery,” the special counsel said. The documents were published from a computer with a Russian IP address, according to Mueller, and whoever released them clearly “had access to at least some of the non-sensitive discovery produced by the government.” But forged documents were mixed in to the trove, too, apparently in an attempt to accuse Mueller of characterizing American websites and Facebook pages like Occupy Democrats as Russian disinformation operations.
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Mueller, for his part, appears to have foreseen how the Russians connected to Concord Management (it is owned by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, often referred to as “Putin’s chef”) might try to exploit the legal process: In June 2018, he asked Judge Friedrich for a protective order that would prevent Concord’s lawyers from sharing any discovery documents with the Russians named in the troll farm indictment, as well as with other foreigners such as lawyers outside the U.S. If the data were to be distributed outside of American law firms, Mueller said, “foreign individuals may try to use that avenue as a way to obtain sensitive materials as part of an intelligence collection effort.” The hoax website aimed at discrediting his investigation largely failed, but seemed to prove Mueller’s prescience, beyond any doubt.