Especially, maybe, for those of us who read most of the Mueller Report and are aware of how much the Russians did to interfere with/influence our 2016 election.
Well, it was much, much, much more than what was cited in the Mueller Report.
The opening paragraph:
An indictment was unsealed today in Tampa, Florida, charging a Russian national, working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), with allegedly orchestrating a years-long foreign malign influence campaign that used various U.S. political groups to sow discord, spread pro-Russian propaganda, and interfere in elections within the United States.
The firecrackers in this indictment are the number of US political groups, and individual leaders of those groups, who knowingly participated in Ionov’s (that’s the guy’s name) schemes and took his money to engineer those schemes. Here’s a quote:
“As court documents show, Ionov allegedly orchestrated a brazen influence campaign, turning U.S. political groups and U.S. citizens into instruments of the Russian government,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
That is, US citizens. Political sorts, even politicians. They are not (currently) named but oh boy will all sorts of independent investigators be digging now through their times lines and files to uncover these names — and the party affiliation.
You must read this straightforward release for the full gut-punch: what you suspected about individual pols and their organizations is true, but goes even deeper than you thought.
One cited overtly racist venture involved targeting Black voters in a plot to turn them against the country and deny the Democratic Party their votes. I distinctly and with revulsion remember this plot as cited in the Mueller Report.
And here I was, wondering whether I should do a short thing about how far back and how deep into Mueller Report territory the DOJ will be going in order fully to investigate and prosecute everyone involved in Jan 6. It’s sedition, to be sure, but now maybe treason.