U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller warned that Russian intelligence services have active “interference operations” in the U.S. and asked a judge to limit the pretrial evidence provided to a Russian firm indicted over meddling in the 2016 election.
Mueller asked a federal judge in Washington for an order that would protect the handover of voluminous evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting LLC, one of three companies and 13 Russian nationals charged in a February indictment. They are accused of producing propaganda, posing as U.S. activists and posting political content on social media as so-called trolls to encourage strife in the U.S.
The threat of public or unauthorized disclosure of evidence would help foreign intelligence services, particularly in Russia, in “future operations against the United States,” Mueller’s prosecutors wrote in a filing Tuesday.