Tom Fitton From Judicial Watch on Michael Flynn, Hunter Biden, Susan Rice and the Benghazi Attack, and More

Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch

This week (June 21-26 2020) Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, has so many interesting documents discussed in Tom Fitton's weekly video, I decided to put the entire post from Judicial Watch.

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Revealed: Obama Effort to ‘Evolve’ Explanation of Benghazi Attack

It’s hard to keep your story straight if you’re making it up as you go along, which was the modus operandi of Obama fabricator Ben Rhodes.

The Justice Department released 80 pages of records showing top Obama White House officials scrambling to “evolve” its false claims that the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. Government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, began “spontaneously” in response to an anti-Muslim video on the Internet.

The emails reveal top Obama White House official Ben Rhodes and Clinton State Department Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan joking about being called “liars” and “leakers.”

The records were produced in response to our 2016 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:16-cv-02046)). We filed the lawsuit after the Justice Department failed to comply with a July 7, 2016, FOIA request for records of the FBI’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure.

On September 16, 2012, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday television talk shows claiming the Benghazi attack was incited spontaneously by an anti-Muslim Internet video. The newly released records show a redacted official’s email from September 27 to then-Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and then-NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor, copying then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, saying, “What’s the plan here?” Rhodes responds:

Broader plan is IC [intelligence community] acknowledgement of an evolving assessment of what took place, which happens to be true (unlike just about everything else we’ve seen reported on Benghazi.)

Further along in the email thread, an official whose name is redacted, says, “Everyone know [sic] Susan [in her TV appearances] was using not just IC approved guidance, but IC created.”

Additionally, Rhodes says to Sullivan and other redacted officials:

At least you’re only a liar. Could be worse – we’re liars and also allegedly leakers. So you’ve got that going for you, which is something.

Sullivan replies: “We’re only lying footsoldiers [sic]. You’re lying masterminds. That’s cooler.”

A redacted official replies to Sullivan: “I prefer that we go by henchmen. Has more of a Marvel comic sinisterness to it. There should be a cable show where all the guests, and the anchor, have to wear polygraphs. Or, when there’s a dispute between source, the aggrieved parties take a poly, with some neutral third party rendering judgment. The Biggest Liar.”

Rhodes says to Sullivan: “I’d like to go on television and tell everybody what I think…. Look at it this way. I[t] could be worse. You could be a career bureaucrat whose greatest thrill in life is leaking half-truths, self-justifications and outright lies to the likes of Eli Lake, Kim Dozier, and whoever picks up the phone at Fox News.”

We previously uncovered that on September 14 Rhodes and other Obama administration officials were attempting to orchestrate a campaign to “reinforce” President Obama and to portray the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack as being “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy.” Also included were numerous emails sent during the assault on the Benghazi diplomatic facility. The contemporaneous and dramatic emails describe the assault as an “attack:”

September 11, 2012, 6:41 PM – Senior Advisor Eric Pelofsky, to Susan Rice:

As reported, the Benghazi compound came under attack and it took a bit of time for the ‘Annex’ colleagues and Libyan February 17 brigade to secure it. One of our colleagues was killed – IMO Sean Smith. Amb Chris Stevens, who was visiting Benghazi this week is missing.  U.S. and Libyan colleagues are looking for him…

At 8:51 pm, Pelofsky tells Rice and others that “Post received a call from a person using an [sic] RSO phone that Chris was given saying the caller was with a person matching Chris’s description at a hospital and that he was alive and well.  Of course, if he were alive and well, one could ask why he didn’t make the call himself.”

Later that evening, Pelofsky emailed Rice that he was “very, very worried.  In particular that he [Stevens] is either dead or this was a concerted effort to kidnap him.”  Rice replied, “God forbid.”

The new records show a December 2, 2015, communication from NASA Regional Counterintelligence Director Arthur Payton to the FBI Counterintelligence Division in which Payton returns a review of evidence obtained in the course of the FBI investigation of Clinton’s email server, specifically, a “classification and determination review.” The contents of the classification review and determination were not included among the records released.

In an April 20, 2016, memorandum from Robert Zanger, of DOJ’s Office of Records Management and Policy, to Peter Strzok memorializing an earlier request by Strzok, Zanger indicates that Strzok had requested that DOJ produce “‘all electronic and transactional records between any @clintonemail.com email account’ and thirty-nine (39) specified DOJ email accounts …’” Strzok also asked the DOJ for a “general, or gateway, search of its [DOJ’s] systems for any other electronic and transactional records involving the identified external e-mail domain [@clintonemail.com].” The April 20 memo indicates DOJ complied with the request, saying, “JMD  [Justice Management Division] searched for any appearance of the @clintonemail.com domain in the electronic information (including emails and documents) of current and departed named custodians from the components for which JMD maintains electronic information. JMD located a small number of documents, but no email between the @clintonemail.com domain and any named custodian.” The memo notes that JMD had other DOJ components search their records too, and that:

The Civil Division located nine documents containing the term @clintonemail.com. A review of the content of the nine records by the Civil Division confirmed that the responses were related to the Division’s handling of Freedom of Information Act litigation, not communications between the custodian and the @clintonemail.com domain.

The memo noted that while it conducted a search of DOJ’s email gateway server for any email between DOJ email accounts and the @clintonemail.com domain, “The server log is maintained for a period of two years. [Emphasis added] JMD performed a search [April 2016] in the JMD-managed Email Gateway Server Log for the @clintonemail.com domain covering the period of 2/3/14 to 2/3/16 and found no email to or from the @clintonemail.com domain. [By the time this search was conducted, and no records were found, Clinton had been out of office as secretary of state since January 2013, a period of three years and three months.]

In a January 28, 2016, memo from Peter Strzok to the Counterespionage Group at the CIA, Strzok says that – due to a Section 811(c) referral under the Intelligence Authorization Act from the Intelligence Community Inspector General relating to the unauthorized release of classified information – the FBI is requesting a copy of a document, the title of which is redacted. Strzok notes that, “The assessment was provided to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Security Council (NSC) and to the Department of State (DoS) in, or around, October of 2009.”

In connection with an apparent response to the above “Request for Records,” an FBI memo dated June 27, 2016, indicates that the CIA provided the document sought. The synopsis of the memo reads: “CIA response to FBI LHM [Letterhead Memo] dated January 28, 2016 regarding a document request.” The memo further notes: “[redacted] document attached to CIOL [apparently referring to a Counterintelligence Operations Letter].”

Joking about being called ‘liars’ after being caught lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack says a lot about the Obama-Clinton team’s contempt for the rule of law and those four innocent Americans murdered in Libya September 11, 2012. The documents also show that Ben Rhodes, the Obama White House official who created the false story for Susan Rice to use on Benghazi, was planning to orchestrate again an ‘evolving’ explanation about the Benghazi attack by the Intelligence Community in time for then-President Obama’s reelection.  You can see how this manipulation is a prelude to Obama’s extensive abuse of the “intelligence community” during the next election to go after President Trump!


Secret Service: Hunter Biden Took 411 Flights, Visited 29 Countries, Including 5 Visits to China

New Secret Service records show Hunter Biden’s significant overseas travels during the first part of the Obama-Biden administration.

Judicial Watch investigators uncovered records from the U.S. Secret Service showing that, for the first five and a half years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden traveled extensively with a Secret Service protective detail. During the time period of the records, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden took 411 separate domestic and international flights, including to 29 different foreign countries. He visited China five times.
Our February 7, 2020, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sought:

Records reflecting the dates and locations of travel, international and domestic, for Hunter Biden while he received a U.S. Secret Service protective detail; please note whether his travel was on Air Force One or Two, or other government aircraft, as applicable and whether additional family members were present for each trip; time frame is 2001 to present.

The Secret Service did not indicate, as was requested, whether Biden’s travel was on Air Force One, Air Force Two or other government aircraft, or whether additional family members were present.

The records show that countries and territories visited by Hunter Biden, between June 2009 and May 2014, included:

• Ethiopia and India on June 14-22, 2009
• Argentina on September 14-17, 2009
• France and Spain on November 9-13, 2009
• Canada on February 12-15, 2010
• Dominican Republic on February 18-22, 2010
• Puerto Rico on March 20-27, 2010
• China on April 6-9, 2010
• Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom on May 5-8, 2010
• UK, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Ascension Island, U.S. Virgin Islands on June 6-13, 2010
• Denmark and South Africa on August 9-24, 2010
• Hong Kong, Taiwan and China on April 16-22, 2011
• Mexico on May 15-17, 2011
• Colombia, France, United Arab Emirates and France again on November 1-11, 2011
• UK and Russia on February 15-18, 2012
• Germany, France and UK on February 1-5, 2013
• UK and Ireland on March 20-22, 2013
• China on June 13-15, 2013
• Switzerland and Italy on July 26-August 7, 2013
• Japan, China, South Korea and the Philippines on December 2-9, 2013
• China and Qatar on May 7-14, 2014

The records were also provided, but were not made public, to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson in a response to a request the senators sent to Secret Service Director James Murray on February, 2020.

In its cover letter to Grassley and Johnson, which was included in the records we received, the Secret Service said that the senators’ request was time and labor intensive, and they could only provide a limited amount of information by the senators’ imposed turnaround time of February 19.

Given the Burisma-Ukraine-China influence peddling scandals, Hunter Biden’s extensive international travel during the Obama-Biden presidency, including at least 5 trips to China, will certainly raise additional questions.

According to reports, Vice President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden flew on Air Force Two for the official trip to Beijing in December 2013. The records we obtained show Hunter Biden arrived in Tokyo on December 2, 2013, and departed for Beijing two days later. While it is typical for the families of the president and vice president to travel with them, questions have been raised about whether Hunter Biden used the government trip to further his business interests.

NBC reporter Josh Lederman, who was one of four reporters on the December 2013 trip, noted in an October 2, 2019, report that, “What wasn’t known then was that as he accompanied his father to China, Hunter Biden was forming a Chinese private equity fund that associates said at the time was planning to raise big money, including from China.”

His travel is only one of our inquiries.

During the last year and a half of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden served on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings while his father was heading up Ukraine policy. We are seeking records through six lawsuits and dozens of FOIA requests related to Hunter Biden’s dealings with the Ukrainian Burisma Holdings and the Chinese BHR Partners.


FDA Bought ‘Fresh’ Human Fetal Parts for ‘Humanized Mice’ Creation

Your federal government has been an active customer of the abortion industry, and we have new details of the sordid transactions.

We received 165 pages of records from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showing that between 2012 and 2018 the FDA entered into eight contracts worth $96,370 to acquire “fresh and never frozen” tissue from 1st and 2nd trimester aborted fetuses for use in creating “humanized mice” for research.

These documents are a horror show. They show that the FDA was trafficking in human fetal parts. Incredibly, there continues to be a push to reopen these monstrous experiments!

The contracts were with Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), a nonprofit firm that has been the subject of criminal referrals from House and Senate committees investigating whether Planned Parenthood or any other entity was illegally profiting from the handling of fetal tissue from aborted babies.

Federal law regulates the purchase and acceptance of human fetal tissue for research purposes. It is unlawful to knowingly transfer fetal tissue for profit.

We received the records after filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department Health and Human Services (No. 1:19-cv-00876)) after HHS failed to respond adequately to our September 28, 2018, FOIA request seeking:

• All contracts and related documentation between FDA and Advanced Biosciences Resources (ABR) for the provision of human fetal tissue to be used in humanized mice research.
• All records reflecting the disbursement of funds to ABR for the provision of human fetal tissue to be used in humanized mice research.
• All guidelines and procedural documents provided to ABR by FDA relating to the acquisition and extraction of human fetal tissue for its provision to the FDA for humanized mice research.
• All communications between FDA officials and employees and representatives of ABR related to the provision by ABR to the FDA of human fetal tissue for the purpose of humanized mice research.

The records show a June 28, 2017, email exchange with the subject line “FDA RFQ” (Request for Quotation) between a redacted FDA contract specialist and an ABR official named Ms. Larton, in which the FDA official tells the ABR official, “I am tasked with the purchase of tissues suitable for HM [humanized mice] research. I would like to request a quote. Please review the Statement of Work and quote your pricing as outlined.” She then includes a table for 16 “Human Fetal Tissue – Liver”, 16 “Human Fetal Tissue – Thymus”, 16 HIV, HepA, HepB, HepC tests, and shipping and delivery. The Statement of Work notes:

The Division of Applied Regulatory Science (DARS) OCP/OTS/CDER is conducting a research program to evaluate the usefulness of humanized mice (HM) for regulatory purposes. The HM are created by surgical implantation of human tissue into mice that have multiple genetic mutations that block the development of the mouse immune system at a very early stage. The absence of the mouse immune system allows the human tissues to grow and develop into functional human tissues. As part of this process DARS needs to repeatedly acquire the proper type of tissues. In order for the humanization to proceed correctly we need to obtain fetal tissue with a specific set of specialized characteristics.

Among the specific characteristics are that the tissue be “Age range 16-24 weeks” and “Tissue must be fresh and never frozen.” An ABR official responds, saying, “Your quote is attached.”

In a June 12, 2017, email thread related to a “contract closeout” of a $24,500 contract between the FDA and ABR in a project titled “Human Tissue,” an FDA official emails an ABR official asking to “confirm all the items/services requested under this order were delivered and all payments processed, so that I may close out this contract…. Our records indicate funds in the amount of $15,090.00 to be de-obligated as a result of this closeout.”

A screenshot of a database (called UFMS) print-out indicates a “Matched Amount” of $9,410. The difference between the “matched amount” and the contract value is $15,090. An ABR official responds on June 26, 2017, saying, “I confirm there are no outstanding invoices or [redacted] P.O. #HHSF223201510746P, and it is my understanding that there are no pending requests for tissue procurements on this P.O. at this time.”

In an email thread beginning July 14, 2017, an FDA contracting specialist advises ABR that, “In order to properly document pricing, I require some documentation of your prices as offered to the public.” They ask for either redacted invoices or “a place on your website that lists prices.” An ABR representative responds:

We do not have a website, and we don‘t allow ‘the public’ to request tissue. It is only sent to verified researchers who have applied and have been approved to receive tissue.

As we are not selling items, we do not have prices. We assess fees for our services. The only document provided then to qualified recipients would be our Fees For Services Schedule. I’ve attached another copy of our current Fee Schedule for your reference. We’re a small non-profit company, and the fees are the same for everyone.

I hope this fulfills your requirement. We’ve done business with the F.D.A. for many years and we‘ve not experienced such rigorous procedures for the production of purchase orders. Will this process be necessary for each P.O. created now?

The “Fees for Services Schedule” provided by ABR lists “Fetal Cadaverous Specimen Procurement” that includes pricing for “2nd trimester specimen (13 – 24 weeks)” and “1st trimester specimen (8 – 12 weeks),” with the pricing amounts redacted. Under a section titled “Special Processing/Preservation” are fees for “Specimen ‘cleaning,’” “Snap freezing (LN2),” “Passive freezing (dry ice)” and “Foreign shipments.”

A July 25, 2018, FDA “Order for Supplies or Services” to ABR called for the purchase of “humanized mice” for the period July 26, 2018, to July 25, 2019, for a contract amount of $15,900. The contract called for the provision of 15 sets of second trimester livers and thymuses, along with associated “HIV/HA/HB blood testing,” and shipping.

In a September 17, 2018, email from the FDA to ABR notifying ABR of the “Closeout” of a contract for “Tissue procurement for humanized mice”, the FDA notes the contract value was $9,900, and that remaining funds of $2,430 for the purchase order existed. The FDA asks ABR to “confirm if all the items/services requested under this order were delivered so that I may close out this contract.” The responding ABR official notes that the FDA said that no invoices were submitted under the purchase order, and the ABR official adds that the FDA acknowledged that “there is a $7,470 difference between the noted Contract Value of $9,900 and REMAINING FUNDS of $2,430.” ABR further advises they would submit nine invoices under the contract, all of which were paid.

On September 24, 2018, the FDA terminated a contract with ABR to provide fetal tissue, saying: “[T]he Government is not sufficiently assured that the human tissue provided to the Government to humanize the immune systems of mice will comply with the prohibitions set forth under 42 U.S.C. § 289g-2.” The letter adds that “[T]he Government has concerns with the sufficiency of the sole-source justification.”

The law 42 USC 289g-2 involves “Prohibitions regarding human fetal tissue.”

HHS said in a statement on September 24, 2018, that it was “conducting an audit of all acquisitions involving human fetal tissue to ensure conformity with procurement and human fetal tissue research laws and regulations.”

In February, we uncovered 676 pages of records from NIH showing that the agency paid thousands of dollars to California-based ABR to purchase organs from aborted human fetuses to create “humanized mice” for HIV research.

These documents are the most disturbing I’ve reviewed in my 22 years at Judicial Watch. Both the Trump administration and Congress should launch emergency investigations into this barbarism.

Until next week …

Conrad Black On Clinton Political Mischief and Robert Mueller's Russian Drama

Special Counsel Robert Mueller

Clinton Political Mischief
Emerges as Key Tale
In an Astounding Drama

By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | February 21, 2018

 

 

It is both dismal and amusing to see the rationalizations of the diehard Kremlin collusionists after Robert Mueller’s spurious indictment of the 13 Russians who will never encounter the vagaries of United States justice. The charge of conspiring against the United States is nonsense, and the whole ambiance of the investigation now is that of a phantom consolation prize for the absence of a crime, a victim, or a culprit, all amplified by the hollow sanctimony of an official America that has meddled countless times in the elections of other countries (usually for the general good of the Western alliance).

 

The desperation of the Trump impeachers is piquant: This indictment doesn’t cover hacking — where might that lead? And the fact that Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein said, “This indictment refers to no Americans,” and that it contains no allegation of affecting the election result or of collusion by Americans, may mean that perhaps another indictment will. It is to this pathetic wisp that the New York Times’ Tom Friedman’s claim of a Russian assault on American sovereignty equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and Senator Mark Warner’s thousand Russian agents delivering Wisconsin to Mr. Trump on election night, have been reduced.

 

It is all, and always has been, nonsense. The Russian activities Mr. Mueller has attacked began before Mr. Trump had announced his candidacy, were favorable to Senator Sanders and the Green candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, as well as to Mr. Trump, and were almost entirely Internet advertisements decrying the state of the country in terms many Americans would sadly endorse — violence, corruption, poverty, crime, racism, etc. — in a presidential campaign in which the major candidates spent $2.5 billion, and Mrs. Clinton spent the unheard-of sum of $250 million on attack ads.

 

This was her version of “going high when they go low”: She was obviously speaking of money spent, not moral tone. And that was without counting the 10 to 12 million dollars the Clinton campaign contributed to assembling the outrageous Steele dossier, which Mrs. Clinton cites in her book as evidence of the ”treason” Trump committed with Russia to cheat her of the election. Trump critics are correct to say that this piffling pseudo-prosecution is not “a complete vindication,” in that it is not an explicit exculpation, but it is a stark confession of the extent of the collusion fiction.

 

When the rabidly Americophobic British newspaper the Guardian is reduced to finding evidence of collusion in Trump’s supposed generosity to Russia, the Red Queen is made to sound like Louis Brandeis. We must be fairly close to the point where it is impartially recorded that Trump-Kremlin collusion was a nasty fairy tale commissioned and paid for and carpet-bombed on the press by the Clinton campaign, and used to infect and mislead the Justice Department and the FBI, by senior Clinton-campaign and Obama-administration officials.

Peter Strzok

The Steele dossier remains the only visible justification for a false Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Carter Page and, incidentally, the Trump campaign; and for the Mueller investigation itself, even though that investigation was prompted by fired FBI director James Comey with an illegal leak to the New York Times of a memo of contested accuracy that was probably illegally removed government property. Mr. Mueller arrived after Mr. Comey had dismissed the Steele dossier as “malicious and unverified” and after the Trump-hating Clinton-helper Peter Strzok, whom Mr. Mueller inexplicably recruited, had reluctantly concluded that there was “no there there.”

 

With this Russian indictment and whatever flailing about Mr. Mueller may commit over hacking and WikiLeaks, Mr. Mueller can make his gesture to the fact that the Russians nibbled ineffectually at the edges of the 2016 election, and use that as his cover to withdraw from the whole misconceived collusion foolishness in which the United States is being reduced to a laughingstock for the whole world. Or, Mr. Mueller can exercise the plenitude of his mandate and unearth the proportions of the chaos caused by the Steele dossier (which the egregious Senator Warner assured us “is taken seriously by the British, our ally”).

 

It is an astounding tale that is emerging of Clinton political mischief tainting the entire justice system and misleading tens of millions of Americans to imagine their political system was being manipulated by foreigners and might have produced an illicit presidential-election result. This is the exposure that must be made, and while I would not necessarily favor prosecuting them all, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey, deputy FBI director McCabe, and quite possibly former senior Justice Department officials including Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates, have committed offenses that put them in the danger zone of indictable acts.

 

Instead of Keystone Kops charges against untouchable Russians and shock-and-awe intimidation of prior bit-players for alleged tax offenses and minor indiscretions, Mr. Mueller should lay this immense, scandalous rotten egg before the country. If he can’t face that challenge and service, he should shut down this charade so that Attorney General Sessions can end his recusal and we can bring on the main event and identify the authors of this monstrous farce.

 

As his greatest problem melts, President Trump has an opportunity to build on the new need of Democrats to be more cooperative than their mindless obstructionism until recently has permitted. To build on the historic success of his tax reform, Mr. Trump should cut across party lines and do the right and surprising thing, as President Lyndon Johnson did with civil rights, President Nixon did with China, and President Reagan did with arms control.

 

He should reaffirm the right of all qualified people to own handguns and rifles, but sharply tighten access to automatic weapons, require licenses to carry concealed weapons, fund substantial security in all schools and for public meetings, including religious services and concerts, and intensify the collection of relevant behavioral information and response to it (an area bungled by the FBI and local authorities in the Parkland, Fla., massacre last week).

 

Gun supporters cannot justify a laissez-faire legal framework, but will continue to be able to collect and enjoy guns if they meet high but reasonable criteria. This might not have interdicted the Las Vegas murderer, but would have flagged the Parkland misfit. All unauthorized firearms should be seized.

 

The other march the president could usefully steal legislatively, and bring the Democrats into formation with him, would be to increase the infrastructure proposal to the $4.5 trillion that is generally recognized to be needed, and fund the increase from anticipated reductions in the gasoline price resulting from increased U.S. production, by maintaining the present price and applying the differential to this program. The anti-Trump resistance is collapsing and we are almost back to normal political blocking and tackling.

 

With these notches in his belt, Mr. Trump would have a chance of complete immigration and health-care reform in the second half of his term. There will be plenty of opportunity for the president to gloat about the collusion idiocy; now is the time to make Washington work and build credentials as a negotiator and champion of the system, and not just the great outsider.

Mr. Trump has brought down the walls like Joshua at Jericho; now is the time to bury gridlock and rebuild public confidence that America’s legislators are not just the corrupt, ineffectual lobbyists-in-waiting that a great many Americans, with some reason, think they are.

 

CBLetters@gmail.com. From the National Review.

 

Robert Mueller's Indictment Could Be a Win for Russia's Trolls

By Simon Shuster , TIME 

February 21, 2018

It turns out you don’t need much to meddle in a U.S. election. Some cheap cell phones. An Internet connection. Maybe a few airline tickets and a good grasp of the English language. That was enough for the Russian troll farm to get started on their U.S. operation back in 2015. And they achieved what they set out to do.

Thirteen of them, mostly errand runners for the group known as the Internet Research Agency, have been charged for allegedly trying to skew the U.S. electoral process. The indictment against them, handed down on Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, reads both like a warning and a potboiler. But it could also serve as an instruction manual, one that any determined group could use to replicate the operation. This is clearly not what the Special Counsel intended.

 When it comes to catching criminals and deterring copycats, the indictment may yet succeed. It might at least become harder for the Internet Research Agency to recruit new trolls around its home base in St. Petersburg, especially now that some of them are wanted by the FBI and unable to travel outside Russia without fear of arrest and extradition. Their summer holidays may now be limited to the beaches of Sochi and Crimea.

But for the broader aims of the troll factory and its investors, the indictment could serve as a victory in disguise. Apart from providing a blueprint for their methods, it may further diminish public trust in the platforms people use to receive information, share ideas, and to engage in civic discourse. Disseminating those kind of doubts has been the aim of Russian propaganda for years.

“It does not function like traditional propaganda,” says David Patrikarakos, the author of War in 140 Characters, a recent book on modern information warfare. It doesn’t seek to promote any ideology or convince people to join any single cause. Instead, says Patrikarakos, “It tries to muddy the waters. It tries to sow as much confusion and as much misinformation as possible, so that when people see the truth, they find it harder to recognize.”

Take, for example, one of the troll factory‘s earlier campaigns in Russia, the one that followed the murder of Boris Nemtsov. On February 27, 2015, the Russian dissident and former Deputy Prime Minister was shot in the back while walking home a few steps from the Kremlin walls. Suspicion among his allies soon fell on the man he had spent his career trying to unseat: President Vladimir Putin, who denied any involvement.

The day after the killing, the staff at the Internet Research Agency received detailed instructions on how to spin the news. Their orders were to flood Russian news websites and social media with comments about Nemtsov’s killing, all in the hope of confusing the online discussion about who was responsible. “Technical instructions for Feb. 28,” the orders began, according to a copy that was later leaked to local journalists. “Create the opinion that Ukrainians could have been mixed up in the death of the Russian opposition figure.”

Other theories spouted that week by the Agency’s trolls put the blame on Nemtsov’s girlfriend, his fellow dissidents, his American allies and his former business partners. They did not focus on dispelling the notion that Putin or his allies could have been involved. They simply crowded the debate with so many theories and alternative facts that everything about the case began to seem suspicious. “Next they’ll say that space aliens did it,” Nemtsov’s personal assistant, Olga Shorina, told me after watching these theories spread on social media at the time. “I can’t even look at it anymore.”

About three weeks after Nemtsov’s death – when a decorated veteran of the Russian security services had already been arrested for pulling the trigger – an independent polling agency in Moscow found that only 15% of respondents believed the Russian authorities had been involved. Perhaps even more surprising, the same survey found that only 10% of respondents were even paying close attention to the highest profile political murder of the Putin era. A far larger number had simply tuned out.

The Kremlin’s main propaganda outlets – the television news – no doubt played a more powerful role in shaping public opinion around that case. But the role played by the Internet Research Agency suggested a shift in strategy. Long before Nemtsov’s killing, in 2011, Russia had overtaken Germany as the nation with the highest number of Internet users in Europe. Even then the public was beginning to turn off state TV and going online for uncensored news.

Across Russia, and especially in the big cities, the political debate was also migrating to the Web around that time, especially to the blogging platform known as LiveJournal, whose audience in Russia around 2011 had come to rival some of the state-run news networks – it had 5 million Russian accounts with 30 million monthly readers. It wasn’t long before that space also came under attack. In April 2011, hackers targeted not just the blogs of the dissidents and opposition figures who were writing on LiveJournal; they took down the entire service.

“There’s no ideology at play here, unless you want to talk about an anti-blogging ideology,” Alexander Plushchev, one of Russia’s leading tech journalists, told me at the time. “These are clearly just Internet hit men who got the order to take out LiveJournal.” The aim, in other words, was to stop the conversation. And for a little while it worked. The raucous debates on LiveJournal ground to a halt as the site remained inaccessible for days, and many of its users began migrating to Facebook, which is a lot more difficult for hackers to knock offline.

The rise of the Internet Research Agency in 2013 was, at least in part, a reaction to that shift. Its managers recognized that trying to shut down the means of political debate was no longer enough. In the age of social media, people would just find another place to exchange ideas. The best way to stop them would be to infiltrate the discourse itself — and, whenever possible, to fill it with nonsense, conspiracies and lies.

The indictment of the Internet Research Agency shows in minute detail how easily this can be done. Reading through the schemes it describes – the fake accounts the suspects created on social media, the fake activist groups they formed, the fake causes they claimed to champion, and the phony protests they were able to organize in American cities – it is hard to avoid the tug of paranoia, the feeling that the civic discourse in any democracy is vulnerable to sabotage, and that every political statement is worthy of suspicion.

The reaction to such doubts could, in many cases, be a healthy sort of skepticism. It could remind people to check their sources of information and to question the voices that reach them online. But that sort of vigilance is hard to maintain. For many people, the easier option would be to withdraw from the debate for fear of being fooled again. And as the efforts of the Agency’s trolls have shown in the past, that outcome would serve their interests perfectly well.

With reporting by Sandra Ifraimova / New York