Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a team of 16 prosecutors with experience in terrorism, money laundering, organized crime and even a Watergate veteran, all working diligently to investigate President Trump, his campaign, and the transition team.
Today, a spokesman for the Special Counsel announced that they’ve added a specialist in cyber crimes prosecution, Ryan K. Dickey, who was assigned from the Department of Justice’s computer crime and intellectual-property section.
Dickey began working for the Special Counsel’s probe almost two months ago, which is significant because it indicates that the probe is pursuing a digital Watergate investigation into stolen DNC emails with even more vigor. The Post reports:
Dickey’s addition is particularly notable because he is the first publicly known member of the team specializing solely in cyber issues.
Mueller’s work has long had an important cybersecurity component — central to the probe is Russia’s hacking of Democrats’ emails in an effort to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system and help Trump win. The original FBI counterintelligence probe was launched in part because a Trump campaign adviser was said to have told an Australian diplomat that Russia had emails that could embarrass Democrats, and in July 2016, private Democratic messages thought to have been hacked by Russia began appearing online.
Mueller also is in possession of information from Facebook about politically themed advertisements bought through Russian accounts. Legal analysts have said that one charge Mueller might pursue would be a conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, if he can demonstrate that members of Trump’s team conspired in Russia’s hacking effort to influence the election.
Republicans drummed up the ‘Hillary’s emails’ non-scandal during the umpteenth Benghazi panel in 2015 and even admitted publicly on Fox News that the emails story was just about polling, not about facts.
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Stolen Democratic emails were later dribbled out strategically by Russian-linked sources en masse via Wikileaks and onto social media, then into conservative media and the mainstream press, which ultimately tilted the playing field substantially by hijacking the media conversation during the 2016 elections.
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The Democratic Party’s nominally private emails became the centrally covered issue in the 2016 campaign (N.Y. Times, major newspapers, national nightly news), but all of the coverage was about ‘Hillary Clinton’s emails,’ and the way that the Democratic National Committee had tilted the primaries in favor of Clinton and not the crime of pilfering private communications and using them for partisan political advantage.
Perversely, mainstream coverage of Donald Trump was extremely issue focused, largely ignoring his very real scandals, which are now the subject of Mueller’s investigation. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, who ran the digital marketing aspect of the Trump campaign, is similarly under investigation for his alleged role in the scandal.
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Today’s news shows that Mueller has a cybercrime specialist focusing heart of the political crime of the century between Putin and Trump to use stolen emails allowing a foreign power to directly influence the American political process, which now threatens to upend both the presidential administration and the Republican Party.
The Trump campaign’s official knowledge of non-public information about the stolen emails long before the hacks was known, even to Democrats, gives public credence to theories that the President or his campaign could be charged with aiding and abetting computer crimes, criminal conspiracy or for benefitting in the election for their role in the scandal.
