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How the Mueller team turned social media breadcrumbs into a wide-ranging conspiracy

A California man pleaded guilty to helping the Russians

After months of breadcrumbs from Congressional investigators and Silicon Valley platforms, Special Counsel Bob Mueller finally laid out the U.S. government’s case for what Russian agents actually did to influence the 2016 election online.

The latest indictment of 13 Russian hackers includes choice excerpts from the trove of data that Facebook, Google, and Twitter handed over to Congress last fall, synthesized with other material to piece together the Russian government operation that began in 2014 and continued through the 2016 election.

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Here’s what’s old

Beyond the names of the hackers themselves, the indictment doesn’t contain a significant amount of new information. Social media ads paid for by Russian agents were previously revealed by House Intelligence Committee Democrats during early November Capitol Hill hearings with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and multiple outlets have connected Russian agents to political events and Twitter profiles created by Russians.

One such Facebook ad released by Congress that Mueller included in his indictment was from the page “Army of Jesus” called Hillary “satan” and urged viewers to support Donald Trump. The 136,000 follower-strong Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which the indictment also references, was fingered as a Russian plant by journalists last October. And events organized by Russian operatives on Facebook have been reported on extensively, as well.

Here’s what’s new

But what Mueller does present as new is the actual conspiracy, titled “Project Lakhta,” that set all this digital skullduggery in motion.

The defendants allegedly obtained the Social Security numbers and other personally identifying information of actual Americans. Using those details, and inventing other personas, the Russians then opened bank and Paypal accounts with the assistance of a Californian named Richard Pinedo, who pleaded guilty on Friday to assisting the alleged conspiracy. Those accounts, in turn, were then used to bankroll the ads and other shenanigans, including an event where one person who dress up as Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform.

Other hijinks included simultaneously holding a pro-Trump rally (“show your support for President-Elect Donald Trump”) and an anti-Trump rally (“Trump is NOT my president”) in November 2016 in New York.

When the FBI caught onto what the Russians were up to last September, according to the indictment, one of the defendants said in an email to her family that “we had a slight crisis at work” as the FBI “busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with colleagues.”

What about the collusion?

It’s not entirely clear where the Mueller investigation goes from here, but the special counsel’s team is already signaling that its work is certainly not over. The Friday indictments do not preclude the possibility of charges of Trump campaign collusion with the Russian government, according to Bloomberg.