Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has accused Russian operatives of stealing materials obtained from his prosecutors, altering the documents, and posting them online in a disinformation effort to discredit the Russia investigation, according to court documents filed on Wednesday. Mueller’s team made the filing in its case against Concord Management and Consulting LLC, a sanctioned Russian company indicted in the probe for allegedly funding a Russian troll farm that waged a disinformation campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. According to prosecutors, a Twitter account with the handle @HackingRedstone was created last October. The user bragged that he had hacked evidence in the Mueller probe. “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller,” the account tweeted, according to the court filing. “Enjoy the reading!”
The court filing said that investigators determined that the special counsel’s office had not been hacked . According to Mueller’s prosecutors, the special counsel provided discovery evidence to Concord’s lawyers and the Twitter account published the documents after they had been “altered.”
The “altered” evidence was “disseminated as part of a disinformation campaign,” the filing said.
“The use of the file names and file structure of the discovery to create a webpage intended to discredit the investigation in this case described above shows that the discovery was reproduced for a purpose other than the defense of this case,” prosecutors said.
The filing was made as Mueller’s prosecutors asked a judge to deny Concord’s request to see some of the evidence that the special counsel has gathered against the firm. The prosecutors warned that handing over the sensitive documents “to the Russian Federation unreasonably risks national security interests of the United States.”
Full Article: Russians reportedly “altered” Mueller documents and leaked them online to discredit probe | Salon.com.