I looked on Pacer (a court document site) and I think this is the reason it’s called “Indictment B.”
The Government had the indictment sealed last week and after the arrest asked that it be unsealed. After it was unsealed, the government filed another request to unseal the court docket and they also asked to replace the indictment with a redacted one they were submitting because there was some administrative info relating to the Special Council’s office at the top of the one that had been unsealed. The judge granted that and ordered that the unsealed indictment be replaced with a copy of the redacted indictment. I believe the redacted indictment is B.
Maybe the government left an “It’s Mueller Time!” logo on the top of Indictment A.
Not sure why your post indicates such an uncharitable, rude perspective, but I’ll chalk it up to ignorance.
Our goal was to create clarity and order out of complexity and chaos. Maintaining an intelligible court record is challenging and important. Leaving a good record for appeals courts, lawyers, the public and anyone else who wishes in the future to review it for whatever reason is a worthwhile objective.
I’ve read transcripts of proceedings where less care was given to such details, and they went like this:
Defense attorney: “(Witness) Mr. Smith, please refer to Defendant’s Exhibit Bee Bee Bee Bee Bee in front of you –“
Prosecutor: “I’m sorry, was that Exhibit Vee Vee Vee Vee Vee?”
Defense attorney: “No, Bee Bee Bee Bee Bee…”
Prosecutor: “Ah, thanks. Got it.”
Defense attorney: “And also, Mr. Smith, directing your attention to Defendant’s Exhibit Eee Eee Eee Eee Eee Eee…”
Judge: “Hang on, was that 6 Ees or 5 Ees?”
We had good reasons for doing things as we did. Hopefully I’ve helped you to grasp one of the basics.
I don’t think this deserves its own thread, so I’ll put it here. To my knowledge, no one is saying the Trump admin had direct interaction with the various Russian troll farms who advertised on Facebook.
The two groups showed up and the confrontation escalated into verbal attacks, although the article doesn’t say there was violence. The ads promoting the rallies cost about $200. This is what it takes to sow discord in America. Two hundred bucks and a few badly translated Facebook posts.
I’m reminded of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, where the aliens pit the townspeople against each other by selectively shutting off and restoring power. The aliens don’t even need to control our power grid anymore. They just need to put together some memes and we’ll fight each other for their amusement.
It’s amazing how the memories of Trump’s cronies are magically “refreshed” after someone testifies that they knew all about Trips to Russia, and had received emails about working with the Russians to influence the election…
I think they all need a long, long quiet time in a secluded government run facility to enable them to “refresh” their memories on a wide variety of topics.
I’m guessing that e-mails from one Trump buttmunchkin to another don’t take place on a “public” system, they wouldn’t be using the .aol addy they get exciting offers from Nigerian princes…
Guessing that all the shit from one particular addy is reliably presumed to be from someone On The Team. Can we therefore assume that one e-mail in that folder that says “Hey, just a heads-up, I won’t be in the office next week, I’m going to Russia”…might raise an eyebrow? Kind of thing you might remember?
And if the sender is some coffee-felching nobody-burger, wouldn’t your next thought be “Who authorized this schmuck to got to Russia? And nobody asked me shit? Huh?”
David Frum shared an opinion today in an article titled These Are Not The Actions Of An Innocent Man:
“…
A year after the 2016 election, the Trump administration has done nothing to harden U.S. election systems against future interference. It refuses to implement the sanctions voted by Congress to punish Russia for election meddling. The president fired the director of the FBI, confessedly to halt an investigation into Russia’s actions—and his allies in Congress and the media malign the special counsel appointed to continue the investigation.
These are not the actions of an innocent man, however vain, stubborn, or uniformed.
“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard for criminal justice. It’s not the standard for counter-intelligence determinations. The preponderance of the evidence ever-more clearly indicates: In ways we cannot yet fully reckon—but can no longer safely deny—the man in the Oval Office has a guilty connection to the Russian government. That connection would bar him from literally any other job in national security except that of head of the executive branch and commander- in-chief of the armed forces of the United States. …”
Trump “clarified” his statements where he denied that the Russians were involved in the 2016 election:
“I believe that he feels that he and Russia did not meddle in the election. As to whether or not I believe it or not, I’m with our agencies.”
The only way to square that circle is to say that Trump now believes that the Russian government meddled in the election but that Putin has no idea about it to this day. Is there anyone in the world who believes that this is actually possibly true? Not to mention that he threw Clapper, Brennan and Comey specifically under the bus yesterday for stating that Russia meddled in the election, which he now claims to believe a day later.
Don’t enforce sanctions. Give speech telling everyone that the sanctions have worked and the Russians are very sorry and we’ve got to figure out what to do about the Ukraine.
Trump only knows how to campaign. Even in his business career he was all about schmoozing and connections; bringing together investors, getting his name on things, managing a brand and image. But did any of his businesses ever accomplish anything as a business? His casinos lost money. His airline went bankrupt.
That Trump won’t harden election systems or implement sanctions doesn’t mean he’s guilty, it means he’s Trump.[sup]*[/sup] He doesn’t care about what he does, or can do, as president. He just cares that he is, that he gets big crowds at his speeches and meets all the right people. It’s like his promise to build a wall on the border; he loves the promising but doesn’t care if it actually happens. Trump’s brilliance is that he a master of hype; he can come up with promises faster than his victims realize they’ve not being fulfilled.
Somewhat parenthetically: IF we survive Trump relatively intact, job one should be to put safeguards in place against further rogue Presidents–the same safeguards already in place, as Frum notes, for every other position in our government except the chief executive. Even if it takes a constitutional amendment to do it.
When the Constitution was written, the framers knew that George Washington would be President. Both to avoid insulting him, and because they knew his integrity was unquestioned, they failed to specify things that we now know we need to specify.
If we survive, we must make the effort to hold future Presidents to the same standards we maintain for all other governmental offices.
That’d be very difficult in terms of balance between policy and politics. Let’s say we put into place a relatively straight forward check – every party nominee undergoes a review for security clearance, just like any other classified government employee. But it’s the DoD that conducts these investigations, and they’re under the executive branch, meaning that a political nominee is in charge. If a candidate from the opposite party to the current president is rejected for this, it would awfully hard to prove that politics were not involved unless there’s some very clear incident that could be put forward publicly, and this probably would violate privacy rules.
On the other hand, if from now on both parties agreed to such investigations before hand, and agreed to make the results public, then that might be a non-legislative way moving forward.