Preet Bharara on Russian Indictments: Idea Anyone Can Say There Was No Interference in The Election Is Just Fooling Themselves

RUSH EXCERPT: 

BHARARA: "Well, basically, all of it. It’s a very powerful document. The level of detail, the level of thoroughness, the level of specificity in it is fairly extraordinary. You know, if you take a step back and look at what the rhetoric has been about what this investigation has been about, the Russia investigation, done by special counsel Mueller and his team, he’s basically been looking at — he’s basically been looking at three things. One, whether anyone engaged in an attack on American democracy and interfered with the election. Second, whether any Americans conspired with them to do that thing. And then third, whether or not there was obstruction of the investigation. And there have been allegations of witch hunt and overstepping their bounds with respect to all three of them. And what’s, I think, important from the perspective of the integrity of the investigation, and also what it means for American elections in our relationship with Russia, is with respect to that first bucket, whether or not the Russians interfered with the election, the evidence now, if you believe the allegations in the indictment, and I do, because they’re so specific and authoritative, it’s overwhelming. And the idea that anyone can say, there was no interference in the election, is just fooling themselves. The best sentence in the entire indictment is the statement of the object of the conspiracy. Every federal indictment that talks about a conspiracy has to state what the object or purpose of the conspiracy was. And it’s right there in black and white, that the object of the conspiracy was to interfere with an American election, and it’s clear with the purpose of interfering in the American election on the side of one party, versus another. So it’s an extraordinary document that puts the lie to anyone saying that the investigation is a witch hunt, when it’s not yielding anything. And it identifies, you know, by name, 12 specific high-level military intelligence officials in Russia who had to be doing what they were doing with the full, explicit approval and perhaps direction of Vladimir Putin. That’s an extraordinarily significant thing."