By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Saturday, January 5, 2019

A defense attorney locked in a courtroom battle with special counsel Robert Mueller is quoting the iconic 1978 movie “Animal House” to make his point that prosecutors are hiding evidence.

Attorney Eric A. Dubelier is defending Russian firm Concord Management and Consulting, which a federal indictment accuses of interfering in the 2016 election by bankrolling millions of fake social media postings and ads.

Leading up to trial, U.S. District Court Judge Dabney L. Friedrich backed Mr. Mueller’s plan to keep “sensitive” investigative evidence hidden from Mr. Dubelier, a former federal prosecutor. An anonymous “firewall counsel” was named to sift through documents and determine what could be shared.

SEE ALSO: Concord federal court filing

Mr. Dubelier then discovered that the identical confidential material he turned over to the firewall ended up in the hands of Mr. Mueller, who proceeded to use it to continue his investigation. What’s more, he learned that Mr. Mueller has admitted in a secret filing that, yes, he acquired the evidence, but not from the firewall.

In a Friday court filing, Mr. Dubelier expressed outrage, turning to “Animal House” and the Tim Matheson fraternity character “Otter” to underscore his argument.

“In the Special Counsel’s secret pleading he concedes he took investigative action relating to information that was identical to that which Defendant provided to firewall counsel just seven days earlier,” he wrote in an argument filed on Friday. “The Special Counsel states that he did not obtain the information from firewall counsel. The Special Counsel also states that if simply trusting him that everything is just peachy is not sufficient, he can tell more ex parte [No defense counsel] secrets to the Court to support his position.

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“The Special Counsel’s argument is reminiscent of Otter’s famous line, ‘Flounder, you can’t spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You f**ked up … you trusted us. Hey, make the best of it.’”

Mr. Dubelier described Judge Friedrich previous decision as an “unprecedented and onerous protective order” that keeps evidence away from the defense.

He asked Judge Friedrich to investigate how Concord’s evidence arrived with Mr. Mueller.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37538930)

Judge blasts lawyers for Russian firm charged by Mueller

By JOSH GERSTEIN 01/07/2019 01:20 PM EST

A judge publicly slammed the defense lawyers for a Russian company criminally charged by special counsel Robert Mueller, accusing the firm’s attorneys of submitting unprofessional and inappropriate court filings attacking Mueller’s office and of unwisely peppering legal briefs with jarring quotes taken from movies like Animal House.

“I’ll say it plain and simple: knock it off,” U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich told lawyers for the Russian company, Concord Management and Consulting, at a brief court hearing in Washington Monday morning.

Story Continued Below

The tone and content of the submissions from Concord’s combative attorneys, Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly, in past months has been unusual for lawyers practicing in federal court. A filing last week quoted both the British 19th Century historian Lord Acton and a slightly sanitized expletive uttered by the somewhat less erudite “Otter,” a fraternity brother in the 1970s classic Animal House.

A stern-faced Friedrich, the newest of President Donald Trump’s three appointees to the district court in Washington, made clear Monday that she was not amused by what she called the “clever quotes.” She also chastised Dubelier for ad hominem attacks on Mueller’s attorneys and other prosecutors in the case.

“I found your recent filings, in particular your reply brief filed Friday, unprofessional, inappropriate and ineffective,” the judge said. She suggested the submissions were an effort to bully her into granting pending defense motions to give the owners and officers of Concord greater access to materials Mueller’s office has turned over to permit the defense to prepare for trial.

When Friedrich beckoned Dubelier to the courtroom lectern to address some more technical issues about the exchange of information, he declined to say anything of substance, declaring instead that the judge’s rebuke was so severe that he might need to withdraw from the case. He also accused Friedrich of bias.

“I need to go and discuss this with my client,” said Dubelier, a former federal prosecutor now with law firm Reed Smith. “There appears to be some bias on the part of the court.”

Friedrich insisted that there was no bias and that the defense filings were patently inappropriate, but Dubelier disagreed.

“That’s your opinion,” the defense attorney said.

It appeared that Friedrich called the Monday morning court session in large part to deliver a public dressing-down to Dubelier. After some routine scheduling matters and a brief discussion of what proceedings should be held in open court, the judge ejected the press and members of the public and moved the court into a sealed session.

Story Continued Below

The courtroom dust-up laid bare some of the tensions created by Concord’s unexpected decision to contest the criminal charges a grand jury acting at Mueller’s request returned in February against the firm, two other Russian companies and 13 Russian individuals. The charges allege a conspiracy to use a disguised social media campaign and some on-the-ground organizing to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Much of the effort was aimed at electing Trump, the indictment alleges, but some actions backed Clinton or simply seemed intended to maximize chaos, conflict and dissension among Americans.

From the outset, Concord’s lawyers have not only fought the legal charges, but used the vehicle of the court filings and open court hearings to mount a public campaign aimed at challenging Mueller’s legitimacy and the validity of the notion that online troublemaking amounts to a criminal conspiracy against the United States, as prosecutors have charged.

Concord’s attorneys and some supporters have noted, however, that the filing of the charges against the three firms and 13 Russians earlier this year also involved a significant amount of public posturing. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein personally announced the indictment at a Justice Department news conference.

Many inside and outside the Justice Department saw the indictment from the outset as a “name and shame” effort, that was intended to put the Russian government on notice that such conduct would be exposed and pursued by the U.S. The likelihood that any of the defendants would ever appear in a U.S. courtroom seemed remote.

Concord’s decision to contest the charges shattered that expectation and did so at relatively low cost to those charged in the case, including Evgeniy Prigozhin a Russian businessman and restaurateur known as Putin’s chef. Under U.S. law, the company is entitled to the full panoply of U.S. constitutional rights even though no individual connected to the firm is at risk of going to prison until and unless they come into U.S. custody.

This story tagged under:

Justice Department Robert Mueller Concord Management and Consulting LLC Mueller Investigation

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37545779)

https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1082419911647850496

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37549881)

This is what lawyers hope they will get to do when they get into law.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37093017)

ftfy

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37093598)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37093718)

The newspaper says it got this information from a 61-year-old man named Valery Amelchenko, who allegedly participated in some of these operations, beginning in 2012. All that’s known about him is that he was arrested in St. Petersburg in 1999 for robbery and sentenced to prison for seven years.

Novaya Gazeta stumbled onto Amelchenko when investigating the November 2016 attack on sociologist and Death Studies Journal publisher Sergey Mokhov (the husband of Lyubov Sobol, who acts as legal counsel for the Anti-Corruption Foundation). The attacker injected a psychotropic drug into Mokhov’s thigh, causing him to lose consciousness. A surveillance camera filmed the incident, and an anonymous source told Novaya Gazeta that the perpetrator was a man named Oleg Simonov, who died under unclear circumstances in May 2017. Simonov’s widow says she recognizes her late husband from the camera footage, and showed Novaya Gazeta a photograph from his funeral, revealing that Amelchenko attended the ceremony.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37111342)

Prigozhin was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) on June 1, 1961 to Violetta Prigozhina (Russian: Виолетта Пригожина).[5][6] He graduated from an athletics boarding school in 1977 and was engaged in cross-country skiing.[5]

On November 29, 1979, Prigozhin was given a suspended sentence for stealing (in Leningrad). In 1981 he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment under articles of robbery, fraud, and involving teenagers in prostitution. Prigozhin spent nine years in prison before he was released.[7]

Restaurant and catering career Edit

In 1990, after his release, he and his stepfather set up a network to sell hot dogs.[8] Soon, according a New York Times interview with him, "the rubles were piling up faster than his mother could count them."[9]

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37099098)

this quote is fucking cash: "the rubles were piling up faster than his mother could count them."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37099179)

it was definitely effective.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4114918&forum_id=2#37545068)