In a segment broadcasted Monday, CNN senior correspondent Matthew Chance is shown digging through dumpsters outside the St. Petersburg, Russia building that special counsel Robert Mueller alleges troll farms interfering in the 2016 election operated out of.
H/T ZeroPointNow
When asked if he looked through the building’s trash, Chance sheepishly replies, “Yes we did.”
“We came here expecting this office to be empty and in fact when all day, we’ve been here the whole course of the day, people have been going in and out,” said Chance.
“We went to the trash can to see what we can find because we saw people dumping rubbish there.”
Chance says he found “new computers,” are being brought into the building and “rubbish” was being tossed away.
Mueller’s indictment named 13 Russian operatives from the internet Research Center LLC. in St. Petersburg who attempted to “interfere” with the 2016 US presidential election.
It appears Mueller based much of the indictment on an earlier RFE article.
We plugged the article into Google translate (It’s in Ukrainian), and the article reads like the Mueller indictment.
Here is the Mueller indictment describing the Internet Research Agency LLC:
And here is the RFE article from 2015:
For the third year, first in St. Petersburg, in the village of Ol’hina, and then in the city itself, on the street Savushkina, in the building number 55 there is a mysterious organization, which is officially called the Limited Liability Company Internet Research, and unofficially nicknamed by its employees, the so-called “Kremlin trolls”, “the Ministry of Truth”
The official founder and director general of this organization is the retired militia colonel Mikhail Bystrov , and is funded by the Concord holding, headed by friend and chef of President Vladimir Putin Yevgeny Prigozhin . Since 2000, this holding organizes banquets in the Kremlin, as well as cooperates with “Vointorg” and the Ministry of Defense.
In the “Trust Ministry”, approximately 400 people, who change one at a time for 12 hours, sit around the computer around the clock and write in blogs – mostly in “Live Journal” or “VKontakte”. There are several departments. In one they are engaged in the blogosphere, in another they are preparing TK – technical tasks, in the third one – they comment on the news in Russian and foreign media , in the fourth – mount photos in the photoshop, forcing, say, heads of Navalny and Obama to the bodies of animals, and so on.
On Friday, the office of special counsel Robert Mueller announced that a grand jury indicted 13 Russian nationals, along with 3 Russian entities, accused of “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump … and disparaging Hillary Clinton.”