Robert Mueller’s dead man switch appears to be kicking in

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Earlier today, international operative George Nader – best known for his role in the Trump-Russia election conspiracy – was arrested on charges of child pornography. As more information comes in, it turns out a grand jury indicted Nader on this charge more than a year ago, and federal prosecutors have kept it under seal until now. This paints Robert Mueller’s endgame in a very different light.

George Nader had been cooperating with Mueller in the Trump-Russia investigation, in exchange for what the New York Times described a year ago as “limited immunity” – though the scope of that immunity was never specified. According to the Washington Post, Mueller – or a federal prosecutor coordinating with him – had a grand jury secretly indict Nader on the child pornography charges in April of 2018.

Nader has been out of the country for some time, finally returning to the United States just now. He surely didn’t know there was a sealed indictment against him, or he’d never have come back here. So while Mueller and the Feds may have used this evidence to push Nader into cooperating to begin with, his immunity must not have covered this kind of thing – and they appear not to have told him that they’d already indicted him for it.

Some political analysts are going to frame George Nader’s arrest as a final coda to the Mueller probe. They’ll argue that it only took this long to bust Nader because he’d been out of the country. But remember when William Barr told us that there were no sealed indictments in the Mueller probe, and that there would be no more indictments coming? Now we have proof that Barr was, as per usual, lying. Are we supposed to believe that there was only one sealed indictment in place, and that Barr took the trouble to lie about it?

This is starting to look like Robert Mueller and his cooperating prosecutors have had sealed indictments in place across the board for quite some time. They indicted Nader fourteen months ago and didn’t tell him he’d been indicted, even as he was cooperating with them. How many more sealed indictments did Mueller put in place along the way, in case he didn’t get to finish his work? We’d guess the Nader indictment was unsealed early, because the SDNY wanted to make sure to nail him before he left the country again – and that the other Mueller indictments are still being held back for strategic reasons. It sure sounds like Mueller had a dead man switch all along, and it’s just started to kick in.

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