A federal court has ordered a mysterious foreign company to comply with a subpoena which was apparently issued by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The Justice Department had asked the company to turn over information relating to a criminal investigation, which had been linked to Mueller’s investigation into allegations of cooperation between Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.
In documents released by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, it was revealed that this entity was a foreign government-owned company.
In the three-page opinion, the court ordered the company to comply with the subpoena.
Before Tuesday’s opinion, nearly all aspects of the subpoena case have played out with strict secrecy limitations.
All the court briefs have been submitted under seal, but limited information about the case appeared in the appeals court’s public docket.
Even the attorneys who argued for the two sides in the dispute remain a mystery.
Court security officials last Friday even took the extraordinary step of barring public access to an entire floor of the Washington, D.C., federal building so that reporters who had been staked out for hours in the hallway could not directly identify the lawyers entering or exiting the courtroom.
POLITICO in October broke the story linking the subpoena case to Mueller’s team after a reporter sitting in the court’s clerk office overheard a man request a document in the case from the special counsel’s office.
The man declined to identify himself or his client.
D.C. Circuit Judge Greg Katsas gave another clue connecting the case to Mueller when he was the only one of the court’s 10 active judges to recuse himself from the matter.
Katsas, the court’s only Trump appointee, had worked on the Russia investigation while in the Trump White House and pledged during his confirmation hearing to take a broad view of his recusal obligations because of that work.
Considering what’s been reported about Mueller’s focus so far, there appear to be two particularly likely possibilities here:
A Russian company: For obvious reasons, this could be a state-owned Russian company. The Steele dossier made various uncorroborated claims about planned payoffs to Trump associates involving the oil company Rosneft. Trump transition adviser Erik Prince met the manager of a Russian sovereign wealth fund in Seychelles. There have been claims that the bank VTB was involved in the Trump Tower Moscow talks, and the chair of a different bank, VEB, met with Jared Kushner during the transition. (None of these companies have been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the Mueller probe.)
A Gulf state company: Many reports this year have made clear Mueller is scrutinizing money trails and influence operations from Gulf states — the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are said to have come under scrutiny. It’s unclear why exactly Mueller has focused on this, and no charges have been brought on the topic just yet.