On the eve of Trump's historic meeting with Vladimir Putin – with Russia-US relations at their worst since the fall of the USSR – Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller handed down 12 indictments of Russian military intelligence operatives accused of participating in the 2016 hacks of the DNC, DCC and Clinton presidential campaign. This is it, we're supposed to think. The proof we've all been waiting for – that Russia hacked the election. It's not quite the holy grail of Collusion, but it's red meat to the starving faithful. It is now the skeptics' turn to wipe the egg off our faces.

No?

US courts will indict a ham sandwich, goes the proverb. Mueller indicted 13 Russians linked to the "troll farm" Internet Research Agency in February, hoping that they wouldn't bother to appear in court, not being bound by US law or having anything to gain by participating in his show trial. But a few sent their lawyers and demanded discovery, which would have forced Mueller to reveal the evidence he had against them. Finding his own indictments riddled with errors – one of the companies named didn't even exist at the time of the election – Mueller quietly backpedaled. Score one for the Russians.

But this time he has evidence, right? Surely he wouldn't make that mistake again. And this time it's Russian military operatives, not some two-bit troll-farmers! The indictment accuses them of spear-phishing Democratic staffers and using those login credentials to access the party's servers, stealing the famous documents and leaking them to the public through Wikileaks and DCLeaks (though they seem unsure whether DCLeaks is a person or a website). Isn't this what we've all been waiting for?

Perhaps it would be, if the FBI had actually encountered the servers firsthand. Government investigators (from both the FBI and the DHS, which also wanted in on the action) never even laid eyes on the "hacked" servers belonging to the DNC and DCCC, instead relying on the assessment of a computer security firm headed by a Russian expat with an ax to grind against his former government. Dmitri Alperovitch's CrowdStrike specializes in attributing malware attacks to state actors – a no-no in the computer security industry, and something he was discouraged from doing by former employer McAfee (whose founder has personally commented on the lack of evidence implicating Russia in the DNC hack). Alperovitch launched CrowdStrike to offer his attribution services to clients like the US government which might care more about blaming a hack on a government than finding out how to protect against such hacks in the first place. 

The DNC hired CrowdStrike to find evidence that Russia was behind the hack on its servers. CrowdStrike dutifully found (produced, embellished) that evidence. When the FBI came knocking, the Democrats had no interest in getting a second opinion about who'd been rooting around in their digital underwear drawer, and Alperovitch certainly didn't want some upstart security expert revealing his business model was hideously flawed. Fortunately, James Comey's FBI was sympathetic to the Democrats' concerns and took CrowdStrike's assessment as valid legal proof as if its own agents had poked through those servers themselves.

If this dubious information, sourced from an unaccountable third party never placed under oath with numerous reasons to lie or at least mislead, was used as evidential basis for any indictment, that indictment cannot stand up in court. The foundations of Mueller's case collapse on even the most cursory scrutiny (that article refers to the original 13 indictments, but unless a clean chain of evidence was used to generate the latest 12, its conclusions remain applicable). CrowdStrike delivers geopolitically-actionable conclusions swaddled in just enough technical jargon to dissuade observers from looking too closely. It's a perfect dance partner for the Deep State hawks who want war with Russia, whether it's another 50 years of cold war or (and this is what they jerk off to at night) a hot, sexy, nuclear war, a proper World War 3, something they could tell the kids about (if they hadn't nuked humanity off the planet).