Mueller Defends Prosecution of ‘Putin’s Chef’ and Russian Trolls

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller pushed back against a company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s chef,” telling a federal judge that the charges filed against the firm -- conspiracy to defraud the U.S. -- aren’t dependent on proving that election interference is a crime.

The special counsel’s office wrote in a filing that prosecutors only need to show that the company, Concord Management and Consulting, and its alleged co-conspirators agreed to engage in conduct that violated their duties to register as foreign agents and report campaign expenditures. “The government is not required to prove that the conspirators actually violated” federal election and campaign finance laws, prosecutors wrote.