Mueller victorious...

Mueller appears victorious in mystery subpoena dispute

The ruling offers the intriguing detail that the entity fighting the Mueller subpoena is a foreign-owned company, not a specific individual, as many had speculated.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN and JOSH GERSTEIN

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered a mystery corporation owned by a foreign country to comply with a subpoena that appears to be from special counsel Robert Mueller.

The three-page opinion released by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is the latest twist in an opaque dispute that POLITICO and other media outlets have tied to Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The ruling offers the intriguing detail that the entity fighting the Mueller subpoena is a foreign government-owned company, not a specific individual, as many experts had speculated.

But the ruling also still leaves many important aspects of the fight shielded from public view, including the kind of work done by the company, the name of the country that owns the firm and just what information is being sought. The order also offers no direct confirmation that the matter involves Mueller’s team.

In the opinion, Judges David Tatel, Thomas Griffith and Stephen Williams unanimously sided with a lower federal district court in Washington, which had rejected the company’s attempts to quash the subpoena.

The appellate judges dismissed the company’s arguments that it’s immune from enforcement of the subpoena under a 1977 law that limits the ability of foreign nations to be sued in U.S. courts, as well as a separate argument that complying with the subpoena would violate the foreign country’s domestic laws.

The judges seemed particularly skeptical of the latter argument, suggesting that officials of the unnamed foreign nation might be trying to mislead the American court about what the foreign law actually requires.

“The submissions from the Corporation’s own counsel and — later — a regulator from Country A seeking to explain the Corporation’s textual interpretation lack critical indicia of reliability,” the three-judge panel wrote. “Consequently, we are unconvinced that Country A’s law truly prohibits the Corporation from complying 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 when approached by POLITICO.

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.

Mueller’s office has repeatedly declined to comment on the mystery case, and it did so again on Tuesday. Following a hearing in the case last Friday, CNN observed a Justice Department car pulling into the special counsel’s office building with two top Mueller attorneys about 10 minutes after the court activity in the D.C. Circuit appeared to end.

Exactly who is on the receiving end of the subpoena remains a guessing game, though Tuesday’s court opinion would appear to categorically rule out a range of individuals whose names have been floated, from President Donald Trump to Vice President Mike Pence. Trump and his personal attorneys have said the case does not involve a subpoena to the president.

Mueller’s investigation, while centering on Russian attempts to influence the presidential election on Trump’s behalf, has also drawn into the mix a number of foreign countries and companies, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the German investment company Deutsche Bank.

The firm under subpoena could seek a review of Tuesday’s decision by the full bench of the D.C. Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court.

The appellate court’s opinion also won’t be the last one on a Mueller-related matter.

A separate three-judge panel is still weighing a separate challenge to a Mueller subpoena from Andrew Miller, an associate of Trump ally Roger Stone. Oral arguments in that case took place last month, with Miller’s attorneys using the case to spearhead a direct legal assault on Mueller’s authority as special counsel.