A mysterious case playing out in Washington amid tight secrecy – and presumed to involve the special counsel Robert Mueller – has been revealed to concern an unnamed corporation, owned by an equally anonymous foreign country.
The US circuit court of appeals on Tuesday issued a ruling that answered some of the questions in a judicial drama that has increasingly obsessed Mueller-watchers intrigued by the exceptional lengths to which the US government has gone to keep it secret. In several other regards, however, the judgment merely deepened the mystery.
The case, referred to in public dockets as 18-3071 with the evocative title Sealed v Sealed, began in August. All that was then known was that it related to a dispute between a grand jury and an unnamed party against whom the grand jury had issued a subpoena.
With all documents in the proceedings closed to public scrutiny, and with Politico reporting in October that one of its journalists had overheard someone in the appeals court clerk’s office requesting Mueller’s latest sealed filing in the case, a mushroom cloud of speculation was unleashed.
Leading observers of the Mueller inquiry speculated that the party resisting the grand jury’s subpoena could be none other than Donald Trump, though that idea was later debunked. Others wondered about the vice-president, Mike Pence, being at the center of it all.
The frenzy reached fever pitch last Friday when several reporters were physically cleared from the entire fifth storey of the DC circuit court before a closed-door hearing. Lawyers from both sides were secreted into the courtroom undetected and undercover.
Tuesday’s ruling dispenses with some of the most lurid theories concerning the case. We now know that the grand jury’s subpoena refers not to an individual but to an anonymous corporation “owned by Country A”. The corporation had been trying to…
