RUTHFULLY YOURS

The president was told of the indictments before he traveled. Yet the plain effect of the announcement was to raise further doubts about the wisdom of the meeting—and perhaps to shape its agenda. Neither is the business of the special counsel or anyone else at the Justice Department. The department has a longstanding policy, not directly applicable here but at least analogous, that candidates should not be charged close to an election, absent urgent need, lest the charges themselves affect the outcome. The general principle would seem to apply: Prosecutors are supposed to consider the impact of their actions on significant events outside the criminal-justice system, and to act with due diffidence.

From a law-enforcement standpoint, there was nothing urgent about these indictments. All 12 defendants are in Russia; none are likely ever to see the inside of a U.S. courtroom.

Alternative strategies were available. In 2008 Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, known to law enforcement as the “Merchant of Death” and the defendant in a sealed indictment, was lured in a sting by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Thailand, where he was seized. The Thais, to their great credit, resisted heavy Russian pressure to release him. Instead they fulfilled their treaty obligations and granted a U.S. extradition request.

It has been argued that the objective of last week’s indictments was not to prosecute the defendants but to “name and shame” them. They were named, and even their military intelligence units disclosed—but shamed? In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector to the U.K., was poisoned in London with polonium from a Russian nuclear facility. Litvinenko had charged that Vladimir Putin was directly responsible for bombing a Moscow apartment building in 1999, an event used as a pretext for the invasion of Chechnya. CONTINUE AT SITE