The trial continues: Klyushin does not admit guilt
I haven’t told you for a long time what is happening in the Vladislav Klyushin case. There, the start of the consideration of the case on the merits is approaching: on January 18, the last pre-trial conference of the parties and the court will take place, and the process itself should start on January 30. The parties are already preparing for jury selection.
Klyushin not only did not admit guilt, but is also actively fighting for his acquittal: he has already filed motions to terminate certain episodes of the case, to declare evidence inadmissible, and now the court is considering a motion in limine - a special motion that concerns the possibility of the parties presenting evidence to the jury - and Daubert Hearing is carried out - in some way a “continuation” of the petition in limine, which is devoted to the admissibility of expert testimony.
Moreover, Klyushin’s defense is trying to wrest the determination of territorial jurisdiction from under the prosecution’s feet (if the court agrees with this, then it will work out, then the court in Massachusetts does not have the authority to consider this case, and the collected evidence may be considered obtained illegally).
However, the court did not agree with the defense regarding the dismissal of the case and the inadmissibility of evidence. Let's see what the court says about other petitions, but for now I'll briefly talk about some of them.
Klyushin's case is being prosecuted by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts. This happened because when illegally obtaining information, for which Klyushin and his accomplices are accused, they gained access to two servers that were physically located in the state. The defense argues that the two IP addresses were not hosted in Boston, and that the MaxMind information cited by the prosecution is inaccurate. In particular, the defense says that the company has repeatedly made mistakes in determining the location of the server by IP address and itself claims that it cannot guarantee the location of the server. The prosecution tried to block this defense argument with invoices for the purchase of servers that are located specifically in Boston, but the defense asks them to be excluded as irrelevant.
The defense is also trying to convince the court of several circumstances at once that the jury cannot possibly know:
- the defense insists that it is impossible to use the information that another defendant in the case is Ivan Ermakov, who was previously accused by the United States of interfering in the 2016 elections and attacking the servers of the anti-doping agency. The defense insists that such accusations against Ermakov could negatively affect the jury's perception of Klyushin, and in general the accusations against Ermakov have never been tested in court. And in general, there is no evidence in the case that Ermakov is connected with the GRU, so this too cannot be mentioned in front of the jury. It is also impossible to say that Ermakov worked for Klyushin’s M-13 company.
- it is also impossible to mention in front of the jury that the accused in 2018 read an article on the Reuters website that Ukrainian hackers were convicted in the United States of insider trading. According to the defense, this article does not prove anything, but will cause prejudice.
- the defense asks to exclude information that, in parallel with Klyushin, identical transactions of purchase and sale of shares were carried out by Sladkov and Irzak. According to the defense, Klyushin does not know these people, did not work with them and does not even have any contacts, and the prosecutor’s office has not proven otherwise.
- standardly (a similar approach was taken, for example, in the Tom Barrack case), the defense asks to exclude mention of Klyushin’s financial condition.
Finally, the defense asks to change the preventive measure for Klyushin, since the pre-trial detention center is located approximately 60 km from the court and traveling such a distance under escort every day would be too tiring for the defendant.
Author: Igor Slabykh
