Co-conspirator in Russia meddling probe made Atlanta trip

The probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election made a pit stop in Atlanta.

Indictments announced on Friday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller accuse 13 Russian nationals of using social media and other activities to influence voters in the race between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The legal papers say that in November 2014 one of the co-conspirators traveled to Atlanta for five days. The details of the visit were not immediately clear.

The unnamed co-conspirator submitted a summary of the itinerary and expenses for the trip to Sergey Pavlovich Polozov, one of the 13 conspirators named in the charges.

The indictment alleges that Polozov managed the IT department for the conspiracy from 2014 to 2016 and oversaw the procurement of American servers and computer infrastructure that “masked the conspiracy’s Russian location when conducting operations within the United States.”

The indictment states that two of the defendants received visas in 2014 and traveled around the United States including stops in Nevada, California, New Mexico. Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana and New York to gather intelligence.

Prosecutors said the Russian Internet Research Agency employed hundreds of people starting in about 2014 to undermine America’s political processes with the goal of waging “information warfare against the United States of America.” The group continued its operations through the 2016 presidential elections, according to the indictment.

The propaganda was aimed at steering U.S. voters toward Trump and away from Clinton.