Thread by @nimkef

16 Nov 2018

DoJ has secretly filed criminal charges against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, a person familiar with the case said, a drastic escalation of the government’s yearslong battle with him and his anti-secrecy group.

H/T @themarketswork

nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/…

Top DoJ officials told prosecutors over the summer that they could start drafting a complaint against Assange, current and former LEOs said. The charges came to light late Thursday through an unrelated court filing in which prosecutors inadvertently mentioned them.

“The court filing was made in error,” said Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia. “That was not the intended name for this filing.”

DoJ declined to say on Thursday what led to the inadvertent disclosure. It was made in a recently unsealed filing in an apparently unrelated sex-crimes case charging a man named Seitu Sulayman Kokayi w/ coercing & enticing an underage person to engage in unlawful sexual activity

Kokayi was charged in early August, and on Aug. 22, prosecutors filed a three-page document laying out boilerplate arguments for why his case at that time needed to remain sealed.

The filing started out referencing Kokayi, it switched on its second page to discussing the fact that someone named “Assange” had been secretly charged, suggesting that prosecutors had inadvertently pasted text from a similar court filing into the wrong document and then filed it

“Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of LE at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant & the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged."

“The complaint, supporting affidavit, and arrest warrant, as well as this motion and the proposed order, would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint & can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition”

July 2018
Mueller charged 12 Russians w/ crimes related to hacking & disseminating emails to interfere in the election, styled in part as a conspiracy to defraud the US. Part of that indictment referred to WikiLeaks, which it IDd as “Organization 1.”

d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2018/07…

“In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the D.N.C. and the chairman of the Clinton campaign to Organization 1,” the July indictment said.

“The conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Seamus Hughes, the terrorism expert, who is the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at GWU, posted a screenshot of the court filing on Twitter shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute Mr. Assange.