How a court found the government could be accusing Julian Assange: NPR

One minute, Seamus Hughes was reading the book Dragons love tacos to his son. A few minutes later, after laying him to bed, Hughes was back on his computer, stumbling over what could be one of the best-kept secrets of the US government: that the Justice Department is preparing perhaps criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Hughes, who calls himself "an executioner of the court records," made the discovery on Thursday by examining documents filed over the summer with the Virginia District Court in the eastern district. As Deputy Director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, Hughes helps to sort out thousands of terrorism cases each year. "In this case", he said: "I was looking at a completely different file".

"The reason I was looking at this is because one person was accused of seducing a minor, but the prosecutor was a national security attorney," he said. Hughes said in an interview with Lakshmi Singh, of NPR.

The file was in his inbox for three days. He discussed the need to keep the records of the case under seal and argued that "because of the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other proceedings It is of a nature to keep confidential the fact that Assange was charged. "

The line has triggered his memory. Hughes said that he had recently read a the Wall Street newspaper report on the American prosecution of Assange.

"I thought I'd make a joke about how to reduce costs if you looked at court records instead of buying them at court the Wall Street newspaper", he said, so he posted an image of the document on Twitter and wrote: "You should read the documents of the EDVA Court more, cheaper than a newspaper subscription."

On Friday morning, the Twitter post contained hundreds of retweets and thousands of "likes". "I look at my wife, I say 'I think something happened last night,' and then we get The Washington Post this morning and the first page is all that, and The New York Times and all the others after that, and I thought, "I guess it'll be one of those Fridays." "

Carrie Johnson and Colin Dwyer, of NPR, said it was not clear whether any charges against Assange had actually been filed. If they do, it is also difficult to know if they are related to the investigation of the special advocate Robert Mueller on the interference of Russia in the US. 2016 election or previous publication of sensitive information by the government through WikiLeaks.

Attorneys in Virginia called the filing was a mistake. "This was not the name for this filing," said Joshua Stueve, spokesman for the US Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Virginia. The New York Times.

Hughes said that the "accidental disclosure" that he had found in court documents was most likely the result of a human error – an accidental case of cutting / pasting.

"It seems like the same prosecutor is looking at these two cases, you know, these prosecutors are overworked, they have a huge workload and some failures have been made, and I think that's not the case. that's one of those honest mistakes. "

Hughes said that he was thinking about the lawyer who had made the mistake, adding that, in retrospect, he might have taken a different approach.

"Looking back, I probably would have called the Department of Justice last night if I realized what I had done and if I asked for a comment, I went from there, sort of through stuff. almost journalistic, but I did not know what it was when I was watching, it really is, "he said.

He added that this discovery also led him to rethink his approach to research.

"Non-sealing motions are very boring," said Hughes, referring to the type of disc he was reading at the time of his discovery. "They have two or three pages, it says exactly the same thing every time, the judge signs it and moves on, no, now I will not be the one who will look at it very quickly and close it."

Elizabeth Baker and Natalie Winston of NPR produced and edited this story for broadcast.