Aloha,
That was my first thought when reading about the 'glitch' made by the
DoJ when Assange's name was mentionned in an unrelated case paper. I
tested the idea on a friend who found it not far from 'sniffed at by
rats' (Dutch loc for bollocks). Yesterday I was interviewed on radio (no
worries about massive exposure - it was a local Amsterdam pirate
station) & repeated the hypothesis - zero response. So I went on a
little search (always check yr sources _after_ having spoken!) and:
Bingo!
Cheers from back in Tuscany
p+7D!
Original to:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/julian-assange-indictment-robert-mueller-roger-stone
Has Robert Mueller Just Revealed His Next Target?
The secret indictment of Julian Assange could be bad news for Roger
Stone.
by Isobel Thompson
November 16, 2018
After stepping out of the headlines and into the courtroom as part of a
pre-midterms cease-fire, Robert Mueller appears poised to make his
dramatic return to national politics with a new set of indictments
centered around WikiLeaks and Roger Stone. According to multiple
reports, the special counsel has been zeroing in on whether Stone or
other Donald Trump associates had advance knowledge of Russia’s hacking
of Clinton e-mails, which WikiLeaks later published. (Stone denies
this.) A peripheral figure in the Stone saga is, of course, Julian
Assange, who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, but has spent the last six years
holed up in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, evading authorities in both
Sweden and the United States. If Mueller were to make his next move
against Stone, he might also be expected to take action against Assange.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that Assange’s name also surfaced this
week, thanks to a slipup by the Department of Justice.
According to The Washington Post, an August 22 filing in an unrelated
case mentions Assange twice by name. Arguing that a case involving a man
accused of coercing a minor for sex should be kept sealed, Assistant
U.S. Attorney Kellen Dwyer, who is also working on a long-standing case
against WikiLeaks, wrote that both the charges and the arrest warrant
“would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection
with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer
evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.” Elsewhere in the
filing, Dwyer wrote that “due to the sophistication of the defendant and
the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep
confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.” Seamus Hughes, a
terrorism expert at the George Washington University, first noted both
mentions. “To be clear, seems Freudian, it’s for a different completely
unrelated case, every other page is not related to him,” he wrote on
Twitter. The office “just appears to have Assange on the mind when
filing motions to seal and used his name.”
Exactly what charges Assange is facing remains unclear. In the past,
prosecutors have considered conspiracy, violating the Espionage Act, and
theft of government property. During the Obama administration, the
Justice Department held back on going after Assange amid concerns that
doing so was similar to prosecuting a news outlet. (Charging someone for
publishing accurate information, Assange’s lawyer Barry Pollack told The
Guardian on Thursday, is “a dangerous path for a democracy to take.”)
The recently ousted Jeff Sessions, however, took a more Draconian stance
on government leaks, and prosecutors were reportedly told over the
summer that they could start compiling a complaint. So far, the D.O.J.
has not offered further details. “That was not the intended name for
this filing,” Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the United States
Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, told The New
York Times, explaining that “the court filing was made in error.”
Whether Assange will be charged as part of the Russia probe is also
unknown, though it seems likely. Presumably, the mention of Assange’s
name in legal documents has spooked Trumpworld, which is already on edge
in anticipation of the next Mueller bombshell. According to Politico,
the White House suspects more indictments are imminent, potentially
targeting a cabal of Trump family members and associates for their
connections to WikiLeaks. On Wednesday, the special counsel delivered a
one-page motion to a Washington judge stating that former Trump campaign
deputy chairman Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the
U.S. and making a false statement in a federal investigation, “continues
to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations.” Then, on
Thursday, Mueller’s office and Paul Manafort’s lawyers jointly requested
a 10-day extension to file a report pertaining to the former campaign
chairman’s sentencing.
Trump allies are feeling the pressure. Conspiracy theorist and
commentator Jerome Corsi, a Stone ally, has said he expects to be
indicted for perjury, and told The Guardian that Mueller’s team grilled
him on Assange and Brexiteer Nigel Farage, the latter of whom has links
to both WikiLeaks and Trump. Donald Trump Jr., too, is said to be
bracing for a legal showdown—as three sources recently told my colleague
Gabriel Sherman, the president’s eldest son has “been telling friends he
is worried about being indicted as early as this week.” (His lawyer,
Alan Futerfas, denied this, saying in a statement, “Don never said any
such thing, and there is absolutely no truth to these rumors.”)
As paranoia, media scrutiny, and the hashtag #indictmentpalooza pick up,
the president, who has been working with lawyers on written answers to a
series of Mueller’s questions, also appears to be on tenterhooks. “The
inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have
found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and
shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the
answers they want,” he wrote on Twitter Thursday, ending an almost
two-month hiatus of attacks on the Russia probe. “They are a disgrace to
our Nation and don’t care how many lives [they] ruin.”
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