WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange has been charged in the US, the organization said, in a development that could have implications for US Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
Prosecutors inadvertently disclosed the existence of a sealed indictment in a court filing in an unrelated case, WikiLeaks said on Thursday.
The exact nature of the charges against Assange was not immediately known.
“SCOOP: US Department of Justice ‘accidentally’ reveals existence of sealed charges (or a draft for them) against WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange in apparent cut-and-paste error in an unrelated case also at the Eastern District of Virginia,” WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter.
The still unsealed charges against Assange were revealed by Assistant US Attorney Kellen Dwyer as he made a filing in the unrelated case and urged a judge to keep that filing sealed.
A scan of the document showed Dwyer wrote: “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.”
The charges would “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested,” Dwyer wrote.
US media were alerted late on Thursday to the inadvertent disclosure, thanks to a tweet from Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. He is known to follow court filings closely.
“The court filing was made in error,” said Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia, US media reported. “That was not the intended name for this filing.”
“The only thing more irresponsible than charging a person for publishing truthful information would be to put in a public filing information that clearly was not intended for the public and without any notice to Mr. Assange,” the Washington Post quoted Assange’s attorney Barry Pollack as saying.
Pollack said he did not know if Assange has been charged.
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