<nettime> Isobel Thompson: Is Mueller targetting Assange? (Vanity Fair)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

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.”


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: