The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is seeking to unseal the exact charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — and the judge hearing the case was appointed by Bill Clinton.
The case is being heard in the Eastern District of Virginia on Tuesday.
In what appears to have been a copy and paste error in a filing, it was revealed last week that the Justice Department has filed secret charges against Assange. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is seeking access to any criminal complaint, indictment or other charging documents relating to the case.
The US government is arguing that the press and the public have no right to know what the charges against the publisher actually are.
“In either event, the government is not required to publicly acknowledge which of those two possibilities happens to be the case with respect to any individual,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg wrote in a filing. “The First Amendment does not require the government to confirm or deny the existence of criminal charges in this case.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer added that the charges “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,” according to a report from Bloomberg.
The judge in the case is Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed by Clinton in 1993.
In 2017, Brinkema was the second judge to order a stay of an executive order by President Donald Trump, which was widely considered by the right to have been an act of judicial activism. The order would have temporarily halted immigration from certain terrorism hotbeds to the US. In an article for the New Yorker titled, ‘Another Judge Has a Problem With Trump,’ Amy Davidson Sorkin wrote about Brinkema’s decision — and belief that Trump’s national security concerns were a “sham.”
The Assange hearing is scheduled to take place at 10 a.m. at the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Virginia, in Alexandria. It is open to the press and the public.
The Gateway Pundit will be attending the hearing and providing updates from the court.
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