The US Department of Justice has inadvertently named Julian Assange in a court document which suggests the WikiLeaks founder may have been charged in secret.
A court filing from a prosecutor in Virginia in a case unrelated to Assange mentions his name twice.
The document, which urges a judge to keep the matter sealed, states 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”.
The prosecutor later says 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”.
WikiLeaks said on Twitter that it was an apparent “cut and paste” mistake. The Justice Department has said the filing was made in error.
Jennifer Robinson, Assange’s lawyer in the UK, said: “The US indictment of Assange is a grave violation of press freedoms.
“The Trump administration is seeking to extend US law worldwide, claiming that it is a criminal offence for a publisher in Europe to reveal evidence of US government abuses.
“How long until China, Russia or Saudi Arabia follow suit, citing the US example?”
Assange has been living inside Ecuador’s embassy in London for more than six years after the country granted him asylum as he tried to avoid extradition to Sweden.
Any arrest could have an impact on the investigation in the US into any ties between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign.
US officials have previously acknowledged that federal prosecutors based in Alexandria have been conducting a lengthy criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder, Reuters reports.
Assange and his supporters have periodically said US authorities had filed secret criminal charges against him, an assertion against which some US officials pushed back until recently.
The filing was discovered by Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at George Washington University in Washington DC, who said on Twitter: “To be clear, seems Freudian, it’s for a different completely unrelated case, every other page is not related to him, EDVA just appears to have Assange on the mind when filing motions to seal and used his name.”
Representatives of the US administration of President Donald Trump, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have publicly called for Assange to be aggressively prosecuted.
Facing extradition from Britain to Sweden to be questioned in a sexual molestation case, Assange six years ago took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy, where initially he was treated as a welcome guest.
But following a change in the government of the south American nation, Ecuadorean authorities last March began to crack down on his access to outsiders and for a time cut off his internet access.