How a George Washington U. Researcher Stumbled Across a Huge Government Secret

Seamus Hughes was reading Dragons Love Tacos to his 4-year-old boy on Thursday evening when someone texted him a Wall Street Journal article about the U.S. Justice Department’s quiet plans to criminally charge Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.

The article reminded Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, of an obscure court filing that he had read a few days earlier. In the filing, which did not directly concern Assange, Hughes had seen a passing mention to the charging of the anti-secrecy activist, a reference that Hughes had dismissed at the time as a typo.

But the Journal’s report made clear that Hughes had stumbled upon something quite remarkable: a major government secret that was hidden in plain sight. At 7:48 p.m., his son now snuggled in bed and fast asleep, Hughes tweeted his findings.

You guys should read EDVA court filings more, cheaper than a Journal subscription pic.twitter.com/YULeeQphmd

— Seamus Hughes (@SeamusHughes) November 16, 2018

The court filing was significant in that it provided official documentation of the Justice Department’s confidential case against Assange. It’s not clear what Assange may be charged with, but a prosecution tied to divulging secrets, as WikiLeaks has done over many years, could have implications for press freedoms.

In 2016, WikiLeaks published thousands of emails from Democrats that federal prosecutors say were stolen by Russian intelligence officers as part of a campaign to disrupt the presidential election.

Hughes’s bit part in uncovering these dramatic developments brings rare attention to the tedious work of academics, who often toil in obscurity and fixate on tiny details that few would bother to notice. Hughes spends countless hours combing through filings in the nation’s 94 federal judicial districts to track terrorism cases. In the past three years, he and his colleagues have pulled together some 15,000 pages of legal documents to give policy makers and the public a better picture of the nature of terrorism threats in the United States.

“Unless you have the weird and overwhelming obsession I do to figure out terrorism cases in the legal system, it’s unlikely that anyone would have seen this,” says Hughes, who is 34.

Hughes started his career on Capitol Hill as an aide to the Senate’s homeland-security committee, and he has been a counterterrorism adviser. He is a staff member, not a professor, at George Washington, where he teaches courses on homegrown terrorism and violent extremism. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Maryland at College Park.

The errant information about Assange appeared in an unrelated court filing about Seitu Sulayman Kokayi, who has been charged with soliciting sex with a minor. Hughes was interested in the case because Kokayi is also suspected of terrorism.

Established in 2015, George Washington’s Program on Extremism more closely resembles a think tank than an academic department. The center’s work is designed for public consumption, so it’s not full of the sort of disciplinary jargon one finds in academic journals. At the same time, Hughes’s day-to-day job looks a lot like that of a faculty member. He spends most of his time doing the boring stuff that Jack Ryan does off screen.

“Behind all of this are a bunch of nerds like me,” Hughes says, “diving through documents and trying to make sense of research questions.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.