A former health care worker was convicted Wednesday of illegally accessing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s medical records in 2019 as she was battling cancer, a move prosecutors claimed was driven by online conspiracy theories about her health.
But the jury acquitted Trent Russell of a separate charge stemming from the posting of those records online. Prosecutors had claimed that Russell, a former Army medic who worked as an organ transplant coordinator, shared the documents on the message board site 4chan.
The unusual case had political overtones as prosecutors painted Russell as engaging with conspiracy theories online that falsely claimed Ginsburg had already died in 2019 and that Democrats were hiding her death to deny former President Donald Trump a chance to nominate a third justice to the high court.
The trial in a federal court in Virginia lasted two days, and the jury deliberated for four-and-a-half hours. Russell faces a maximum sentence of 21 years in prison.
Ginsburg, a member of the court’s liberal wing who enjoyed an unusual degree of celebrity for a Supreme Court justice, died in 2020 and was replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett before Trump left the White House.
Russell denied ever accessing Ginsburg’s records, said he voted for former President Barack Obama in 2012, and claimed he rarely even thought about the justices – let alone engage in conspiracy theories about their health. Instead, he described a workplace where computer security was lax and the sharing of passwords needed to access medical records was routine.
Russell had access to the records in the first place because of his job connecting patients who needed organs to potential donors. He was authorized to review health records in those situations to ensure potential donors were a good candidate.
Supreme Court police noticed Ginsburg’s records circulating on social media sites and a subsequent FBI investigation determined that they were first posted on 4chan, a message board where users can post anonymously and that has long been a hotbed of hate speech and conspiracy theories.
Search logs reviewed by investigators indicated that Russell was logged into a desktop computer at home and had searched for the word “Gins” in a name field that would have brought up Ginsburg’s name. A review of his hard drive by the FBI also found evidence that he had previously viewed threads about Ginsburg’s health on 4chan.
But the hard drive had been reformatted and investigators were only able to pull fragments of its contents. Russell said he had no memory of the search and suggested it might have been a typo.
Prosecutors also alleged that Russell tried to cover his tracks as initial investigations into the data breach got underway, including by wiping the hard drive and also purchasing a new phone. The jury also convicted him Wednesday on a charge of destroying records.
Russell, who took the stand Tuesday in US District Judge Michael Nachmanoff’s courtroom, told the jury that he routinely reformatted his hard drive to improve computer performance. And he said he replaced the phone because of a cracked screen and intermittent charging.
The Supreme Court closely guards details about the health of the justices, but Ginsburg’s repeated bouts with cancer toward the end of her life were publicly disclosed. The court announced that Ginsburg was treated for pancreatic cancer in 2009. And in 2020, the justice disclosed she had was being treated with chemotherapy for a recurrence of cancer.
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