A former health care worker who was accused of illegally accessing the health care records of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court, posting them online and then trying to hide what he had done was sentenced on Thursday to two years in prison, federal prosecutors said.
The former worker, Trent James Russell, 34, was convicted by a federal jury in July of illegally accessing health care records and destroying or altering records. He was acquitted on a charge of disclosing individually identifiable health information.
Justice Ginsburg’s name is redacted from all the court records in the case, but The Associated Press reported that “all sides openly acknowledged that Ginsburg was the victim of the privacy breach.”
Charles Burnham, Mr. Russell’s lawyer, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on Thursday. According to court records, Mr. Burnham had sought a sentence of probation or home detention sentence for his client, arguing that Mr. Russell was a “veteran, husband, son and distinguished medical professional” who had “lived a quietly heroic life.”
Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment on the case on Thursday, but in a court filing on Oct. 31 in which they recommended a sentence of two and a half years in prison, they said that Mr. Russell “clearly believes he is smarter than everybody else.”
“The defendant’s inflated self-conception has led him to commit serious and invasive crimes and then repeatedly try to lie his way out of the consequences,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Russell, who worked as an organ donation transplant coordinator at the Washington Regional Transplant Community, obtained Justice Ginsburg’s records in January 2019, according to prosecutors. They noted that at the time he was “interested in a conspiracy theory promulgated on the Politically Incorrect pages of the 4chan messaging board.”
Prosecutors said in court records that Mr. Russell’s job gave him access to the electronic medical record systems for the various hospitals in the Washington area, but he was only supposed to access them when coordinating organ donations.
“He did not let that stop him,” prosecutors said in court filings, adding that Mr. Russell searched for Justice Ginsburg’s medical record, found it and took a screenshot of the information as it was displayed on the search screen without going into the file.
Mr. Russell then tried to cover up his actions by searching names that were “purely designed to throw anyone reviewing search logs off the scent,” prosecutors said.
After obtaining the screenshot, prosecutors said, Mr. Russell posted the information on 4chan, an anonymous message board known for fostering conspiracy theories, and claimed that it showed that Justice Ginsburg had already died, according to prosecutors said in court records. He again tried to cover up his tracks by deleting the post, they said, but by that time it had already been widely shared.
According to prosecutors, “his screenshot became a supporting exhibit in the divisive, democracy-undermining, and just plain hateful conspiracy circulating the internet.”
When an investigation was opened into how the information had ended up on the internet, Mr. Russell formatted his hard drive to “erase, destroy, and alter the data on it and to obstruct the investigation,” according to prosecutors. He would go on to lie about his involvement to his employer and to the F.B.I. which questioned him in February 2019, they said. He also gave F.B.I. agents a secondary hard drive instead of his primary operating system drive “in a further effort to obstruct the investigation,” prosecutors said.
Early 2019 was a tenuous time for Justice Ginsburg amid heavy public speculation about her health and her ability to serve on the nation’s highest court. In January of that year, a Supreme Court spokeswoman announced that Justice Ginsburg was cancer free after a surgery the previous month. Shortly before she died on Sept. 18, 2020, Justice Ginsburg told her granddaughter Clara Spera that “my most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” NPR reported.
On Sept. 26, 2020, during an early evening ceremony in the Rose Garden, President Donald Trump introduced Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his choice to fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat. The U.S. Senate voted to confirm Justice Barrett to the court on Oct. 26, 2020 — about a week before Election Day 2020.
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