Sealed Indictments Up To 234,420 Cases?

I wanted to bring you an update to a very important story.

Remember all the talk about “sealed indictments”?

Well, even though most have not yet been “unsealed”, it looks like they have NOT gone away or slowed down.

I want to preface this by saying I’m just a reporter….if any of you have expertise in researching or searching these matters, I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

But here’s what I wanted to report.

MelQ on her Gab just reported this:

Here are the latest pending sealed federal indictments…

234,420 sealed cases
6359 added in February

http://Pacer.gov

Before 2017 the average number of indictments was around 1000 per year!

Also note that each indictment can have up to 39 people in it.

She says you can search for yourself on Pacer and see them.

I don’t know how to do that but if anyone reading this does, I’d love to hear from you!

Here are zoom-ins on those images:

Now let’s dig in a little more.

Can sealed indictments be searched and found?

I found this lengthy PDF from USCourts.gov from 2009 explaining a detailed search they conducted back then for sealed cases.

See it here:  https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/sealed-cases.pdf

So it looks to me based on that that you absolutely can find this kind of information.

Even ABC News back in 2018 reported that the number of current sealed cases is “unusual”….take a look:

Nearly three dozen sealed criminal indictments have been added to the federal court docket in Washington, D.C. since the start of 2018.

Sealed criminal court files are assigned a case number, but do not indicate the identity of the parties or the nature of the charges, so it is impossible for the public to discern what those sealed cases contain.

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But several legal experts told ABC News the number of sealed cases awaiting action right now is unusual. Fourteen were added to the docket since late August alone, a review by ABC News has found, just as the midterm elections were drawing near and longstanding Justice Department policy precluded prosecutors from taking any public action that could appear to be aimed at influencing political outcomes.

And the inadvertent discovery on Thursday night of what appear to be secret charges pending against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has drawn fresh attention to the mystery. Legal experts told ABC News that the sealed cases could be tied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possibly part of a quiet effort to protect his investigation from any premature effort to shut it down.

“I assume that Mueller knew that once the election was over, there could be an existential threat to his investigation,” said Matthew Miller, a former senior Justice official under former Attorney General Eric Holder. “He knew the best thing to do was act before that.”

Sealed indictments are often used in cases where a defendant is overseas and U.S. prosecutors don’t want to tip off their target before they have a chance to make an arrest. But they can also be used to pressure someone to flip on a more important target, according to Kendall Coffey, who served as U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida in the mid-1990s, “especially if there was someone who presented the hope of providing proactive assistance – undertaking conversations, especially recorded conversations with other suspects in the investigation.”

So what do you think?

Anymore more to add in the comments?