Regarding: Sealed Indictments

Exec Summary: Initial results call into question Sealed Indictments implications. Further study needed.

We’ve all heard about the ~28,000+ sealed indictments filed across the US since October of 2017.

This has been taken by many (including myself) as strong proof of what is going on behind the scenes.

I decided to look into this a little more deeply, and would like to share my methods and results.

First of all, you can always go to @Arazel50 for up to date details on the research being done on the sealed indictments. Great resource.

From the pinned tweet at @Arazel50 we get this link to the compiled results from the research: <omitted> 

One of the documents to be found at that link is: “Search for Sealed Indictments on Pacer.gov”. This document has detailed and clear instructions on how to replicate the search results about sealed indictments.

One of the claims being made is that the total volume of sealed indictments being filed dwarfs the number that have been filed historically. If we could validate this claim that would provide strong confirmation that something “unusual” is going on behind the scenes… Specifically, that same @Arazel50 pinned tweet links to an article from 2009 which states, “We found 1,077 sealed criminal cases among 66,458 criminal cases filed in 2006”. This is compared to 28k+ filed in just the last several months!

How can we validate that this is true?

Simple! We simply use the exact same Pacer.gov techniques to research sealed indictments for months prior to October of 2017! If our theory is correct then we should see a big difference in the number of filings pre/post that time.

Well, to cut to the chase, I did a (small) sampling of months prior to 10/2017 and I saw filing rates of sealed indictments that were roughly comparable to the rates after 10/2017! In other words, no big change pre/post 10/2017

NOTE: I only did a small sample. Specifically I only looked at filings in Connecticut, and only sampled a small number of months, so these results are not definitive, but they are suggestive.

My results showed that, contrary to my expectations, there was no big jump in sealed indictments filed since 10/2017. Or, to put it another way, as I went further back into time prior to 10/2017 I did not see a big drop in sealed indictments. That is until I jumped back into 2015, and then in fact there was a very big drop.

Conclusion: I believe the techniques being used by the existing sealed indictments team should be extended back further into the past (prior to 10/2017), possibly for many months, or even years. Only in this way we will we be able to see clear and definitive evidence (or not) that there has been a big uptick in sealed indictments as has been claimed.

I was originally motivated by a desire to see definitive proof about the uptick in sealed indictments, but what I found did not support that. I put in as much time as I had available to bring things this far, and now I request that the community research this further to confirm/refute my findings.

Note that I still believe we are living through a historic period where we are on the cusp of learning about years (decades) of corruption within government(s), and that some form of reckoning is in process. Even if the specific claims of a huge uptick starting in 10/2017 are not true, that does not invalidate the fundamental premise that underlies current events.

Personally, I still think that the pain is coming :)

I am the sole author of the above, and I hereby commit it to the public domain for use by anyone for any purpose in any way as they see fit in perpetuity. — Anonymous

Thank you to the original Sealed Indictment team, and to all who have taken the time to read this, and of course to Q, Q+, and friends.