WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

Our top Catholic Cardinal George Pell sought sanctuary

Asylum seekers seek sanctuary where they can find it.

Seeking asylum is seeking sanctuary, Walter.

The Vatican is a nation-state, with its own laws, and its own police.

It's not a church. It's a nation within a nation.

Don't you have free movement in Australia?

It took about nine calendar months of public outcry to get the Pope to pressure Cardinal Pell to return and face his accusers. The case has been closed to public attendance for whatever reason.

Under several centuries of Roman Catholic tradition, the church will not expel anyone who seeks its sanctuary. A spokesman for the State Department's Panama Task Force, Richard Sanders, declined to speculate on what steps the U.S. government might take to bring Noriega to the United States. Fitzwater said the United States "will continue to pursue avenues for bringing General Noriega, now located, to justice." However, his decision to seek asylum in an embassy, particularly a Vatican embassy, may give Noriega a strong hand in any negotiations over his future. "If he wants to stay there forever and ever, he could do it," said Margaret Crahan, a professor of religion and a board member of the Interamerican Institute of Human Rights of the Organization of American States. "It is highly unlikely they {the Vatican} would cooperate to remove him. It is too risky for them to violate the principle of sanctuary." Ironically, the papal nuncio in Panama City has been highly critical of Noriega, and the Vatican legation has provided refuge for Noriega opponents.

The U.S. Justice Department inadvertently named Julian Assange in a court filing in an unrelated case, suggesting prosecutors have prepared charges against the WikiLeaks founder under seal.

Assange's name appears twice in an August court filing from a federal prosecutor in Virginia, who was attempting to keep sealed a separate case involving a man accused of coercing a minor for sex.

In one sentence, the prosecutor wrote that the charges and arrest warrant "would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint, and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter."

In another part of the filing, the prosecutor said that "due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged."

Any charges against Assange could help illuminate the question of whether Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election.

It would also suggest that, after years of internal wrangling within the Justice Department, prosecutors have decided to take a more aggressive tack against the secret-sharing website.

It was not immediately clear what charges Assange, who has been holed up for years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, might face.

But recently ousted U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions last year declared the arrest of Assange a priority. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating whether Trump campaign associates had advance knowledge of Democratic emails that were published by WikiLeaks in the weeks before the 2016 election and that U.S. authorities have said were hacked by Russia.

Any arrest could represent a significant development for Mueller's investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the election.

WikiLeaks has attracted U.S. attention since 2010, when it published thousands of military and State Department documents from Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning. In a Twitter post early Friday, WikiLeaks said the "U.S. case against WikiLeaks started in 2010" and expanded to include other disclosures, including by contractor Edward Snowden.

"The prosecutor on the order is not from Mr. Mueller's team and WikiLeaks has never been contacted by anyone from his office," WikiLeaks said.