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As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sought to privately battle cancer, federal prosecutors said this week, her health records reached a dark corner of the internet where users floated antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Her information, according to court testimony from FBI agents, was accessed by an organ transplant coordinator while she was under the care of George Washington University Hospital in 2019 and then posted to the online message board 4chan, which is known for salacious and conspiracy-themed discussions.

Trent J. Russell was charged with illegally accessing and distributing Ginsburg’s records in violation of federal privacy protections. He faces a maximum sentence of 22 years in prison and tens of thousands of dollars in fines if convicted on all counts at his trial in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.

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Russell, 34, has pleaded not guilty. He told federal agents during an initial interview that it was possible his “cats had run across his keyboard,” according to a court filing.

“I never looked at medical records for patients I wasn’t assigned to,” Russell testified Tuesday, adding that he had made a “nervous joke” about his cats when he was first approached by federal investigators in February 2019.

The investigation began shortly after the data breach, when the Supreme Court police became aware of Ginsburg’s medical chart circulating on social media and contacted the FBI for help, according to court testimony. A former hospital executive testified that the spouse of a George Washington employee also spotted the justice’s chart online and alerted administrators.

Ginsburg’s patient chart first appeared on 4chan and quickly spread to Twitter and YouTube, an FBI agent testified Monday. The screenshot, which was displayed in court, shows Ginsburg’s name and the exact dates and times she received radiology, oncology and surgical treatment at the hospital from around 2014 to 2018.

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Another FBI agent testified Tuesday that the image first appeared in a 4chan discussion thread in which posters were using antisemitic tropes and advancing a conspiracy theory that Ginsburg had died in late 2018, and that Democratic politicians were covering up her death to deny President Donald Trump the opportunity to make a Supreme Court appointment.

Ginsburg was 87 when she died the year after the data breach, in September 2020, at her home in Washington. She was the second woman and first Jewish woman to serve on the high court and was known for her fierce opinions in support of gender equality and minority rights. A member of the Supreme Court police force testified that he escorted the justice to the hospital at least two or three times as her health began to wane and that the visits were always arranged to be “as discreet as possible” to protect her privacy.

Ginsburg was never referred as a potential organ donor to Russell’s employer, the Washington Regional Transplant Community, a federally designated organization that works to identify patients near death whose organs could be transplanted, witnesses testified.

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Lori Brigham, the organization’s founder and former chief executive, said transplant coordinators such as Russell had “no business being inside the chart” of any patient who had not been referred. She said Russell was well aware of the rules because of numerous agreements he signed and training sessions he underwent.

Hospital officials traced the search of Ginsburg’s data to one of Russell’s home computers, witnesses said. U.S. officials said he lied during the initial interview in 2019, saying his phone had been stolen when asked about the leak by investigators. The agents said he deleted data from a computer hard drive at his home.

His lawyer, Charles Burnham, took issue with the characterization in a court filing, saying “the agents were aware that Mr. Russell had not deleted his hard drive but had in fact ‘formatted’ it which is not the same thing.” Formatting a hard drive entails erasing its data to improve system performance. Russell also told investigators he had shared his hospital log-in credentials with others.

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He told the jury that he was “not particularly” political, that he had last voted in the 2012 presidential election for President Barack Obama, that he served as an Army combat medic in Afghanistan, that he got the coronavirus vaccine and that he was not prejudiced against Jewish people or any race or ethnicity.

“I respect her public service,” Russell said of Ginsburg. When his lawyer asked him how his home computer wound up entering search terms that produced the justice’s hospital chart, Russell said, “I have no idea.” He added later, “I feel like everyone’s made typos.”

Russell conceded on the stand that he had been frequenting 4chan for two decades, primarily, he said, “to talk about TV and movies and videogames ... current events.” Some of the conspiracy theories proliferating on the website were “quite amusing,” Russell said.

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Federal prosecutors in Virginia, where Russell lived at the time of the breach, argued that he supercharged one of those conspiracy theories. The screenshot posted to 4chan, showing Ginsburg’s cancer treatments through 2018, came with a message: “She died dec 31st."

An FBI agent who scanned Russell’s hard drive said she found indications that he had visited multiple posts on 4chan discussing the conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians were covering up Ginsburg’s death.

The agent said she found an image mimicking a poster for the 1989 film “Weekend at Bernie’s,” labeled “Weekend at Ginsburg’s.” It showed Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) propping up Ginsburg from both sides, in a morbid play on how the movie characters cover up Bernie’s death so that they can use his beach house.

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Brigham testified that Russell, who now resides in Nebraska, was not known for bringing politics or “weird conspiracies” into the workplace. Prosecutors said they also found 4chan posts on his hard drive delving into other antisemitic conspiracy theories, including one titled “Mossad just tried to assassinate Trump during the White House Christmas Tree Lighting” and a Google search for “dirty jew.”

Prosecutors said Russell violated Ginsburg’s right to privacy under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects the confidentiality of patients’ medical information.

Nathan Read, who led an internal investigation of the breach as George Washington University Hospital’s chief information officer, said Russell had access to patient records because he functioned as a contractor and was often on-site to evaluate patients for potential organ transplants. Read said Russell’s access was immediately revoked after he was identified as the suspect in January 2019. Russell then contacted the hospital’s IT help desk the following month to ask that his permissions be restored, and was denied, Read testified.

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A member of the hospital staff also conducted an unauthorized search that would have turned up Ginsburg’s data around the time of the breach, Read testified, but that individual did not appear to be tech-savvy enough to post the information to social media, and he was ruled out as the culprit. The individual was also fired, Read said.

This story has been updated with additional testimony from court proceedings on Tuesday.

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