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Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is asking for a hearing that could lead to new trial, citing jurors’ alleged consumption of news on social media as the reason why his recent conviction should be overturned.

The defense made the request in a motion filed Tuesday morning with the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. Chapo’s lawyers cite “bombshell disclosures” about misconduct detailed in a juror’s interview with VICE News as the basis for asking Judge Brian Cogan to hold a hearing to investigate juror misconduct. If the allegations are confirmed, the defense wants the judge to invalidate the unanimous guilty verdict handed down against the 61-year-old Mexican kingpin on Feb. 12 after a grueling and costly three-month trial.

“Reports of jury misconduct, of course, are nothing new in high-profile cases,” the defense wrote. “One factor that sets these apart is a juror’s frank confession that panel members actively sought out and openly discussed the most sensational extrinsic information — including vile allegations that the defendant raped young girls — overtly defying the Court’s perpetual injunctions and cannily lying to Your Honor when asked about it.”

Chapo currently faces life in U.S. federal prison, and he remains held in a high-security Manhattan jail awaiting a June 25 sentencing hearing that may now be postponed as the court considers how to proceed.

Prosecutors have not yet issued a formal response to the defense motion.

The defense has requested an “evidentiary hearing” to investigate whether jurors disobeyed Judge Cogan’s orders by reading about the case on the internet and discussing evidence with each other prior to deliberations. The judge repeatedly warned the jury to avoid social media, but a juror who spoke with VICE News after the verdict said that order was ignored.

“You know how we were told we can’t look at the media during the trial? Well, we did,” said the juror, who asked to remain anonymous “for obvious reasons.”

Phones and electronics were banned from the courtroom during Chapo’s trial, but many reporters used a downstairs media room to post news updates on Twitter. The juror said their social media use took place outside the courthouse. The juror saw reports that Chapo was accused of drugging and raping girls as young as 13, and said at least five others did too. That information had been withheld from the jury after prosecutors argued it was “unfairly prejudicial” and unrelated to the drug, weapons, and money laundering charges in the case. Members of the jury conferred with each other and planned to tell the judge they were unaware of the rape allegations, the anonymous juror told VICE News.

The defense motion lists several reporters who covered the case on Twitter and cites a number of articles that jurors may have seen that include “inflammatory evidence the Court had excluded and pronounced Guzman guilty before the proof had closed and the jury began to deliberate.”

“According to the juror’s VICE interview, at least five panel members actively followed and openly discussed ongoing media accounts of the trial, including extra-record charges that Guzman drugged and raped children and one of his lawyers carried on an adulterous affair with a client,” the defense wrote. “If so — and there’s no reason to doubt the juror’s word at this point — the panelists blithely disobeyed emphatic orders against both behaviors and committed undeniable misconduct.”

The jurors — eight women and four men, plus six alternates — were kept anonymous by the court over security concerns. Because their identities remain secret, VICE News was unable to contact other jurors to corroborate the misconduct claims. If there is a hearing as the defense requests, they may now face questioning under oath, and they could potentially be fined or held in contempt of court for their actions, though experts said it’s very rare for jurors to face jail time. If caught lying under oath about their behavior, they could face perjury charges.

“This is not a situation where one or two jurors were mistakenly exposed to the most horrific press coverage about a defendant and owned up to it, promising not to let it influence their verdict,” Jeff Lichtman, one of Chapo’s trial attorneys, said in a statement. “This instead is a case where multiple jurors sought out the most prejudicial press coverage, filled with allegations which never made it into the trial as well as misinterpretations of evidence — and then plotted to lie about it to the judge. These are crimes.”

Chapo’s lawyers said they plan to “propose potential witnesses and address whether the hearing should be open or closed” at a later date. Because jurors are accused of lying to the judge, the motion also argued that the circumstances warrant “the defense counsel’s examining the witnesses personally or, at the very least, submitting questions in writing.”

Read more: El Chapo’s lawyers say they’ll ask for a new trial. Here’s what could happen next.

The decision about how to proceed is entirely up to Judge Cogan. He may be loathe to grant a new trial because the evidence against Chapo was so overwhelming — and because the government has already invested millions in the case. Cogan not only has to confirm that jurors broke the rules, he must conclude that exposure to prejudicial information led to Chapo’s conviction. In this case, the bar is high given the mountain of evidence the government presented during Chapo’s trial.

Still, experts like Suzanne Luban, a Stanford law professor who specializes in post-conviction appeals, said a retrial is within the realm of possibility given the circumstances. According to Luban, if Judge Cogan finds “that even one juror read a news article that contained prejudicial information” — such as the child rape allegations against Chapo — it should result in a new trial.

“Jurors reading news of the case during the trial or deliberations is a serious breach, exposing jurors to facts from a source outside the four walls of the courtroom, a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to a fair, unbiased jury,” Luban said. “Even reviewing one such article would qualify, if proven. Same with jurors reading journalists’ Twitter feeds.”

Other law scholars, defense attorneys, and independent jury experts who spoke with VICE News said Chapo’s case — already historic for its scope and magnitude — could now influence how courts across the country respond to juror misconduct in the internet era.

“It is a very serious problem and I think this judge really sits on the precipice with a lot of folks in the judiciary potentially following what’s going to happen here,” said Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, a jury consultant for the defense team in the O.J. Simpson trial. “This is really going to set a precedent, and the judge knows this.”

Read more: A key witness against Chapo believes in aliens, the Illuminati, and witchcraft.

Juries are supposed to reach a verdict based solely on evidence and testimony heard inside the courtroom, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google have made it easy for curious jurors to seek out forbidden information about their case. Exactly how often that happens remains unclear, largely because jury deliberations are held in secret. Misconduct is typically only reported when jurors come forward or post publicly on social media.

Dimitrius said her firm’s polling has shown that 40 percent of prospective jurors say they would violate a judge’s instructions about social media. Other publicly available research suggests internet-related juror misconduct is rare. Only 33 federal judges out of nearly 500 surveyed in 2014 reported catching social media use by jurors during trial or deliberations. Another survey, also from 2014, of nearly 600 jurors from state and federal courts found that just 8 percent admitted being “tempted to communicate” about their case on social media.

There’s no group that actively tracks incidents of jurors breaking the rules with social media, but Paula Hannaford-Agor, director of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts, said her group is currently conducting a new study to determine exactly how often it happens. Right now, she said, it appears to be extremely common.

“If you’ve got a case going longer than two days, it would be highly unusual that you don’t have at least one person who does something,” Hannaford-Agor said. The question for judges, she added, is not whether a juror merely posted about the case on Facebook or Twitter, but whether they shared an opinion about the person on trial or viewed info that was deemed inadmissible or prejudicial, which is what the juror said happened in Chapo’s case.

Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a University of Dayton law professor who has written extensively about juries and the internet, warned that misconduct will become increasingly prevalent as the population shifts and includes more jurors grew up with technology.

“If they do it at the workplace and they do it at school, why wouldn’t they do it in the courtroom?” Hoffmeister said. “You just don’t shut everything down. Look at the people who are becoming jurors. You’ve got people who grew up with this. For them, it’s ‘In Google we trust.’ That’s how they get life answers and information.”

Social media has already changed the way juries are chosen. While Chapo’s jury was anonymous, juror names are usually public, which allows attorneys or consultants to scour online profiles for biases, conflicts of interest, or insights about how a person would approach the case.

Amy Singer, a jury consultant who worked the Casey Anthony, Michael Jackson, and Jack Kevorkian trials, said some clients have requested social media monitoring to see what the general public is saying about their case and the evidence. The lawyers can then use that crowd-sourced feedback to tailor their arguments to the jury. Singer believes sequestration, which entails putting jurors in a hotel under the watchful eye of guards for the duration of the trial, is the only way to keep social media from tainting the jury in high-profile cases.

“If you got a high publicity case which is being played up by social media, you absolutely have to sequester the jury, no if ands or buts, end of story,” she said. “It’s really that simple.”

The length of El Chapo’s trial, which stretched for 14 weeks over Christmas and Thanksgiving, and the already astronomical cost of security made the judge reluctant to sequester the jury. The jurors were allowed to return home each day after court, but they were escorted to and from the courthouse by the U.S. Marshals Service.

Judge Cogan’s admonition about social media varied from day to day, but jurors were regularly told to stay away from any discussion or outside information about the case. But the judge rarely, if ever, mentioned the specific consequences for breaking the rules.

Joshua Dratel, a defense attorney who represented Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark web drug marketplace Silk Road, said in one of his cases a juror friended the defendant on Facebook. He said he simply assumes that “crazy stuff” will happen with the jury. Jurors can be told to stay off social media, he said, but many people rely on technology to do their jobs or keep in touch with friends and family. Temporarily quitting the internet isn’t an option for most people.

“It’s not possible in the world we live in today,” Dratel said. “It’s a major problem. How do you take people who are saturated with this, people who can’t go 20 minutes without looking at their phones, and expect they’re going to go and not look at the internet? The temptation is extraordinary.”

Cover: Drug trafficker Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman is escorted to a helicopter by Mexican security forces at Mexico’s International Airport in Mexico city, Mexico, on Saturday, Feb. 22, 2014. (Photographer: Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Sunday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr presented a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that contained a few sentences from Mueller’s final report, one of which directly addressed the question of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” In a footnote, Barr explained that Mueller had defined “coordination” as an “agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump campaign and the Russian government on election interference.”

Mueller’s full report has not been made available to the public yet, so it’s not clear whether it sets forth everything the special counsel’s office learned over the course of its nearly two-year investigation—including findings about conduct that was perhaps objectionable but not criminal—or whether it is more tailored and explains only Mueller’s prosecution and declination decisions. But national-security and intelligence experts tell me that Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump or his campaign team with a conspiracy is far from dispositive, and that the underlying evidence the special counsel amassed over two years could prove as useful as a conspiracy charge to understanding the full scope of Russia’s election interference in 2016.

[Read: What Mueller leaves behind]

“As described by Barr, at least, Mueller’s report was very focused on criminal-law standards and processes,” said David Kris, a founder of Culper Partners, who served as the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division under former President Barack Obama. “We won’t know for sure if that is the case, and if it is the case, why Mueller confined himself in that way, until we see the full report.” Kris noted, however, that “there is no question that a counterintelligence investigation would have a wider aperture than a strict criminal inquiry as applied here, and would be concerned, for example, with the motivations and any sub-criminal misconduct of the principal actors.”

A counterintelligence probe, he added, would ask more than whether the evidence collected is sufficient to obtain a criminal conviction—it could provide necessary information to the public about why the president is making certain policy decisions. “The American people rightly should expect more from their public servants than merely avoiding criminal liability,” Kris said.

A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee said in a statement on Monday that in light of Barr’s memo “and our need to understand Special Counsel Mueller’s areas of inquiry and evidence his office uncovered, we are working in parallel with other Committees to bring in senior officials from the DOJ, FBI and SCO to ensure that our Committee is fully and currently informed about the SCO’s investigation, including all counterintelligence information.”

[Read: The House’s latest move could be a big threat to Trump’s presidency]

In May 2017, just after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, the FBI launched a full counterintelligence investigation into the president to determine whether he was acting as a Russian agent. “We were concerned, and we felt like we had credible, articulable facts to indicate that a threat to national security may exist,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe explained to me last month. It’s still not clear what became of that counterintelligence probe after Mueller was appointed, and Barr did not indicate in his four-page summary how far the special counsel pursued it.

[Read: Andrew McCabe couldn’t believe the things Trump said about Putin]

Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff at the Defense Department and the CIA under Obama, said he believes Mueller’s “core focus” was to determine whether or not federal criminal laws were violated. “If Mueller interpreted his mandate as a criminal one, the decision to pursue the investigation as such is something he will have to explain to Congress,” Bash said.

Mueller’s mandate, given to him by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, empowered him to investigate not only any “coordination” between the campaign and Russia, but any “links” between them as well. Barr’s summary does not describe how Mueller investigated or came to explain the many interactions the campaign had with various Russians during the election.

Even so, Bash said, it’s an “immense challenge” to envision how a counterintelligence investigation targeting the president himself would have played out. “Normally, the bureau would investigate, and if criminal matters were involved, they’d ask prosecutors to get involved,” he said. “But if it is just a matter of there being a national-security threat, the FBI would report to the director of national intelligence, who would then report to the president. But what if the president is the threat? We don’t have a playbook for this.”

Generally speaking, the wide aperture afforded by a counterintelligence investigation might be key to understanding some of the biggest lingering mysteries of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians in 2016—mysteries that, if solved, could explain the president’s continued deference toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and skepticism about his conduct on the part of the U.S. intelligence community.

For example, was the fact that Trump pursued a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal in Moscow during the election—and failed to disclose the deal to the public—enough for the Russians to compromise him? Why did the administration attempt to lift the sanctions on Russia early on in Trump’s tenure, even after it had been revealed that Russia had attacked the 2016 election? And what about the internal campaign polling data that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, gave to the suspected Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik in August 2016—an episode that, according to one of the top prosecutors on Mueller’s team, went “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating”?

Mueller apparently determined that none of that evidence was enough to establish that a criminal conspiracy had occurred, which is fairly unsurprising if you know Bob Mueller, said John McLaughlin, the former acting director of the CIA who served under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime.

Mueller “always noted that the term evidence meant something different to intelligence analysts who had to work with a variety of sources of varying reliability, whereas an FBI officer needed something so unassailable as to work in a court prosecution,” McLaughlin told me, referring to the conversations he had with Mueller while he was FBI director. But as former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell told me, “We still do not understand why President Trump has this affinity for Putin. What happened yesterday is Mueller took one possibility off the table—that there was a criminal conspiracy. But we still don’t know what is going on between these two leaders, and what is driving this relationship.”

It would once have been unthinkable to even contemplate that a sitting president was putting the interests of a hostile foreign power above those of the United States. But Trump’s consistent praise of Putin, his pursuit of a massive real-estate deal in Moscow while Russia was waging a hacking and disinformation campaign against the United States in 2016, and the secrecy that continues to surround his conversations with his Russian counterpart have given some in the national-security community, including many leading Democrats, pause.

Trump took the extraordinary step of confiscating his interpreter’s notes after his first private meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, according to The Washington Post, and demanded that the interpreter refrain from discussing the meeting with members of his own administration. In Helsinki, Finland, one year later, Trump insisted on meeting with Putin with no American advisers or aides present.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, said he “never envisioned” that Mueller would bring a conspiracy charge—and that focusing on the absence of criminal indictments for conspiracy is unproductive. “If all we do is provide criminal standards to investigative findings, we are missing the point,” Figliuzzi told me. He noted that the vast majority of counterintelligence cases never result in criminal prosecution. Instead, he said, “they’re about determining the degree to which a foreign power has targeted, compromised, or recruited” the subject. “This thing started as a counterintelligence investigation,” Figliuzzi said, “and it needs to end as a counterintelligence investigation.”

Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow expressed her dissatisfaction with Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress summarizing the report of the findings from Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Maddow deemed Barr’s letter “The