Assange faces 17 more U.S. charges
WASHINGTON — Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and a thorn in the side of intelligence agencies, faces 17 additional U.S. criminal charges under the Espionage Act, according to an indictment released Thursday, a step that First Amendment advocates warned could set a precedent for farreaching restrictions on press freedoms.
British police removed Assange, 47, on April 11 from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had sought refuge seven years ago to avoid prosecution in Sweden in an unrelated sexual assault case.
At that time, prosecutors charged him with conspiracy to hack into a Pentagon computer network by allegedly offering to help Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, with cracking a password in 2010. Manning ultimately provided WikiLeaks, an online organization that collects and disperses sensitive records, with hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including State Department cables and reports on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By contrast, the new charges allege that Assange, who is currently fighting extradition to the U.S., unlawfully obtained and disclosed national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act.
That law was originally enacted to crack down on spying during World War I, but it has been increasingly used to target people who leak classified documents. It has never been used against a person for publishing national security information.
The new charges will reignite the debate over Assange’s claim that he is a publisher like any other and broader issues of how far the press can go in publishing government secrets. News organizations routinely encourage sources to provide them with highly sensitive information, and publication of even secret material has been considered shielded by the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press.
The Obama administration aggressively prosecuted leakers, but Justice Department officials decided not to charge Assange under the Espionage Act because of concerns about the First Amendment. The Trump administration signaled early on that it planned to reconsider that issue.
The decision to move ahead with the prosecution comes against a background of tense relations between the administration and news organizations, which Trump has often referred to as “enemies of the people,” and amid an escalating effort to crack down on government officials who provide information to reporters.
“This is an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on journalism, and a direct assault on the First Amendment. It establishes a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. WikiLeaks gave a more pungent response. “This is madness,” the group said on Twitter. “It is the end of national security journalism and the First Amendment.”
John Demers, the Justice Department’s top national security official, defended the decision to prosecute.
“Some say Assange is a journalist and he should be immune from prosecution for these actions,” he said. “The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy. It is not and has never been the department’s policy to target them for reporting.”
But, Demers added, “Julian Assange is no journalist. This is made plain by the totality of his conduct as alleged in the indictment.”
Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement that the government’s insistence that Assange is not a journalist doesn’t remove the threat to those who are.