US charges Wikileak’s Assange with violating Espionage Act – TheNigerialawyer

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department on Thursday charged
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with violating the US Espionage
Act by publishing military and diplomatic files in 2010, rejecting
his claim that he is a journalist.

The department unveiled 17 new charges against Assange, accusing
him of directing and abetting intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning
in stealing secret US files, and also recklessly exposing
confidential sources in the Middle East and China who were named in
the files.

The charges against Assange, now 18 in total, reject his claim
that he was simply a publisher receiving leaked material from
Manning, an action that is protected under the US Constitution’s
First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press.

A new indictment alleges that Assange actively conspired with
Manning to steal the hundreds of thousands of classified files
“with reason to believe that the information was to be used to the
injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation,”
the Justice Department said.

It also said that Assange rejected the US State Department’s
warning in 2010 to redact the names of its and the US military’s
confidential sources in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and China,
sources it said included journalists, religious leaders, human
rights advocates, and political dissidents.

“Assange’s actions risked serious harm to United States national
security to the benefit of our adversaries and put the unredacted
named human sources at a grave and imminent risk of serious
physical harm and/or arbitrary detention,” the department said.

“The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our
democracy,” said Assistant Attorney General John Demers.

“But Julian Assange is no journalist.”

ATTACKS ON PRESS FREEDOM

A native of Australia, Assange, 47, is currently in prison in
Britain for jumping bail, and faces a US extradition request when
he is released 11 months from now.

But it is not yet clear whether the British government will
honor that request, and the new charges could complicate it.

WikiLeaks blasted the charges, saying the threatened reporters
broadly.

“This is madness. It is the end of national security journalism
and the first amendment,” the group tweeted.

Wikileaks later denounced the charges as “an unprecedented
attack on the global free press” and an “extraterritorial
application of US law,” saying in a statement that the “Department
of Justice wants to imprison Assange for crimes allegedly committed
outside of the United States.”

Media rights groups also reacted sharply.

“The charges brought against Julian Assange under the Espionage
Act pose a direct threat to press freedom and investigative
journalism, both of which are undermined when those who inform the
public are prosecuted for sounding the alarm,” said Reporters
Without Borders.

The charges escalate the US government’s effort to crack down on
leakers of national security materials.

While the previous administration of president Barack Obama
pursued leakers, including Manning, it appeared to draw the line on
transparency groups like WikiLeaks, not wanting to enter a battle
over press freedom.

But after WikiLeaks played an important role in the Russia
meddling operation in the 2016 US election, publishing materials
stolen by Russian hackers that were damaging to Democratic
candidate Hillary Clinton, Washington officials began to paint the
group as acting in concert with US enemies.

In 2017, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at the time director of
the CIA, called WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence
service.”

LEAKS ROCKED THE WORLD IN 2010

WikiLeaks put itself on the map as a potent force in 2010 when
it began publishing the files extracted from classified US
databases by Manning, then a low-level US army intelligence analyst
angered by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The documents, videos, and communications exposed possible war
crimes, torture, and secret military operations, as well as
unveiling the often-unseemly behind-the-scenes activities,
discussions and analyses of US diplomacy.

The 40-page indictment paints Assange specifically as a
co-conspirator of Manning, who was sentenced in 2013 under the
Espionage Act to 35 years in prison for the leaks, her claim of
being a “whistleblower” rejected.

Her sentence was commuted by Obama in 2017. But she was sent
back to jail earlier this year for refusing to cooperate with the
investigation into Assange.

The Justice Department said that in 2009, before Manning acted,
WikiLeaks publicly solicited specific classified materials
involving the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq so that it could
publish the materials.

“Assange wanted the ‘Most Wanted Leaks’ list to encourage and
cause individuals to illegally obtain and disclose protected
information,” the indictment says.

It says Assange went far beyond the actions of a simple
publisher.

“No responsible act of journalism would purposely publish the
names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential sources in
war zones, exposing them to the gravest of dangers,” said
Demers.

AFP

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