US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1485

WASHINGTON — Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader, has been indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday — a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues.

The new charges were part of an expanded indictment obtained by the Trump administration that significantly raised the stakes of the legal case against Mr. Assange, who is already fighting extradition proceedings in London based on an earlier hacking-related count brought by federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia.

The case has nothing to do with Russia’s 2016 election interference, when Mr. Assange’s organization published Democratic emails stolen by Russia to help elect President Trump, the case has nothing to do with the election interference. Instead, it focuses on Mr. Assange’s role in the leak, by the former army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and diplomatic files.

Justice Department officials did not explain why they decided to charge Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act — a step also debated within the Obama administration but ultimately not taken. Although the indictment established a precedent that deems criminal actions related to obtaining, and in some cases publishing, state secrets, the officials sought to minimize the implications for press freedoms.

They noted that most of the new charges were related to obtaining the archives of secret documents, as opposed to publishing them. In the counts that deemed the publication of the files a crime, prosecutors focused on a handful of documents revealing the names of people who provided information to the United States in dangerous places like war zones.

“Some say that Assange is a journalist and that he should be immune for prosecution for these actions,” said John Demers, the head of the department’s National Security Division, at a briefing with reporters. “The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy and we thank you for it. It is not and has never been the department’s policy to target them for reporting.”

But Mr. Assange, he said, was “no journalist.” Mr. Demers accused him of conspiring with Ms. Manning to obtain classified information and said “no responsible actor, journalist or otherwise, would purposefully publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in a war zone, exposing them to the gravest of dangers.”

Still, the Trump administration’s move could establish a precedent used to criminalize future acts of national security journalism that are essentially the same from a legal perspective, said Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“The charges rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day,” he said. “The indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom.”

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Mr. Demers left the press briefing without taking questions, and a Justice Department official who stayed behind to answer questions on the condition that he would not be named would not address any about how most of the basic actions the indictment deemed felonies by Mr. Assange differed in a legally meaningful way from ordinary national-security investigative journalism — working with sources to obtain secret information of news value and publishing that information without the government’s permission.

Notably, The New York Times, among many other news organizations, obtained precisely the same archives of documents from WikiLeaks, without authorization from the government — the act that most of the charges addressed. While The Times did take steps to withhold the names of informants in the subset of the files it published, it is not clear how that is legally different from publishing other classified information.

On May 24 2019 09:20 Nebuchad wrote:
Fwiw, the reason why grownups don't entertain those revolutionary ideas is because they grew up in the 1990s when everyone thought liberalism was the final answer to the world for 10 years. We're slowing moving out of that, arguably too slowly.

On May 24 2019 09:46 Nebuchad wrote:


Without the 1990s you would also understand the cost of not considering a revolution. There's climate change but even without that, it's not like it's not been clear for a while that we're going backwards.

On May 24 2019 10:29 xDaunt wrote:
The declassification order extends to the Department of Energy. Perhaps we are about to learn what really happened with Uranium One?

On May 24 2019 10:32 micronesia wrote:

Can you source this? I'm interested in reading about the DoE angle.