Julian Assange of Wikileaks indicted under US Espionage Act

In 2010, Julian Assange obtained and published a trove of confidential U.S. military and diplomatic information provided by Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army soldier turned whistleblower. After spending years in asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange was expelled April 11, 2019, whereupon British authorities arrested him. The following month, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) amended a preexisting indictment of Assange to charge him with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act; he now faces extradition to the United States. The indictment has rattled journalists and Free Speech advocates, who fear that Assange’s possible conviction could erode press freedoms in the United States. 

Key Players

Julian Assange is an Australian computer programmer and self-proclaimed journalist with the declared goal of “expos[ing] injustice” by pushing for greater government and corporate transparency, according to The New Yorker. A practitioner of what he calls “scientific journalism” — the publication of primary source material along with news stories and analysis — Assange in 2006 established WikiLeaks, a database for leaked information.

Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1917, some months after the country entered World War I, the Espionage Act, among other things, criminalizes the dissemination of classified information relating to U.S. national defense. Originally designed to limit public dissent against wars, the law has been used repeatedly in recent decades in an attempt to punish whistleblowers within the U.S. foreign policy and national security apparatus. 

Further Details

British authorities arrested Assange for violating bail after he was expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had achieved political asylum in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations, according to the BBC. 

Soon after his arrest, U.S. authorities unveiled an indictment superseding one originally filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in March 2018, which had accused Assange of the less severe crime of conspiring with Manning to hack a government computer, according to The New York Times. 

On May 23, 2019, the DOJ added new charges accusing Assange of violating the Espionage Act in 2010, The Times reports. The indictment focuses specifically on WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic cables at that time. Notably, it did not charge him in connection with Wikileaks’ disclosure of leaked emails from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s computer during the 2016 election. 

“The superseding indictment alleges that Assange was complicit with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, in unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents related to the national defense,” according to a news release from the DOJ.

Specifically, the indictment focuses on Assange’s publishing of the names of people who cooperated with the United States in war zones. If convicted under all of the charges he now faces, Assange could receive a 175-year prison sentence, whereas under the original conspiracy charge the maximum possible sentence would have been five years.

“According to the superseding indictment, 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 press release reads. 

Former President Barack Obama’s administration considered indicting Assange under the Espionage Act, after the 2010 disclosures, but ultimately shied away from the decision, according to The Times. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, charged or convicted eight people who they believed had violated the Espionage Act with their leaks — more than all previous administrations combined, according to NPR. Famously, President Richard Nixon charged Daniel Ellsberg under the espionage law for disclosing the Pentagon Papers in 1971; Ellsberg was never convicted, however, because the revelation of government misconduct during its investigation of him resulted in a mistrial.

Journalists and Free Speech advocates fear the indictment of Assange on such serious charges could set a legal precedent that would enable the prosecution of journalists who routinely receive and publish classified information. 

“The charges rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The Times. “The indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom.”

Outcome

Assange faces extradition to the United States 

As authorities hold Assange under arrest, British courts are beginning to consider Assange’s extradition, according to The Times. Assange has said he intends to fight extradition and could thereby prolong the process for years, according to legal experts.