Assange charged in US with violating Espionage Act
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US prosecutors have brought new charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, accusing him of obtaining and publishing classified information in violation of the Espionage Act.
Mr Assange has already been sentenced to 50 weeks in prison by a London court for jumping bail in 2012 and hiding in the Ecuadorean embassy. He was subject to an existing extradition request by the US, where he was wanted on a narrower computer hacking charge following the leak of thousands of classified documents in 2010 relating to military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Thursday, the US Department of Justice unveiled a superseding 18-count indictment detailing criminal charges against Mr Assange, in a move that scholars said could raise significant questions over the scope of press freedom and protections for those who publish leaked classified information.
Officials said Mr Assange conspired with the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in obtaining classified information. It also accused him of posting a narrower set of classified documents that identified Afghan and Iraqi sources. Ms Manning was convicted at a court martial in 2013 of leaking the documents.
The new indictment alleges that beginning in late 2009, Mr Assange and WikiLeaks solicited classified information, including by publishing a list of “Most Wanted Leaks”. Manning is said to have responded by searching for classified documents and going on to provide troves of information to Mr Assange. These included hundreds of thousands of reports related to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, some 800 Guantánamo Bay detainee assessment briefs and 250,000 state department cables.
Mr Assange is alleged to have published on WikiLeaks documents containing names of “human sources” who provided information to US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the state department, the DoJ said.
“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 DoJ said in a statement.
In an appearance before Westminster magistrates’ court earlier this month, Mr Assange said he did not assent to being extradited to the US. “I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism which has won many awards and protected many people,” he said.
Constitutional law experts said the case could provoke a debate over the scope of journalism in both the UK, where the extradition request must be considered, and the US. Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, said the Obama administration had decided against bringing charges for publishing classified documents because of the questions it would raise over press freedom.
“This is the charge many of us feared might come,” he said, arguing that it could prove difficult to distinguish some of Mr Assange’s activities from those of a journalist. Bringing an espionage charge against him was potentially criminalising similar conduct by a wide array of journalists who receive classified information from whistleblowers and leakers, he said. “It is impossible to see how Julian Assange can be prosecuted under the Espionage Act without causing considerable collateral damage to journalists under the First Amendment.”
DoJ officials insisted that prosecutors were not seeking to target the press, arguing that the totality of Mr Assange’s conduct showed that he was not a journalist.
Mr Assange’s attorney Barry Pollack said in an email statement following the new US charges that his client was being accused under the Espionage Act for “encouraging sources to provide him truthful information and for publishing that information”.
He added: “These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavour to inform the public about actions that have taken by the US government.”
If convicted, Mr Assange would face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for each of the counts, except for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, for which the maximum penalty is five years in prison.
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