2019.05.22; Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues - The New York Times

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Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment IssuesAssange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues

Though Julian Assange is not a conventional journalist, much of what he does at WikiLeaks is difficult to distinguish in a legally meaningful way from what traditional news organizations do.
Credit
Jack Taylor/Getty Images

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Though Julian Assange is not a conventional journalist, much of what he does at WikiLeaks is difficult to distinguish in a legally meaningful way from what traditional news organizations do.CreditCreditJack Taylor/Getty Images
May 23, 2019
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 election interference in 2016, when Mr. Assange’s organization published Democratic emails stolen by Russia as part of its covert efforts to help elect President Trump. Instead, it focuses on Mr. Assange’s role in the leak of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and military files by the former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea


That exchange came at a time when Ms. Manning had copied and sent to WikiLeaks archives of logs of significant events in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and dossiers about Guantánamo Bay detainees, but she had not yet sent the group hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world, the indictment said. Weeks later, she began copying and uploading the State Department messages to WikiLeaks, it said.
The pair also tried to cover their tracks by removing user names from the disclosed information and deleting their chat logs, according to the indictment.
During her court-martial, in which some of Mr. Assange’s efforts to help were also discussed, Ms. Manning took complete responsibility for her actions and said that Mr. Assange had not pushed her to take them.
"No one associated with W.L.O." — an abbreviation she used to refer to the WikiLeaks organization — "pressured me into sending any more information," she said at the time. "I take full responsibility."
Outside the Ecuadorean Embassy on Thursday.
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Matt Dunham/Associated Press
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Outside the Ecuadorean Embassy on Thursday.CreditMatt Dunham/Associated Press
Ms. Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking the files and served about seven — the longest of any convicted leaker in American history — before President Barack Obama commuted most of the remainder of her sentence shortly before leaving office in 2017.
Ms. Manning is in jail again. A judge held her in civil contempt last month for refusing to testify before a grand jury about her interactions with WikiLeaks.
If Mr. Assange is convicted on the conspiracy to hack offense alone, he could face up to five years in prison. The government could later seek to charge him with additional offenses, but because of extradition practices, any such superseding indictment would most likely need to come soon, before Britain formally decides whether to transfer custody of him.
Until recently, Mr. Assange’s Ecuadorean citizenship, granted in 2017, presented a hurdle in President Lenín Moreno’s efforts to remove him from the embassy. Ecuador’s Constitution limits the government’s ability to turn over citizens to a foreign justice system, especially if they could face torture or the death penalty, which are outlawed in Ecuador.
The country’s former foreign minister, María Fernanda Espinosa, originally granted Mr. Assange’s citizenship, citing a policy that allowed certain foreigners under "international protection" to be naturalized. She argued that Mr. Assange’s refuge at the embassy was a case that qualified.
However, on Thursday, Ecuador’s current foreign minister, José Valencia, said Mr. Assange’s citizenship had been suspended because of irregularities, opening the door for him to be handed to the British authorities.
Mr. Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced questions about sexual assault accusations, which he has denied. Sweden rescinded its arrest warrant for Mr. Assange in 2017, but he refused to leave the embassy.
Under a previous president, Ecuador had offered Mr. Assange citizenship and open-ended refuge in its embassy. But its government soured on the relationship as the years kept passing, and it eventually began to impose limits on what Mr. Assange could say and do.
The Ecuadorean government said last year that it had cut off Mr. Assange’s internet access, saying that he had violated an agreement to stop commenting on, or trying to influence, the politics of other countries. The government also imposed other restrictions, like limiting his visitors. He sued in October, claiming that it was violating his rights.
On Thursday, Mr. Moreno, who became Ecuador’s president in 2017, said on Twitter that his country had decided to stop sheltering Mr. Assange after "his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols."
Reporting was contributed by Katie Benner from Washington; David D. Kirkpatrick and Richard Pérez-Peña from London; Nicholas Casey from New York; and Raphael Minder from Madrid.




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