Keeping Secrets
Julian Assange was indicted in Federal Court yesterday. These new charges are called “superseding” indictments; they are replacing the original indictments that were secretly filed a few years ago. We learned about those original indictments because of a mistake by an Assistant United States Attorney in the Federal Eastern District of Virginia, who copied “boiler plate” paragraphs from the sealed Assange document to an unrelated indictment, and included too much.
Julian Assange is the creator of Wikileaks, an international website that prides itself on publishing secrets. Its first secret was released in December 2006, a Somali order to assassinate government officials. Even in this first “secret” the United States was implicated, with Wikileaks commenting that the order might be misinformation put out by US intelligence.
Wikileaks took on other powers, including Swiss banks, Kenyan politicians, the Chinese suppression of Tibet, and Scientology. But Assange often came back to US intelligence, including “procedures” used at the Guantanamo prison and internal Defense Department documents. But the first big “hit” against the US came in April of 2010. It revealed unedited video of US helicopter airstrikes in Baghdad, where civilians were “collateral damage.” One of those attacks killed two Reuters news agency staff and wounded several children.
That information was given to Assange and Wikileaks by a US soldier named Chelsea Manning. She leaked over 750,000 US diplomatic cables, videos, and other classified documents to Assange, most of them published on Wikileaks. Manning ultimately was charged with espionage, confessed in Federal Court, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. Her sentence was commuted by President Obama after serving seven years.
Assange went onto to publish the information stolen by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, and, of course, the stolen Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 election. He was charged with sexual assault and rape in Sweden, and claimed asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he stayed for seven years. Last month the government of Ecuador kicked him out, and he was taken into custody by the British police.
The original sealed Federal indictment accused Assange of directly aiding Manning in stealing classified materials. The US government had evidence of Assange helping Manning figure out the passwords to break into the system. This indictment seemed like a clean case of aiding and abetting someone stealing classified materials.
Yesterday’s superseding indictment changed the entire legal nature of the charges. It charged Assange with eighteen counts of espionage against the United States by publishing classified materials. This alters the “criminal act(s)” from aiding in the theft of classified documents, to the actual publishing of those same documents.
I don’t like Julian Assange. He was a “tool” of Russian Intelligence in their attack on the US elections, and most particularly on Hillary Clinton. And while I understand the “whistleblower” aspect of Manning and Snowden, there also was tremendous damage done to US interests by their releases.
Wikileaks is a platform for the release of secret and often embarrassing information. In the rapidly evolving world of information, it is hard to differentiate between “journalism” and something else. Wikileaks claims to be a news source and a journalistic business, similar to a newspaper. Like it or not, the Wikileaks releases, from Manning to Snowden to the Podesta emails; all ended up on the front pages mainstream newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even the Columbus Dispatch.
The new indictments attempt to make it espionage to publish information that is classified. The fact that it is filed against Julian Assange makes it little different than filing against the AG Sulzberger of the Times, Fred Ryan of the Post or Bradley Harmon of the Dispatch. It also seems to be a government attempt to overturn the long established Supreme Court ruling in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, where it was held that the Times and the Post could not be restrained from publishing leaked Pentagon documents.
For more conspiratorial readers, the new indictments may have an even more sinister intent. Filing espionage charges against Assange for publishing will put the United Kingdom courts in their own “freedom of the press” bind. It might well be that the UK will not extradite Assange to the US for such charges, thus keeping him out of the US Court systems. It also will keep Assange from answering questions about the source of the Democratic National Committee emails, and whether Assange coordinated their release with official or unofficial members of the 2016 Trump campaign.
Regardless of the impact on the “Russia investigation,” the new indictments put the US on a slippery slope of First Amendment freedoms. It is easy to argue that the Snowden releases were damaging to US interests, but it is more difficult to say that other “whistleblower” information should be stifled. If Assange was found guilty on these charges, that would be the most likely outcome. The government could keep their mistakes secret, mistakes the public needs to know.
