WASHINGTON — DailyExpertNews and four European news organizations on Monday called on the United States government to drop its charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified diplomatic and military secrets.
In a joint open letter, The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País said Mr Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent” that threatened to undermine the First Amendment and freedom of the press. .
“Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when needed in the public interest is a core part of journalists’ daily work,” the letter said. “If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies will be significantly weakened.”
Mr Assange, who has been fighting extradition from Britain since his arrest there in 2019, is also accused of taking part in a hacking-related conspiracy. Notably, the letter did not urge the Justice Department to drop that aspect of the case, though it did say that “some of us are also concerned about it.”
Each of the five organizations had collaborated with Mr Assange in 2010 and 2011 during the events central to the criminal case. WikiLeaks, which obtained leaked archives of classified US diplomatic cables and military records, gave early access to the treasure troves of traditional news outlets, which published articles about remarkable revelations.
A spokeswoman for The Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said the company’s publisher, AG Sulzberger, decided to sign the letter in consultation with the legal department. The editors were not involved, she said.
The case against Mr. Assange is complicated and revolves not around whether he is considered a journalist but whether his journalistic activities of collecting and publishing classified information can or should be treated as a crime.
The letter comes as Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has sought to curb ways the Justice Department has made it harder for journalists to do their jobs. In October, he issued new rules prohibiting the use of subpoenas, warrants or court orders to seize reporters’ communications records or demand their notes or testimonies in an attempt to expose confidential sources in leak investigations.
Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks rose to world fame in 2010 when he began publishing classified videos and documents about the United States’ wars and foreign relations.
It eventually became clear that Chelsea Manning, a former military intelligence analyst, had provided the archives to WikiLeaks. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison after a court-martial trial in 2013. President Barack Obama commuted most of her remaining sentence shortly before leaving office in January 2017.
Ms. Manning’s revelations constituted one of the most extraordinary leaks in American history. They contained about 250,000 State Department cables revealing many secrets around the world, files on Guantánamo Bay detainees held without trial, and logs of key events in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which revealed, among other things, that there were more civilian casualties than had been officially determined. estimates.
The letter said the same five institutions had publicly criticized Mr Assange in 2011 when unredacted copies of the telegrams were released, revealing the names of people in dangerous countries who had aided the United States and risked their lives put. At Ms Manning’s trial, prosecutors did not say anyone was killed as a result, but officials have said the government has spent significant resources getting such people out of harm’s way.
While the Obama administration and law enforcement and national security officials disliked Mr. Assange, transparency advocates and anti-war activists treated him like an icon.
His public image changed significantly after WikiLeaks published Democratic emails hacked by the Russian government as part of its sting operation to help Donald J. Trump win the 2016 presidential election. But the criminal case against him is not about the Democratic emails.
The open letter notes that the Obama administration had considered indicting Mr Assange in connection with the Manning leaks, but failed to do so – in part because there was no clear way to legally distinguish WikiLeaks’ actions from those from traditional news organizations like The Times writing about national security issues.
But in March 2018, under the Trump administration, the Justice Department obtained a sealed grand jury indictment against Mr. Assange. Initially, the charges sidestepped press freedom issues and narrowly charged him with a hacking-related offense by offering to help Ms. Manning cover her tracks on a secure computer network.
Under Attorney General William P. Barr, the department later escalated the case by obtaining an additional indictment that included a second set of allegations: that his journalistic-style activities violated the Espionage Act, a World War I law that prohibited unauthorized detention and dissemination of national security secrets a crime.
(Another indictment expanded the allegations related to the hacking-related indictment to include a broader attempt by WikiLeaks to encourage hackers to obtain classified material and provide it to the group.)
There is no precedent in the United States for prosecuting a publisher of information – as opposed to a spy or a government official who has leaked secrets – under the Espionage Act. The Trump administration’s decision to bring such charges against Mr. Assange raised new and profound questions about the meaning of the First Amendment.
For now, those issues have not been tested in court as the case has been put on hold while Mr Assange fights extradition. But the open letter called on the Justice Department to drop the Espionage Act charges.
“Holding governments to account is part of the core business of a free press in a democracy,” the letter said.
