Julian Assange—the founder of WikiLeaks, who has spent the past five years in a British prison awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. for trial under the Espionage Act—will at last be set free this week. And that is a good thing.
I am not a fan of Assange, who, even if he is not a Russian asset, has certainly behaved like one for more than a decade. Some of his leaks have almost certainly resulted in the deaths of American agents and allies; others have disclosed CIA hacking techniques for the benefit of U.S. adversaries; a slew of Hillary Clinton’s emails—which he peddled as a middleman between Russian hackers and eager Western reporters during the 2016 presidential campaign—may have helped catapult Donald Trump to the White House.
But none of these deeds were what prompted the U.S. Justice Department to hit Assange with a 19-count indictment in 2018 (with revisions in 2020). If they had been, the merits of the case—and of the request for his extradition—would have been fairly cut-and-dried. Instead, he was charged, in the language of the Espionage Act, with “obtaining and transmitting classified information without proper authorization.”
Specifically, he received classified documents from then–Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning and put them out on the WikiLeaks website for the public to consume. Assange is not, by most standards, a journalist. But what he did in this case was nothing different from what many journalists do routinely. Not only that, but disclosure of some of Manning’s documents was definitely in the public interest.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementThat is why it’s a good thing the Assange case is over. If it had gone to trial and if he had been found guilty, journalists and editors of all stripes would have had reason to feel insecure about simply doing their jobs.
As is, righteous cause for paranoia hasn’t totally disappeared. The Assange case is over because he agreed to plead guilty to one of the 19 charges, and in turn, a judge agreed to consider the defendant’s five years in a British jail—much of it in........