The Justice Department on Thursday charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with violating the US Espionage Act by publishing military and diplomatic files in 2010, rejecting his claim that he is a journalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The department unveiled 17 new charges against Assange, accusing him of directing and abetting intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in stealing secret US files, and also recklessly exposing confidential sources in the Middle East and China who were named in the files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The charges against Assange, now 18 in total, reject his claim that he was simply a publisher receiving leaked material from Manning, an action that is protected under the US Constitution\u2019s First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A new indictment alleges that Assange actively conspired with Manning to steal the hundreds of thousands of classified files \u201cwith reason to believe that the information was to be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation,\u201d the Justice Department said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It also said that Assange rejected the US State Department\u2019s warning in 2010 to redact the names of its and the US military\u2019s confidential sources in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and China, sources it said included journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAssange\u2019s 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,\u201d the department said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it is not yet clear whether the British government will honor that request, and the new charges could complicate it.
\nWikiLeaks blasted the charges, saying the threatened reporters broadly.\u201cThis is madness. It is the end of national security journalism and the first amendment,\u201d the group tweeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wikileaks later denounced the charges as \u201can unprecedented attack on the global free press\u201d and an \u201cextraterritorial application of US law,\u201d saying in a statement that the \u201cDepartment of Justice wants to imprison Assange for crimes allegedly committed outside of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But after WikiLeaks played an important role in the Russia meddling operation in the 2016 US election, publishing materials stolen by Russian hackers that were damaging to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Washington officials began to paint the group as acting in concert with US enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2017, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at the time director of the CIA, called WikiLeaks a \u201cnon-state hostile intelligence service.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe charges brought against Julian Assange under the Espionage Act pose a direct threat to press freedom and investigative journalism, both of which are undermined when those who inform the public are prosecuted for sounding the alarm,\u201d said Reporters Without Borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the previous administration of president Barack Obama pursued leakers, including Manning, it appeared to draw the line on transparency groups like WikiLeaks, not wanting to enter a battle over press freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WikiLeaks put itself on the map as a potent force in 2010 when it began publishing the files extracted from classified US databases by Manning, then a low-level US army intelligence analyst angered by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The documents, videos, and communications exposed possible war crimes, torture, and secret military operations, as well as unveiling the often-unseemly behind-the-scenes activities, discussions and analyses of US diplomacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Justice Department on Thursday charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with violating the US Espionage Act by publishing military and diplomatic files in 2010, rejecting his claim that he is a journalist. The department unveiled 17 new charges against Assange, accusing him of directing and abetting intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in stealing secret US files, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":61953,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61954,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61952\/revisions\/61954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}