One of them said that an unidentified Russian businessman served as an intermediary in these discussions. Read: The radical evolution of WikiLeaks. All of which is to say that Ecuador had ample reasons of its own to show Assange the door and was well within its sovereign rights to do so. He first sought refuge in the embassy after he jumped bail more than seven years ago to evade extradition to Sweden on sexual-assault charges brought by two women.
That might now change, and so the lawyer for that claimant has filed to reopen the case. But the British charges remained on the books throughout. Worse than that, Assange and his ever-dwindling claque of apologists spent years in the pre- MeToo era suggesting, without evidence, that the women who accused him of being a sex pest were actually American agents in disguise , and that Britain was simply doing its duty as a hireling of the American empire in staking out his diplomatic digs with a net.
As it happens, a rather lengthy series of U. Read: The astonishing transformation of Julian Assange. Everything about this Bakunin of bullshit and his self-constructed plight has belonged to the theater of the absurd.
Assange will have all the same rights he was accorded when he tried to beat his first extradition rap in These people make it seem as if Assange is being sought by the Eastern District of Virginia for publishing American state secrets rather than for allegedly conniving to steal them. It turns out those fears were well founded. Last week, it emerged that there is a secret indictment of Assange , which was accidentally revealed in an unrelated legal filing.
But based on what is known publicly, there are good reasons to be skeptical of his prosecution, and to fear it could set a damaging precedent that would weaken press freedom.
Assange has published information that exposed government wrongdoing, including the abuse of detainees in Iraq. If it does, we will all suffer. Both could threaten the foundations of First Amendment protections—especially if the bipartisan Assange-hatred overcomes the blind administration of justice. The left has engaged in similar flipfloppery, blasting Assange for the DNC leaks, which somehow crossed a line that they seem sure was not crossed earlier.
Do you claim to support a free press? Assange has a document release that will test that belief. Do you believe in government transparency? Wikileaks has very likely caused you to impose some limits on that belief—limits that may well be tied to your partisan orientation.
As unintentionally revealed by federal prosecutors last month , the government has apparently filed a sealed criminal indictment against Assange.
But one real possibility is that the government will charge Assange with violating the Espionage Act, a World War I-era statute that has been used periodically over the past years to prosecute leakers of classified information. As media advocates including myself have said again and again, an Espionage Act prosecution of a publisher or an individual journalist would cross a bright red line, bringing the very act of publishing within the scope of a harsh criminal statute in a way—we hope—the First Amendment does not permit.
And yet recently, media outlets generally have been slow to offer support for Wikileaks. What would the New York Times have to worry about if the government successfully prosecuted Assange under the Espionage Act? Quite a lot, actually. If a publisher like Wikileaks falls under the Espionage Act, what would stop the government from prosecuting a more conventional publisher—or, for that matter, an individual journalist?
There are plenty of ways to distinguish the Wikileaks from the Times and Assange from a working journalist, but not in ways that would give the Times much comfort should the government ever bring Espionage Act charges against it.
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