Julian Assange is free after agreeing to plead guilty to a felony under the Espionage Act. Maybe a sentence of time served is enough, given his five years in British prison and his seven years holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted “publisher.”
Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo once described WikiLeaks as “a nonstate hostile intelligence service,” and the label fits. When the U.S. indicted Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act in 2019, Assistant Attorney General John Demers cited the totality of his conduct, soliciting and dumping online classified information that could put the lives of American allies in jeopardy: “No responsible actor — journalist or otherwise — would purposely publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in war zones.”
A year later, in unveiling a superseding indictment alleging a broader conspiracy on computer intrusion, the Justice Department said Mr. Assange “communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack.”
Amid the 2016 election, WikiLeaks published embarrassing internal emails from Democratic power brokers. Later investigations said those messages were stolen by hackers tied to Russian military intelligence. Mr. Assange’s outfit also posted the emails without bothering to redact sensitive personal information, including home addresses and Social Security numbers.
WikiLeaks “very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort,” said a 2020 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Its investigation found “significant indications that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have benefited from Russian government support.” Mr. Assange denied that Russia was the source of the Democratic emails, but it’s hard to see why anyone should believe him.
None of this is the behavior of a journalist or a whistleblower, and Mr. Assange is neither.
This would have been obvious during the Cold War, say, if a foreign national had been caught copying and disseminating hundreds of thousands of U.S. military field reports. The internet age makes leaking easier, but it hasn’t blurred these lines anywhere near enough to cover Mr. Assange. If the U.S. had failed to pursue him, it might as well have given up keeping secrets.
