WikiLeaks founder Assange may be near end of long fight to stay out of US [View all]

[justaprogressive]

Assange and his supporters argue he acted as a journalist to expose U.S. military wrongdoing and is protected under press freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Among the files published by WikiLeaks was video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

“Julian has been indicted for receiving, possessing and communicating information to the public of evidence of war crimes committed by the U.S. government,” Stella Assange said. “Reporting a crime is never a crime.”

U.S. lawyers say Assange is guilty of trying to hack the Pentagon computer and that WikiLeaks’ publications created a “grave and imminent risk” to U.S. intelligence sources in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[snip]

“The drafters of the Espionage Act did not intend for publishers to fall within its ambit,” Stella Assange wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Unchallenged expert evidence showed that receipt and publication of state secrets is routine, and that there was an ‘unbroken practice of non-prosecution’ of publishers. The prosecution ‘crosses a new legal frontier’ and ‘breaks all legal precedents.’”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/19/wikileaks-founder-assange-may-be-near-end-of-long-fight-to-stay-out-of-us-00142084