US DOJ charge Wikileaks’ Julian Assange with 17 criminal charges for conspiring with Bradley Manning

The U.S. Justice Department unveiled 17 new criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday, saying he unlawfully published the names of classified sources and conspired with and assisted ex-Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning (called Bradley Manning at the time) in obtaining access to classified information.

The original Assange indictment, brought in March 2018 and unsealed in April of this year, charged the WikiLeaks founder with conspiring with Manning to hack a government computer to obtain hundreds of thousands of U.S. military reports about U.S. wars in the Middle East.

Unlike the first indictment, the new counts allege that he and Manning sought to “subvert lawful restrictions on classified information and to publicly disseminate it.” The new indictment could raise significant questions about First Amendment protections for publishers of classified information.

Yet Justice Department officials sought to downplay any analogy between Assange and a mainstream news reporter, emphasizing how he published the names of confidential human source knowing they would be put “at a grave and imminent risk” of harm.

Assange, who was taken out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April, is being held in a London jail for jumping bail on a sex charge and awaiting extradition to the United States.

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photo/Espen Moe

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