Assange Freed

Short version is that he pled guilty to infections of the Espionage Act, and will be sentenced to time served, and is expected to return to Australia.

It's good that he is out, but it needs to be noted that his plea was basically coerced, and the whole prosecution was basically criminalizing the practice of journalism.

The plea deal Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has reached with prosecutors is bad for American press freedoms. But the outcome also could have been worse.

The deal, which was finalized on Wednesday in a courtroom in a remote U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific, cleared the way for him to walk free after more than five years in British custody, most of which he spent fighting extradition to the United States. In exchange, he pleaded guilty to one charge of violating the Espionage Act.

The result is an ambiguous end to a legal saga that has jeopardized the ability of journalists to report on military, intelligence or diplomatic information that officials deem secret. Enshrined in the First Amendment, the role of a free press in bringing to light information beyond what those in power approve for release is a foundational principle of American self-government.

The agreement means that for the first time in American history, gathering and publishing information the government considers secret has been successfully treated as a crime. This new precedent will send a threatening message to national security journalists, who may be chilled in how aggressively they do their jobs because they will see a greater risk of prosecution.

But its reach is also limited, dodging a bigger threat. Because Mr. Assange agreed to a deal, he will not challenge the legitimacy of applying the Espionage Act to his actions. The outcome, then, averts the risk that the case might lead to a definitive Supreme Court ruling blessing prosecutors’ narrow interpretation of First Amendment press freedoms.

“He’s basically pleading guilty to things that journalists do all the time and need to do,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It will cast a shadow over press freedom — but not the same kind of a shadow that would have been cast by a judicial opinion holding that this activity is criminal and unprotected by the First Amendment.”

In short, he added, the outcome was complicated from the perspective of press freedom and could be seen as neither “all bad or all good.”

………

But for the purposes of press freedom, what matters is not who counts as a journalist, but whether journalistic-style activities — whether performed by a journalist or anyone else — can be treated as crimes. And the charges against Mr. Assange are not about Moscow’s covert efforts to help Donald J. Trump win the 2016 election.

Rather, the charges centered on the earlier publications that vaulted him to global notoriety and made him a hero to the antiwar left: a video of a U.S. helicopter gunning down people in Baghdad, including a Reuters photographer; troves of military incident logs documenting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; a quarter-million diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world; and dossiers about Guantánamo detainees.

The narrow criminal information to which Mr. Assange pleaded guilty centers on one count of conspiring to violate the Espionage Act. The court document says that Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, and Mr. Assange agreed that she would send him national-security files, even though he had no security clearance, and that he would then “communicate them” to others who were also “not entitled to receive them” — that is, publish them.

………

But successfully indicting a nongovernment official for publishing national-security information of public interest that he had obtained while working with a source is different. No one had ever been charged under the Espionage Act for a journalistic act, in part because there had long been a widespread assumption that applying that law to such acts would be unconstitutional.

The charge against Mr. Assange, then, crossed a line. It showed that the 21st-century crackdown on leakers could expand to encompass criminalizing the same sort of actions that brought to light important post-Sept. 11, 2001, abuses like warrantless wiretapping and torture, as well as day-to-day journalism about military, intelligence or diplomatic matters that help people better understand the world.

The charges are literally the performance of journalism.

The facts of whose oxen were gored is irrelevant to the real issue here.