The Justice Department is broadening the scope of its criminal case against the founder of WikiLeaks, unsealing a superseding indictment on Wednesday, which provides greater detail related to the criminal case against Julian Assange.
A press release said the criminal offenses “relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” The Justice Department noted that “the new indictment does not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019” but added that the new 49-page court filing “does, however, broaden the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.” The DOJ filing argues that Assange and his compatriots “recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks.”
The Justice Department said, “The broadened hacking conspiracy continues to allege that Assange conspired with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash to a classified U.S. Department of Defense computer.”
The Justice Department also provided other details about WikiLeaks’s hacking activities, including a very brief history of Assange’s activities.
“Since the early days of WikiLeaks, Assange has spoken at hacking conferences to… encourage others to hack to obtain information for WikiLeaks,” the Justice Department said. In 2009, Assange told the Hacking At Random conference that WikiLeaks obtained nonpublic documents from the Congressional Research Service by exploiting “a small vulnerability” within Congress, telling the audience that “this is what any one of you would find if you were actually looking.”
Assange “gained unauthorized access to a government computer system of a NATO country” in 2010, the Justice Department said, adding that in 2012 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.”
The Justice Department claims WikiLeaks “obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an ‘Anonymous’ and LulzSec-affiliated hacker” and that the hacker says that Assange “indirectly asked him to spam that victim company again.”
The United States is seeking the extradition of Assange, 48, from the United Kingdom.
Special counsel Robert Mueller raised the possibility that President Trump lied to him during the Russia investigation related to WikiLeaks. Newly disclosed sections of Mueller’s 448-page report, unveiled Friday thanks to a legal challenge to redactions littered across the tome, showed Mueller’s assessment of Trump’s written answer about his conversations with longtime confidant Roger Stone and others about Assange.
“It is possible that, by the time the President submitted his written answers two years after the relevant events had occurred, he no longer had clear recollections of his discussions with Stone or his knowledge of Stone’s asserted communications with WikiLeaks,” Mueller’s report said. “But the President’s conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President’s denials and would link the President to Stone’s efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks.”
Assange attorney Barry Pollack said last year the “unprecedented charges” against his client “demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists.”
Federal prosecutors accused the WikiLeaks founder of violating the Espionage Act as part of a new superseding indictment in May 2019, charging him on 17 new counts in addition to the single count unsealed last year.
The Justice Department said those charges “relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
The U.S. government alleges that Assange “actively solicited United States classified information, including by publishing a list of ‘Most Wanted Leaks’ that sought, among other things, classified documents” starting in late 2009.
Describing Assange as “the public face of WikiLeaks,” the Justice Department said he founded the website with the purpose of it being “an intelligence agency of the people.” The Justice Department said that what WikiLeaks published “included names of local Afghans and Iraqis who had provided information to U.S. and coalition forces,” which prosecutors alleged “created a grave and imminent risk that the innocent people he named would suffer serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention.”
The Justice Department said in prior filings that “Manning responded to Assange’s solicitations by using access granted to her as an intelligence analyst to search for United States classified documents, and provided to Assange and WikiLeaks databases containing approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables.”
Assange has not been charged, however, for his organization’s role in exposing the CIA’s “Vault 7” program in 2017, a massive document dump that revealed details about the agency’s electronic surveillance and hacking capabilities. Nor has the WikiLeaks founder charged in connection to Russia’s election interference in 2016.
Manning was convicted at a court-martial trial in 2013, and the 35-year sentence was commuted by Barack Obama days before his presidency ended in January 2017. Manning was imprisoned again and later released after refusing to give grand jury testimony.
Until his arrest in April 2019, Assange had been granted political asylum for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He took refuge there in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning in a sexual assault investigation. That case was dropped, but WikiLeaks feared Assange could be extradited to the U.S.
He was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail in May 2019 after he was found guilty of breaking his bail conditions when he claimed asylum in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden. Assange has been held at Belmarsh prison since September after finishing a 50-week sentence for violating bail. The coronavirus has delayed extradition hearings.
“He is there for facing the full power of the U.S. government,” Assange attorney Edward Fitzgerald said this spring. “They have massive resources. They have a series of legal resumptions operating in their favor.”
The Justice Department released 33 search warrants stemming from the investigation of Stone in April, showing the searches began in the fall of 2017 and focused on Stone’s alleged outreach to WikiLeaks and Russia-linked accounts. The search warrants show Stone and Assange conversed with each other online in 2017.
