As the United States seeks to extradite Julian Assange from the United Kingdom, a lawyer for the U.S. government argued before a London court that the WikiLeaks founder put lives at risk by leaking classified documents containing the names of U.S. foreign sources.
“The defense seeks to suggest that the risk to these individuals who, by having the individuals revealed as informants, is somehow overstated,” U.S. counsel James Lewis told the judge at the Woolwich Crown Court on Monday, according to the Guardian. “I would remind the court that these were individuals who were passing on information on regimes such as Iran and organizations such as al Qaeda.”
Assange, 47, was arrested at Ecuador’s Embassy in London early last year in connection to a single U.S. charge of conspiring to hack a classified Pentagon computer network in 2010, by agreeing to help Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning crack a password. Federal prosecutors later accused the WikiLeaks founder of violating the Espionage Act as part of a new superseding indictment last May, charging him on 17 new counts.
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.”
After this week’s legal arguments, a three-week evidentiary hearing won’t begin until May.
Lewis argued that Assange “is not charged with disclosure of embarrassing or awkward information that the government would rather not have disclosed — the disclosures charges are solely where there was a risk of risk.”
The attorney added that “the U.S. is aware of sources, whose redacted names and other identifying information was contained in classified documents published by Wikileaks who subsequently disappeared, although the U.S. can’t prove at this point that their disappearance was the result of being outed by Wikileaks,” according to the BBC.
Lewis claimed the charges against Assange weren’t about uncovering U.S. war crimes but, as quoted by CNN, related to “publishing specific classified documents that contained unredacted names of innocent people who risked their safety and freedom to aid the United States and its allies.”
The attorney for the U.S. read aloud a 2011 repudiation from WikiLeaks’ five former media partners in the wake of those disclosures.
“We deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted State Department cables, which may put sources at risk,” the outlets said at the time, adding, “We are united in condemning it.”
The Department of Justice said Assange founded WikiLeaks with the purpose of it being “an intelligence agency of the people.” The indictment said the information 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.”
The DOJ said that “Manning responded to Assange’s solicitations by using access granted to her as an intelligence analyst to search for U.S. 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 attorney Barry Pollack said last year that “these unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists.”
Assange was not charged for his role in exposing the CIA’s “Vault 7” program in 2017 nor in connection to Russia’s election interference in 2016.
His lawyer Mark Summers claimed last October there was a connection between “the reinvigoration of the investigation and Donald Trump’s presidency.”
“Julian Assange faces, if extradited and convicted, 175 years in prison,” Assange’s attorneys said last year. “The implication for publishers of information whose publications concerns practices of the United States for which national security is claimed have implications far beyond the case of Julian Assange.”
“The extradition is a death sentence,” Assange’s father John Shipton said last week.
Today, Lewis called these claims “hyperbole” and said any prison sentence would likely be far less than that.
Assange lawyer Edward Fitzgerald told the court last week they had evidence showing former California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange “on instructions from the president” and “was offering a pardon” if Assange “said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham called this “a complete fabrication and a total lie.”
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 last year after refusing to provide grand jury testimony.
Assange was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 when avoiding Swedish extradition over sexual assault allegations. He remained there until London’s Metropolitan Police arrested him last April, and he has been held at Belmarsh prison since September after finishing a 50-week sentence for violating bail.
