The U.S. government’s prosecution of Julian Assange ended earlier this year, but plenty of questions about its decade plus pursuit of the WikiLeaks founder remain unanswered.
A new Freedom of Information Act lawsuit – filed against the FBI and Department of Justice by our friends at Defending Rights and Dissent – seeks answers.
We hosted a recent conversation via X Spaces with DRAD’s policy director, Chip Gibbons, and Kevin Gosztola, author of “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange” and editor of The Dissenter. The two discussed the need to force transparency on a dark chapter in the history of press freedom in America.
Gibbons explained that as part of Assange’s plea deal, the U.S. committed to not bringing any further charges against him for past conduct – meaning that exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act for ongoing investigations should no longer apply. And yet, the government has not complied with DRAD’s longstanding document requests.
Nobody expects an easy path forward in piercing through the layers of secrecy the government will likely invoke to deny transparency. But Gibbons hopes to obtain records that will shed some light on why the U.S. decided to put the First Amendment at risk to prosecute Assange. Assange testified today before Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that his plea deal required him to plead “guilty to journalism.”
Gibbons said he wants to give the public a behind-the-scenes view into why former President Donald Trump’s administration, and subsequently President Joe Biden’s, changed course after the Obama administration declined to prosecute Assange, preferring to use the Espionage Act against whistleblowers instead.
“I do believe there is this hard-line career intelligence faction in the FBI and the CIA and the NSA too, who have always wanted to go after Assange. … The Obama administration took this perspective of sort of maximum war on government insiders, but don't touch the government outsiders, and I know the FBI was clearly dissatisfied,” Gibbons explained.
He also wants to know why prosecutors decided to forgo other potential charges to pursue an Espionage Act theory based on WikiLeaks’ 2010 publications of documents from whistleblower Chelsea Manning. A case based on a computer hacking theory would likely not have encountered similar resistance from the press freedom community, which viewed criminalization of publishing government secrets as an existential threat to investigative journalism.
And a case based on other WikiLeaks publications – like the Vault 7 leaks – may not have provoked the same outrage from anti-war and human rights organizations as a prosecution arising from documents that exposed U.S. war crimes.
“I would be very curious to know why the decision was made in 2019 to revive the 2010 Chelsea Manning case and not the other, less politically toxic cases. … They sort of picked their politically weakest case, which I would presume was because they thought it was legally the strongest,” Gibbons said.
Gosztola added that the documents being withheld could also shed light on everything from the role of discredited informants and the FBI’s tactics in seeking witnesses to testify against Assange to what the FBI took from the Ecuadorian embassy after Assange was expelled in 2019.
Both speakers called for reform of the Espionage Act — which allows prosecution of whistleblowers and publishers of classified documents without distinguishing those who do so out of conscience to expose wrongdoing from foreign spies. Gibbons was the lead author of amendments to the act proposed by Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Gosztola said he doesn’t trust the U.S. government’s assurances that it won’t apply to so-called “conventional” journalists the Espionage Act theory under which it charged Assange. He said the Assange case demonstrates the “willingness of the Justice Department to cross this line” and prosecute publishers, not just leakers, of government secrets.
And he said independent journalists like himself would suffer most — not just from actual Espionage Act prosecutions but from the chilling effect that comes from the prospect of one. “Someone like myself who works independently, I don't have a lawyer on hand. … So I do consider the choices that I'm making when I engage in newsgathering. I do consider what I'm going to pursue as a journalist,” he said.
The conversation was an hour-and-a-half-long deep dive into the Assange case and the secrecy surrounding it. We can’t possibly capture it all in a blog post, but you can listen to it, or read a transcript (albeit an imperfect AI-generated one) here.
