FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
According to court documents, the Department of Justice and Julian Assange have reached a plea agreement in the DOJ’s long-running case against the WikiLeaks founder that threatens core press freedom rights of journalists. Assange is expected to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing classified documents from whistleblower Chelsea Manning in 2010.
The following statement can be attributed to Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF):
It’s good news that the DOJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day.
The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic. The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit. And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.
The Trump administration indicted Assange on 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Biden administration has continued pressing the case for the past three years.
Under the legal theory used in the indictment, any journalist could be convicted of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining national defense information from a source, communicating with a source to encourage them to provide national defense information, or publishing national defense information. Virtually all major civil liberties organizations and major news outlets denounced the prosecution as a threat to core press freedom rights.
If you are a member of the press and wish to conduct an interview with a Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) expert, email [email protected]
