'Dangerous Path for Democracy' and Dire Threat to Press Freedom: Trump DOJ's Secret Charges Against WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Revealed

Free speech advocates and civil libertarians are warning that fundamental press freedoms are under threat after the Trump Justice Department accidentally revealed in an unrelated court filing that secret charges have been filed against journalist Julian Assange.

For nearly six years, the Wikileaks founder and publisher has been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to the U.S. for publishing classified and embarrassing information about the global superpower.

“The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take.”
—Barry Pollack, Assange attorney

“The news that criminal charges have apparently been filed against Mr. Assange is even more troubling than the haphazard manner in which that information has been revealed,” Barry Pollack, one of Assange’s attorneys, said in a statement. “The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take.”

While it is not entirely clear how mention of the Assange charges ended up in an entirely unrelated filing, experts told the Guardian it was likely a simple copy-paste error.

Written by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen Dwyer, the filing calls for the charges against Assange to remain hidden from the public “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case.”

“I hope people see how precedent the Trump administration wants to get against WikiLeaks under the Espionage Act can easily be turned around and used on mainstream reporters.”
—Trevor Timm, Freedom of the Press Foundation

The charges, Dwyer continued, “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested.”

Though it is not yet clear what specific charges have been filed against Assange, press freedom advocates immediately raised alarm at the dangerous prospect of an individual being prosecuted for publishing classified information—something journalists and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post do all the time.

Journalist and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald, in a column posted Friday morning, detailed why any prosecution of Assange for his work as a journalist would have profoundly negative implications and placed the ongoing attack on Wikileaks in the context of broader discussions of press freedoms:

“I hope people see how precedent the Trump administration wants to get against WikiLeaks under the Espionage Act can easily be turned around and used on mainstream reporters,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote on Twitter. “Hard to overstate how dangerous it would be for press freedom.”

“If Assange is charged by the U.S. government in relation to the Manning leak and WikiLeaks, the implications for U.S. journalism, and the chilling effect, would be extremely serious,” added Christian Christensen, an American professor of journalism at Stockholm University in Sweden. “Dislike of Assange should not blind people in the U.S. to this fact.”