Washington - The Justice Department on Thursday charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with violating the US Espionage Act by publishing military and diplomatic files in 2010, rejecting his claim that he is a journalist.
A new indictment alleges that Assange actively conspired with Manning to steal the hundreds of thousands of classified files "with reason to believe that the information was to be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation," the Justice Department said. "The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy," said Assistant Attorney General John Demers. A native of Australia, Assange, 47, is currently in prison in Britain for jumping bail, and faces a US extradition request when he is released 11 months from now.
The charges escalate the US government's effort to crack down on leakers of national security materials. In 2017, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at the time director of the CIA, called WikiLeaks a "non-state hostile intelligence service."WikiLeaks put itself on the map as a potent force in 2010 when it began publishing the files extracted from classified US databases by Manning, then a low-level US army intelligence analyst angered by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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