--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Julian Assange had a big hearing in London today. A bunch of his supporters showed up, but he did not. He's currently being held at Belmarsh Prison in London, and a WikiLeaks spokesperson said that while he's been there, his health has deteriorated and he's lost a dramatic amount of weight. Today, his lawyer said he was too ill to appear in court.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is, like, bad news on top of bad news on top of bad news for Assange. But the worst news came about a week ago, and Andrew Prokop has been covering the story for Vox. Last week, the Justice Department announced a new superseding indictment, 17 new charges against Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: U.S. officials charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with violating the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing classified information with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These are in connection to the leaks of military documents and State Department cables back in 2010, given to him by then-private Chelsea Manning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of the documents leaked exposed abuse by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Including information that documented the names of confidential human sources and that the release of that information put the individuals in exceptionally grave danger.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: When I think Espionage Act, I think spies. Is this saying that basically what he did with Chelsea Manning in leaking a bunch of information about the United States government and our national security was in league with what a spy might do?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For over a century at this point on the books has been this Espionage Act, which says that the publication of any document, writing, it lists several types of pieces of information relating to the national defense, which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, is criminal.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Two federal prosecutors argued against using the Espionage Act against Assange. They're reportedly worried about the threat that these charges could pose to the First Amendment. So it's a very broad law that has scared people for a long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now it's being used by the Justice Department to say that Assange's publication of the leaked classified and military information that Chelsea Manning gave him is criminal. But this happened in 2010. Has the U.S. government just been weighing that question for, what, two administrations and nine years now?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, the Obama Justice Department looked very seriously at charging Assange and they even explored this option of charging him under the Espionage Act. But around 2013, they decided that they wouldn't do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a Washington Post story from the time that quotes a Justice Department official saying that what they had was a New York Times problem, that using the Espionage Act against Assange for the publication of information like this could be invoked in the exact same way against more respectable journalists and really any reporting on classified information or secret national security information.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That the U.S. government wants to keep hidden. Has the Justice Department commented on whether this means that journalism itself is at risk?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, essentially, they just say, don't worry about it. We don't consider Assange a journalist, and we would not use the law in this way against journalists. And it's kind of like a trust us argument.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What is the distinction between Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, journalism, The New York Times, Vox, Mother Jones, Bob's blog in Topeka? Like, where do you draw the line?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So in response to these concerns, John Demers, the head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, said, some say that Assange is a journalist and that he should be immune from prosecution for these actions. The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy, and we thank you for it.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It has not and never has been the department's policy to target them for reporting. But he went on to say that Assange is no journalist and he also said that he was not a responsible actor that was purposefully publishing the names of individuals that could be confidential human sources exposing people to danger and so on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I mean their argument is essentially that Assange was irresponsible and dangerous and a bad guy and that they don't consider him a journalist. But the response from free speech activists and journalists themselves is that what he did essentially obtaining secret information that the government wants to keep secret and making it public, is what they're doing too.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The one difference maybe being that the New York Times or Vox or even Bob's blog in Topeka might be a little more careful to not publish names of active sources or government agents in a foreign country? That would be a difference, but it's not clear if there's a legal difference.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's nothing in this law in particular that would make that distinction. Charlie Savage from the New York Times wrote in his story that the Times obtained the same archives of documents from Manning that WikiLeaks did back in 2010.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And he writes, while the Times did take steps to withhold the names of informants in the subset of the files it published, it is not clear how that is legally different from publishing other classified information.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's been viewed as kind of a voluntary step that journalistic organizations have taken in response to governmental concerns. But it's not clear that it's a legal distinction.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What is the distinction that they're making between Chelsea Manning, who leaked the information, and Julian Assange, who shared it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the government has long taken a more aggressive stance against the leakers themselves than the people who publish what the leakers give them. Manning was, of course, prosecuted under the Obama administration and other governmental leakers were as well.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Obama's Justice Department got harsh criticism for that. It was called his war on leaks. But they never went so far as filing charges against the people who published the classified or secret information rather than the people who leaked it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the heat just got turned up significantly on Assange and it was already cranked, right? Where does this leave him?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: After spending several years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange was finally arrested and taken into British custody in April. The U.S. is trying to extradite Assange to get him brought into the United States so they can prosecute him here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as part of that effort, they filed an initial charge against Assange in April. And now they have filed this broader set of charges, apparently in an attempt to settle exactly what he's going to be charged with before any potential extradition.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Now, the extradition is not necessarily a sure thing, though. There's also an investigation into a rape allegation against Assange in Sweden. So there's the possibility he could be extradited there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's the possibility that the UK government could turn down the US request to extradite Assange if they feel that his prosecution is too political. So basically it's not clear, but he's currently in a prison in London.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It wasn't that long ago that Julian Assange was basically a folk hero. How we went from there to here, next.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He is also the host of a TV show called Adam Ruins Everything. My TV people tell me it's on TruTV. Check it out. But also the podcast, Factually, is a show where Adam talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, professors, other smart people to find out the true facts behind big issues like homelessness or all the stuff big tech is going through right now or gun control.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Like, for instance, did you know that no one in America thought the right to bear arms really had anything to do with self-defense for a very long time. That's more of like a recent development.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's stuff like that in the show. It's again called Factually with Adam Conover from Adam Ruins Everything on TruTV. But this one's a podcast. It's in the podcast apps now. And you can subscribe now so you never miss an episode.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Andrew, where does Julian come from?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, Australia. Assange was born in Australia in 1971. By the time he was a teenager, he got into computer hacking. He called himself Mendax. According to a New Yorker profile of him, it meant nobly untruthful.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I was a journalist. You know, I was a very young journalist activist at an early age. I wrote a magazine and was prosecuted for it when I was a teenager. Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and his stated goal was to publish information the powerful were trying to keep secret.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And over the next couple of years he really had his greatest successes in obtaining and publishing United States military national security and foreign policy documents.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A big part of that is that Assange himself was a harsh critic of what he deemed the U.S.'s imperialist ambitions. The predominant form the U.S. empire has is an empire of U.S. bases, now more than 1,400 U.S. military bases in over 120 countries dotted around the world, and an empire of trade.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it uses these mechanisms of its embassies, of its military bases, of its presence in organizations like the UN and IMF in order to secure advantageous deals and structures for the largest American companies.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So when exactly does the world come to know of WikiLeaks? One of their first big scoops was in 2010. They published a video of a U.S. airstrike in Iraq that killed civilians.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From a distance, you hear the voices on the tape watch as the wounded try to crawl to help. But when help arrives... Come on, let's shoot. You're engaged. 1-8. Clear. Come on. Clear.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They also published a lot of military documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and all sorts of State Department cables in which diplomats were giving very candid assessments of foreign governments.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: French President Nicolas Sarkozy is called thin-skinned and the naked emperor. The German chancellor is described as Angela Teflon Merkel. And Afghan President Hamad Karzai is weak and driven by paranoia.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: These are essentially U.S. government secrets that the United States was trying to keep hidden. Some of it related to the deaths of civilians and wars abroad and terrible things that happened there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And these leaks were really unprecedented to an extent. And they gained enormous attention and made him a kind of celebrity.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I remember watching those videos. A lot of people were looking at Julian Assange as the sort of activist folk hero who was exposing the truth about these engagements that were deeply unpopular in the U.S. and abroad.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does he sort of fall from that perch?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So, yeah, Assange was a kind of folk hero. There was even a movie in 2013 called The Fifth Estate. He was played by Benedict Cumberbatch.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What about the lives of the soldiers and the civilians involved in these conflicts? Death squads, unreported civilian casualties, countless incidents of friendly fire.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This is information the world needs to know. And things started to somewhat turn for him in 2012. He faced a rape allegation, which posed a risk that he would be extradited to Sweden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In June 2012, he showed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and asked for political asylum. And the imminent danger at the time was the Swedish extradition.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But he said that what he was really worried about was political persecution from the United States government for the leaks that they so despised.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And at the time, it was President Rafael Correa was the leader of Ecuador and the leftist government of the country was pretty sympathetic to Assange's anti-United States imperialism activism.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So they granted his request and he took up residence in the Ecuadorian Assembly in London. And he like sets up his own personal WeWork there for what, seven years?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, he was holed up there in the end for nearly seven years from June 2012 to in the end, April 2019.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But he wasn't just sitting around. He was continuing to run WikiLeaks and posting more leaked material and including most infamously, perhaps, during the 2016 campaign, posting hacked emails that had been obtained by Russian hackers and that he had gotten a hold of, both from the Democratic National Committee.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In one email, a top DNC staffer wonders about Sanders. Does he believe in a god? He has skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And from Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta. Her inability to just do a national interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem, more so than honesty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This became a central event of interest in the Mueller investigation. But in the end, Assange was not charged for anything related to those leaks.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: How does the sexual assault allegation coupled with the leaks of information that ultimately harms the Democratic Party the DNC and Hillary Clinton and ultimately affects the 2016 presidential election change the way Assange is perceived by the public here or abroad?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of people turned against him of course who had previously been sympathetic to him. It wasn't clear whether Assange was trying to bring transparency by publishing the powerful people's communications or whether he was instead just trying to help out the Russians and hurt Hillary Clinton, who he had long really disliked.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He called her a bright, well-connected, sadistic sociopath. And weirdly enough, Republicans who had previously criticized him for leaking all this stuff started to support him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He called into Sean Hannity's show and was rapturously received there, for instance. It's absolutely incredible for Clinton to lie. She is lying.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But it's a bit disturbing that James Coney goes along with that game. Wow, Julian Assange, fascinating. I do hope you get free one day. I wish you the best. Thank you for being with us. Thank you, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump read out WikiLeaks on the campaign trail. He said, WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks! And, you know, then Trump was elected and it turned out that Assange didn't get the better treatment that he was hoping for.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What exactly happened there? Do we have any idea how Trump went from WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks! to having his Justice Department file all these charges that he violated the Espionage Act?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, it doesn't really seem like Trump initiated any of this. I think what happened is that WikiLeaks got a hold of another series of leaks, and they posted a new set of material about the CIA's hacking capabilities.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And this is called the Vault 7 leak, and it appeared to be the largest leak of CIA documents in history, according to the New York Times.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: WikiLeaks says the documents show the CIA's team of hackers have developed malware to be able to hack into almost any device people use and can remotely control iPhones, iPads, Android devices, taking video from their cameras, listening with their microphones.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And this may have really been the thing that reactivated the Justice Department's efforts to go after Assange.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How exactly does his relationship with the Ecuadorian embassy shift? Because ultimately, they give him up, right?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Yeah, so basically Assange overstayed his welcome on one hand, and then on the other hand, Ecuador got a new president who was less sympathetic toward him and announced, we've ended the asylum of this spoiled brat. From now on, we'll be more careful in giving asylum to people who are really worth it and not miserable hackers whose only goal is to destabilize governments.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow, what happened? There were all sorts of stories leaking out over the years that Assange has vigorously disputed, more or less Assange's hygiene.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The Associated Press writes, The stench from going weeks without a shower and a dental problem born of poor hygiene was a constant nuisance, according to the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then there was the issue of Assange's poop, which authorities said he spread across embassy walls on at least one occasion in an act of open defiance showing how little he thought of his hosts.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Yikes. Yeah. So, again, Assange has tried to dispute some of these allegations. But, you know, according to these Ecuadorian officials, he was not the greatest house guest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Julian Assange, now with a beard, carried out of the Ecuadorian embassy by London's Metropolitan Police. You must resist. You can't resist.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What happened in the end is that the Ecuadorian government said they were done with him and agreed to turn him over to the U.K. government. And now there's this battle over where he's going to be extradited.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His case will be argued in court. There will be First Amendment challenges probably against these charges. And traditionally, when the First Amendment is at risk in the United States in free speech cases, it's often not the most sympathetic or beloved people in the world that are trying to exercise those free speech rights.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think a really interesting question now is whether sentiment in the United States among, say, those Democrats who are so angry at what Assange did in the 2016 election can now kind of see past that and realize that criminalizing the publication of secret United States information is something that could have some very bad effects down the road.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is not necessarily something that progressives or liberals should be happy to see happening.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Andrew Prokop is a senior political correspondent at Vox.com. I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. This is Today Explained. Thank you.
