What Was the Point of Prosecuting Julian Assange?

Julian Assange is not a simple man, for all that people wish otherwise. The WikiLeaks founder is portrayed as a transparency hero, an enemy of the United States, a master tactician, and a thin-skinned narcissist. None of those descriptions quite fits the bill. But whatever you think of him, for the first time in almost 14 years, Assange is set to be a free man.

Assange’s friends and family, alongside his online supporters, are keen to present his release from London’s Belmarsh prison as a victory, a triumph after years of international campaigning for his release.

The reality, as usual, is more complex. Assange has been freed as part of a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department, which has been the subject of careful negotiation for months, even as the two sides battled it out in U.K. extradition courts.

Assange has agreed to plead guilty on one felony count relating to illegally securing and publishing classified U.S. documents, in exchange for a sentence of five years in prison, which he has already served in the U.K. while fighting against his extradition. He will not have to set foot on the mainland United States, let alone serve time in an American prison. He will soon be back in his native Australia.

[James Ball: You don’t have to like Julian Assange to defend him]

There is no world in which Julian Assange believes he is guilty of wrongdoing. He will almost certainly, upon his arrival in Australia, recant any admission of guilt and say that the plea deal was a simple matter of saying what he had to say to be free. Assange has lost more than a decade of his life to criminal cases, at a significant toll to his health, according to his friends and supporters. If this is the price of freedom, he has been ground down until he is willing to pay it.

Assange’s legal troubles did not begin with his work as WikiLeaks’ founder and editor in chief. His first arrest, in December 2010, related to allegations of rape and sexual assault against two women in Sweden. Assange fought against that extradition in the U.K. courts until each and every one, up to and including the Supreme Court, decided against him. Days afterward, in 2012, he breached his bail conditions and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he claimed asylum—not over the Swedish case, but over potential U.S. charges.

He remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years, fathering two children during that time, until the combination of a change in government and long-deteriorating relations between Assange and his hosts led to Ecuador inviting the Metropolitan Police into its embassy to arrest him. Sweden briefly considered reopening its own prosecution of Assange but eventually gave up owing to statute-of-limitation issues—the Swedish women were successfully denied their day in court.

Assange has been in a U.K. prison since he was dragged from the embassy in 2019, though he did get married during that time. The first year was for breaching his bail conditions in 2012, but the years since then have been pretrial detention—for understandable reasons, U.K. courts did not grant bail a second time—while Assange awaited extradition.

The Swedish case was eclipsed in the public eye by the unsealing of the Department of Justice’s case against Assange in 2019. To the surprise of many journalists, the charge sheet against Assange related entirely to documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, and published by WikiLeaks in 2010, that shed light on U.S. actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the conduct of the State Department worldwide, and the treatment of detainees in Guantánamo Bay.

These releases were published in coordination with major international news outlets, including The New York Times, and won public-interest journalism awards across the globe.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, the Department of Justice did not attempt to prosecute Julian Assange for any conduct related to these leaks, on the grounds that there was no case to be brought against Assange that could not also have been brought against reporters or editors at The New York Times—a clear admission of the threat to journalism such a case could bring.

And yet, this was exactly the case that was prosecuted against Assange by the Justice Department, first under Donald Trump and then under Joe Biden. The charges included conduct beyond journalism, relating to hacking, but these were relatively weak, stemming from an offer to help Manning obtain login credentials that might help hide her identity.

In trying to understand why the Justice Department was continuing to pursue—in full sight of the world—a case that posed a threat to the First Amendment, some observers reasoned that the unsealed charge sheet was being used to secure Assange’s extradition to the U.S., with the intention of bringing more serious charges later.

WikiLeaks had, after 2010, engaged in leaks that would not be so difficult to distinguish from mainstream journalism. Among those later releases were emails—found to have been obtained by Russian military hackers—related to the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta.

In another release, in 2017, WikiLeaks published hacking tools used by the CIA. Because the actual code for the tools was released, some were then used in criminal cyberattacks across the world. Was the prosecution of Assange for his conduct in 2010 an attempt to bring him to justice for later actions?

The plea deal, which will soon see Assange become a free man, puts paid to any such theories. If the Department of Justice ever hoped to extradite Assange and then charge him with a host of other crimes, it must have abandoned that ambition. Instead, it has secured what could be described at best as a messy draw.

The Assange prosecution, though, will still have a chilling effect on mainstream and independent journalists. Assange, compared with most people in his position, had almost unlimited resources to fight the case. He had access to the very best of U.K. legal counsel and enjoyed worldwide fame, with a network of high-profile supporters and activists. Even with all of that, he spent years in prison and has been forced to accept a plea deal for a felony.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Now Julian Assange is a martyr]

Almost no journalist outside the very largest media institutions would retain even a fraction of Assange’s advantages in a confrontation with the U.S. government. Assange’s protracted public fight and punishment—even if they came before his formal sentencing—send a loud and clear message across the world.

That message is not the one the U.S. generally seeks to project when it comes to free expression and press freedom, which is under threat across the world. Although America likes to portray itself as a champion of a free and even aggressive media, it has just secured the conviction of man seen by many as the personification of those values. What’s more, it has also freed him up to talk about it, which he will almost certainly do—in blistering terms, if his previous form is anything to go by.

The Department of Justice and Julian Assange have been engaged in a ferocious and yearslong battle, which they have both now lost. Assange has forfeited a decade of his life, and has had to plead guilty in court to a crime that he undoubtedly does not feel he committed. The Justice Department, for its part, wasted endless hours and dollars on an ultimately inconsequential fight. It has in the process made the world’s most powerful government look small in the very worst ways—appearing petty and vindictive, by bringing the immense power of the state to bear against one annoying man.

In an extremely volatile and polarizing election year, that petty use of prosecutorial power is perhaps the scariest precedent of all.