Julian Assange has been one of the most controversial figures in the West. He’s known as the head of WikiLeaks, a hero for free speech and journalism, a revolutionary against the West’s military industrial complex, a narcissist fringe attention-seeker, a partisan cutout, and a useful for the Kremlin.
The Obama Administration was not a fan of his, but nevertheless decided not to move against him because of the potential for a dangerous precedent setting in using the power of the state against investigative journalism.
However, last week, the Ecuadorians turned him over to the UK, at which point the US unsealed an indictment for conspiring, with Chelsea manning, to illegally gain classified information from the pentagon.
The breakthrough came with the Ecuadorians after the election of Lenin Moreno in 2017. The increasingly conservative-leaning president was less inclined to support Assange and more interested in rebuilding relations with the US, especially given the importance of US support for a new $4.2 billion IMF loan agreed to in February.
WikiLeaks also leaked documents that touched on Moreno’s corruption, and made a series of political announcements that were complicating Ecuadorian relations with other countries—including, most recently, Assange’s support for the Catalonian secession that caused tensions in relations with Madrid—that increased the pressure, leading Moreno to finally rescind Assange’s citizenship and kick him out of their London embassy, where he had been residing for some seven years.
The US coverage has been predictably focused on President Donald Trump’s inconsistencies around Assange. Trump repeatedly expressed his support for WikiLeaks during the election campaign, given Assange’s strong opposition to Hillary Clinton and WikiLeaks’ role in publicizing material from that was damaging to her campaign.
Trump may well have had a heads up on the opportunity presented by WikiLeaks during the election, with Trump supporter and Paul Manafort confederate Roger Stone having been in close communication with Assange just before the material was published.
The decision to indict Assange comes from national security, not from Trump personally. Given the absence of Assange from Robert Mueller’s indictment list, his use to Trump’s election doesn’t imply any direct connection to the president. In other words, I don’t expect any political interference with the process here.
I am less concerned than many that the Assange case becomes a mechanism to fundamentally undermine the effectiveness of a free and independent media.
First, Trump’s conflicted political interests in WikiLeaks makes him less capable of using the case as a landmark to go after “fake news” and the mainstream media (sort of like it’s hard to advance tougher border security in the aftermath of terrorist attacks from white nationalists; the politics makes it harder to use the argument).
Second, the case isn’t going to move quickly. We’re likely to get through 2020 US presidential elections before there’s a resolution from the British courts on US extradition and, presuming successful, a start to criminal proceedings in the US.
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