US charges Julian Assange with violating the Espionage Act
Federal prosecutors have charged WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange with 17 more criminal counts, including accusations that he violated the Espionage Act. The US charged him last month with conspiracy to commit computer hacking following his arrest in London. The superseding indictment includes that previous charge.
He's accused of publishing classified information obtained by whistleblower and former Army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning, who is currently in jail for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. The documents allegedly included unredacted details about foreign people who have assisted the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and State Department officials around the world. His actions allegedly "risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries and put the unredacted named human sources at a grave and imminent risk of serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention."
The Justice Department accuses Assange of conspiring with Manning to obtain the documents, and "aided and abetted her in obtaining classified information 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 indictment further states that "Assange, WikiLeaks affiliates and Manning shared the common objective to subvert lawful restrictions on classified information and to publicly disseminate it."
