The U.S. wants Julian Assange on hacking charges—but they may not be the only ones he’s facing. The Justice Department is hinting that there could be another case pending against the WikiLeaks founder now that Ecuador has booted him out of its London embassy. What else could Assange be charged him with? And is it likely that he’ll ever see the inside of an American court?
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Can this be used against other outlets? It’s wait and see. The nightmare scenario for news outlets that do national security reporting has always been that the Justice Department would charge WikiLeaks or Assange under the Espionage Act. Given that news organization solicit classified information on a daily basis, that would mean everyone from the New York Times on down could be open to prosecution for their national security reporting.
In the Assange indictment, prosecutors didn’t charge him for receiving stolen classified information, but for allegedly trying to crack a password that would help Chelsea Manning cover her tracks in removing classified data from Defense Department networks. At the time, Manning served in the U.S. Army as an enlisted intelligence analyst deployed in Iraq.
The tailored approach has earned praise from former prosecutors like David Hickton, who served as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania under the Obama administration and brought hacking and espionage charges against Chinese military personnel.
"What the Eastern District of Virginia has done here is really a rifle shot as opposed to a shotgun blast. It's a well done indictment, narrowly drawn,” he said.
Still, journalism advocacy organizations are at best uneasy about the charges. The Freedom of the Press Foundation rounded up statements from groups ranging from the ACLU to Reporters Without Borders citing “concern” and calling the move “troubling.”
What did Assange try to hack? According to the indictment, Manning wanted to be able to hide her tracks and harvest data from the Pentagon’s network for sharing secret-level information without logging in under her own username. To get around that, she needed to crack a password stored as a hash value.
Chat logs obtained by journalist Emma Best reportedly show Manning and Assange messaging each other under pseudonyms during the early March 2010 time frame listed in the Assange indictment. In the logs, Manning allegedly asked Assange if he was “any good at Im hash cracking?”—a reference to hash values used by Microsoft LAN manager. Assange responded “yes,” and said that WikiLeaks has resources that can potentially crack the hash and reveal the password it represents.
Not much seems to have come of the attempt, though. In pages of chat logs on that day and others, the “scheme” as described in pages of indictment comes off as barely a blip—an exchange that took up about four lines in a day where the two racked up hundreds chatting back and forth.
Nor would it have achieved much had the two been successful. By this point, as the indictment notes, Manning had already passed along thousands of pages of classified material comprising the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs. She’d also already left behind a long enough forensic trail for prosecutors to convict her. A military court sentenced Manning to 35 years in prison in 2013 but President Obama commuted her sentence in 2018.
What’s the next charge to drop? Justice Department officials have told reporters that Manning-related charges aren’t the only ones they plan to file on Assange. It’s unclear what those would be but there are at least two active criminal cases in which WikiLeaks and Assange played a role as uncredited co-stars.
Assange’s most notable connection to a current case is as Roger Stone’s correspondent during the 2016 presidential campaign. Stone was charged with lying to Congress about his contact with WikiLeaks through an intermediary as he tried to get advanced knowledge of future releases of hacked Democratic campaign material.
But he’s also a bit player in a less well-followed case. Prosecutors charged former CIA employee Joshua Adam Schulte under the same Computer Fraud and Abuse Act statute as Assange, along with leaking classified information and possessing child pornography. Schulte allegedly passed information about a suite of classified CIA hacking tools to WikiLeaks in 2016 that formed the basis of the Vault 7 leaks. Prosecutors later tacked on new charges after they accused Schulte of smuggling phones into the prison and sending out classified information to family members with the intent that they provide it to the media.
It’s hard to say which case, if either, is a likely nexus for whatever new charges may be forthcoming. But between the two, there’s more evidence for prosecutorial interest in the Vault 7 case. In 2017, The Washington Post reported that then Attorney General Jeff Sessions had prodded staff to look at whether WikiLeaks could be charged in connection with the Manning case or the CIA case. And keep in mind that the special counsel’s office which chose to prosecute Stone would’ve had access to all the information regular prosecutors have about Assange’s role in that case and never filed charges against him.
When can we expect to see Assange in an Alexandria, VA courtroom? No one knows. Even though the British government is a close U.S. ally with little love for Assange or WikiLeaks, the courts keep their own time. And extraditing suspects from the U.K. on hacking charges can be harder than it seems. In 2018, a British court rejected U.S. requests to extradite British-Finnish citizen Lauri Love on charges that he hacked a handful of federal agencies. A British court cited the unduly harsh conditions he would alleged face due to his depression and Asperger’s syndrome. Assange isn’t a British citizen like Love, but he has claimed to be suffering from severe health issues in recent months.
