A scary reminder of the press-freedom stakes in the Assange case – Columbia Journalism Review

On Sunday, Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor, and Michael Isikoff reported in an explosive, seven thousand-word story for Yahoo News that in 2017, Donald Trumps CIAthen under the directorship of Mike Pompeo, a future secretary of stateplotted to kidnap Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, from Ecuadors embassy in London, where he was then holed up, and that high-level Trump administration officials even discussed assassinating Assange and asked for options as to how to do it. Theres no indication that such plans were ever formally approved, and its unclear exactly how serious the assassination talk was, but a number of senior officials were so worried that they privately shared concerns with Congressional oversight panels. The story contends, in perhaps its most attention-grabbing claim, thatafter US intelligence agencies began to suspect Russia of a plan to spirit Assange to Moscow and harbor him therethey prepared a range of possible responses, including potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane.

Dorfman, Naylor, and Isikoff describe the frenzied CIA campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks as a response to the latter groups publication of details concerning top-secret CIA hacking tools, a document drop known as Vault 7Pompeo and top colleagues were reportedly embarrassed about the disclosures and, in the words of one former national-security official, saw blood. In April 2017, Pompeo publicly described WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service; at the time, Isikoff (and others) viewed the remark as a grabby talking point, but a former official said that the phrase was chosen advisedly, and gave the administration a pretext to treat WikiLeaks as it would a state adversary, without jumping through legal hoops or informing Congressional leaders. Nor was Assange the sole target of this effort: under the rubric of offensive counterintelligence, American spooks reportedly surveilled other WikiLeaks associates and stole their electronic devices, while working to seed disharmony between them. According to Yahoo, CIA officials entertained the possibility of killing people who werent Assange but also had access to the Vault 7 cache.

From the magazine: All of It Matters

The Yahoo story is directly tied to the US governments ongoing efforts to extradite Assange from the UKwhere he is now in jail, having finally been kicked out of the embassy in 2019and prosecute him for his work with WikiLeaks; as Dorfman put it on Twitter, Trump administration officials were both worried about the legality of rendering Assange generally, and particularly concerned about kidnapping him absent an indictment, and so reportedly accelerated the drafting of charges against Assange so as to have something ready should he be brought onto US soil. Soon after British police dragged Assange from the embassy, US authorities indicted him only for computer fraud, which briefly assuaged the fears of press-freedom advocates who feared that the charges might criminalize the publication of secrets. Those fears were soon un-assuaged, however, as prosecutors added a bevy of charges under the Espionage Act that had a much more direct bearing on routine journalistic practice.

Other claims in the Yahoo story also bear directly on press freedom, beyond those immediately concerning the charges; indeed, many of them predate Trumps time in office. As Dorfman, Naylor, and Isikoff report, the Obama administration, fearful of the consequences for press freedomand chastened by the blowback from its own aggressive leak hunts, initially limited investigations into Assange and WikiLeaks, only for its approach to become more aggressive over time, following the groups involvement in the Snowden leaks, in 2013, then again after its publication of hacked Democratic Party emails around the time of the 2016 election. In between times, intelligence officials reportedly lobbied Obama to bolster their investigative powers by classifying WikiLeaks as an information broker, and, troublingly, sought the same designation for Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two journalists at the heart of the Snowden story. (I am not the least bit surprised that the CIA, a longtime authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to criminalize journalism, Greenwald told Yahoo.) Trumps administration, of course, had fewer First Amendment qualms than its predecessor. Then came Vault 7.

After Britain took Assange into custody, press-watchers debated old questions as to whether he can really be considered a journalist, and how much professional solidarity he deserves, especially in light of the historic rape claims against him and his links to Russia and its 2016 election-meddling. The espionage charges, by contrast, seemed to focus media minds to a greater extent, given their clear ramifications beyond Assanges very specific circumstances. Some press advocates have reacted similarly to the details in the Yahoo story. The American Civil Liberties Union shared the article and reiterated its past call for the US to drop the charges against Assange on press-freedom grounds. The Freedom of the Press Foundation described the story as shocking and disturbing, and the CIA as a disgrace; Jameel Jaffer, the director of Columbias Knight First Amendment Institute said that the story was mind-boggling, adding, the over-the-top headline actually manages to capture only a small fraction of the lunacy reported here. Many media-watchers shared the story on Twitter, and numerous major news outlets, at home and abroad, covered or at least noted it.

Still, since its publication on Sunday, the story has hardly attracted wall-to-wall attention from other outlets: as far as I can see, the New York Times has yet to even mention it; CNN discussed it a couple of times on air yesterday, but not in prime time. There are a number of potential factors at play here, and they arent mutually exclusive. Rival outlets national-security reporters may still be working to corroborate the story, which is more useful than aggregation and takes time. Stories about national security, in generaland Assange, in particularcan be gnarly, and have been challenged before; the Yahoo article has itself already elicited some pushback. That said, Yahoo claims to have spoken with thirty former officials, eight of whom described the kidnapping plot and three of whom spoke of the assassination discussions; perhaps more to the point, TV talk shows, in particular, frequently give splashy billing to Trump scandal stories that seem less consequential and less extensively sourced. (The relentless cable coverage of a recent slew of books about Trumps last days in office has often been a case in point.) Its more than conceivable thatas with past stories about AssangeYahoos claims havent yet gotten bigger billing because Assange is perceived to be an unsympathetic victim and because, unlike other examples of Trumpian demagoguery, the authoritarian state power at issue here has much deeper, broader roots than Trump himself, involving years of national-security policy under presidents of both parties.

If Yahoos reporting holds up, its bottom line is that senior US officials entertained extreme, violent, and extrajudicial responses to the publication of sensitive information. You dont need to accept the probity of the publisher or the merits of the information to see the slippery slope here for press freedomyou need look, in fact, no farther than Greenwald and Poitras. The plans never came to fruition, but their high-level consideration would be bad enoughand the US government still very much is pursuing Assange on charges that could criminalize reporting, despite another recent change of administration; officials are currently appealing a British judges ruling that blocked the extradition of Assange on health grounds, and recently won the right to expand the terms of that appeal. The charges against Assange are as much a threat to press freedom under Biden as they were under Trump, yet for many media-watchers, they no longer seem close to front of mind.

Below, more on Assange:

Other notable stories:

From the magazine: Retail Politics

TOP IMAGE: Sketch of Julian Assange appearing by video link at the High Court in London, August 11, 2021. Elizabeth Cook, via AP Images.

Original post:

A scary reminder of the press-freedom stakes in the Assange case - Columbia Journalism Review