The Heritage Foundation
Friday, December 18, 2020
Every year at this time, presidents issue pardons, and
some of the most controversial pardons have been issued when they are leaving
office.
For example, President Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a
fugitive from justice who was facing 51 counts of tax fraud and was alleged to
have owed $48 million to the IRS. Rich’s former wife, who urged Clinton to
issue this pardon, was a substantial contributor to the Clinton Library and to
Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign.
Clinton also pardoned Susan McDougal for her role in the
Whitewater scandal, and commuted the sentences of 15 members of the Fuerzas
Armadas de Liberacion Puertorriqueno, a Puerto Rican terrorist organization
that set off 120 bombs in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. It was rumored that this was also done to
help Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign.
As he was leaving office, President Barack Obama granted
clemency to Chelsea Manning, who, as discussed below, did incalculable damage
to the nation by providing highly classified information to Wikileaks,
at the request of Julian Assange.
Obama also commuted the sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera,
another Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Puertorriqueno member who had refused to
accept clemency from Clinton in 1999 because it was conditioned on his
renunciation of the use or threat of violence to achieve the that
organization’s political objectives. Obama imposed no such condition on Rivera
in 2017
This year, there are some who are urging President Donald
Trump to issue a pardon to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Among the
people supporting a pardon for Assange are the usual array of Hollywood
celebrities and liberal activists—Oliver Stone, Pamela Anderson, Michael Moore,
Daniel Ellsburg, Noam Chomsky, among others—and Edward Snowden.
Actually, the fact that Snowden, who leaked highly
classified material from the National Security Agency in 2013 and subsequently
fled to Russia (with, according to the government, the assistance of Assange
and others at WikiLeaks), is supporting a pardon for Assange tells you just
about everything you need to know.
Assange is an enemy of the United States who, among other
things, deliberately recruited an American soldier to illegally disclose
national security secrets and who then released those secrets to the public.
Assange is also the creator and manager of a website—Wikileaks—dedicated to
repeating this crime over and over again.
A formal government review of Assange’s actions and of
their consequences found the following:
·
Multiple lives were lost and others were put at
risk.
·
U.S. diplomatic relations were severely harmed.
·
Foreign militaries changed their tactics and
procedures—making them more difficult to predict and counter.
·
Key intelligence sources and methods were lost
or disrupted.
·
Tens of millions of taxpayer funds were wasted
responding to or mitigating the threat posed by these illegal disclosures.
Recall that in April 2019, the United States Department
of Justice issued a press
release announcing the indictment
(which was superseded
in June, accompanied by a new press
release) against Assange, and indicating their intent to seek his
extradition so that he would have to answer for the charges.
As we wrote here,
the charge relates to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises
of classified information in the history of the United States.” Unlike other
journalists, Assange was not simply a passive recipient of classified
information that was obtained by some would-be government whistleblower.
Assange, a self-proclaimed “famous teenage hacker in Australia,” has a long
history of actively encouraging and recruiting individuals to hack into
non-public systems to obtain sensitive classified information, often telling
those individuals how to exploit system vulnerabilities and providing those
individuals with a list of targets.
Assange was not subtle about this, publishing a “Most
Wanted Leaks” list on the WikiLeaks website, something no legitimate journalist
would do. Unfortunately, many, including Chelsea Manning, responded.
According to the superseding indictment, Assange engaged
in a conspiracy with Manning, “a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army,
to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense
computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S.
government network used for classified documents and communications.”
The superseding indictment also alleges that “between…
January 2010 and May 2010… Manning downloaded four nearly complete databases
from departments and agencies of the United States. These databases contained
approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000
Iraq war-related significant activity reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee
assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables.” Manning was
convicted at a court-martial for her conduct.
Manning did not act alone. The indictment alleges that
Assange tried to help Manning crack a password system that would enable Manning
to obtain the information Assange wanted. As the indictment states: “Had
Assange and Manning successfully cracked the encrypted password hash, Manning
may have been able to log onto computers under a username that did not belong
to Manning. Such a measure would have made it more difficult for investigators
to identify Manning as the source of unauthorized disclosures of classified
information.”
Moreover, it is alleged that Assange had ongoing
conversations with Manning, describing the types of documents he wanted Manning
to obtain and encouraging him to keep looking for documents to steal by, among
other things, telling Manning that “curious eyes never run dry in my experience.”
A legitimate journalist? A passive recipient of
classified information? Hardly.
Even the Washington Post, a recipient and publisher of
some of Wikileaks material, editorialized
that Assange is “not a free-press hero.”
According to the Post, “contrary to the norms of
journalism… Assange sometimes obtained such records unethically—Including… by
trying to help now-former… soldier Manning hack into a classified U.S. computer
system.”
Rebutting the notion that Wikileaks is a journalist, the
Post went on to say: “Unlike real journalists, Wikileaks dumped material into
the public domain without any effort independently to verify its factuality or
give named individuals an opportunity to comment.”
We support a free and open press. We have defended every
right under the First Amendment, and will continue to do so. Suppression of
speech, in a free society, is wrong. But Assange is not a free-speech hero.
To put it bluntly: Julian Assange deserves to face the
full legal consequences of his actions and, under no circumstances, deserves to
be pardoned. Granting any form of leniency to Assange would not only be a grave
insult to the families of those who died
as a direct consequence of his actions, but it would also invite more illegal
disclosures that would further erode American security and strength.
If Trump is seriously considering pardoning Julian
Assange, we would strongly urge him to reconsider.
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