Julian Assange Is No Hero

National Review Online

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

 

The Julian Assange saga ended this week in a federal court in Saipan, an American commonwealth in the Northern Mariana Islands. Assange pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy charge of obtaining and disclosing American national-defense information. Even to the end, Assange is dictating the terms: The plea deal drops all other Espionage Act charges; it includes a sentence of time already served, so he will be released; and the court proceeding took place in the Western Pacific, rather than in Virginia where he was initially indicted, to accommodate Assange’s desire not to set foot in the United States.

 

We are his enemy, after all.

 

Despite that, the Wikileaks founder became a cult hero for the radical Left and libertarians of an anarchist bent — and, disturbingly, for a vocal faction on the right as well. They portray him as a fearless “journalist” dedicated to exposing the seamy underbelly of American aggression and corruption. The truth is far from that. Assange and his operation are hostile actors who collaborate with clandestine agents, rogue regimes, and sundry hackers to damage the United States. They do not merely report classified information leaked by subversive agents and government officials; they aid and abet in its theft, and mass-publish it without redaction of sources situated in war zones and countries with repressive governments, heedless of the mortal peril this represents.

 

Cartoonish depictions of American national-defense operations may do for Assange and his acolytes in Europe and Hollywood. In the real world, to safeguard and advance freedom and security, a great nation that has taken on great responsibilities must be able to protect intelligence secrets and the sources who provide them — at great risk to their lives. And a serious nation deals firmly with enemies and traitors who undermine those efforts.

 

President Barack Obama, however, was utterly unserious in commuting to just seven years the well-deserved 35-year sentence of U.S. army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning — who became an icon of the Left upon identifying as a trans woman, “Chelsea,” who had raided our national intelligence files with Assange’s assistance.

 

With Manning’s assistance, Assange exposed the triggers for and limitations on American combat operations against Iran-backed terrorist insurgents in the Iraq War. Cui bono? The mullahs. Moreover, indictments against Assange and Manning establish that they jointly compromised approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq War–related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables.

 

Many of the documents were classified “secret” — meaning their disclosure could cause serious damage to United States national security. The charges describe how the willfully damaging leaks exposed to grave danger many Afghans, Iraqis, and Iranians, among others, who had provided our government with information about human-rights abuses, terrorist plots against American troops, and the inner workings of hostile regimes. In a 2010 interview, Assange conceded that this was . . . “regrettable.” The evidence indicates that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other American enemies viewed it as an intelligence banquet.

 

The curiosity is that the Justice Department charged Assange with only the Manning thefts and leaks from over a dozen years ago. Uncharged were offenses far more serious than the conduct that led to dozens of felony charges against Donald Trump under the same statute. Recall that for years we’d been tirelessly assured that Assange and Wikileaks had worked with Putin’s regime in the theft and 2016 publication of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails — the foundation of the “collusion” hoax, in which the Hillary Clinton campaign and the FBI (among other government actors) portrayed Trump, even after he took office as president, as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. Yet, although special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a number of Russians our government knew would never face trial, Assange was never charged. Such allegations would undoubtedly have helped the Justice Department convince the British government to extradite Assange . . . if, of course, prosecutors had been able to prove them.

 

Absent such charges, and with the Manning outrages discounted by Obama’s clemency and fading memories, the chance that Assange would be prosecuted became increasingly remote. He wore out his welcome after seven years holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London — mainly on the lam from a Swedish sexual-assault charge that was eventually dropped. He was then detained by the Brits in Belmarsh Prison for the past five years while his extradition was litigated. The matter became an increasing headache for the Biden administration, as Australian and European allies joined the international glitterati’s clamor for his release.

 

Hence, the plea bargain. From the courtroom in Saipan, Assange will arrive in Australia a free man. WikiLeaks hasn’t published defense secrets since 2021 as Assange and his allies worked on winning his release. They’ll surely be back in business soon enough.

The Biggest Exposure of Classified Secrets Since Edward Snowden

By Jim Geragthy

Monday, April 10, 2023

 

There are often harmful consequences when government agencies that deal with national security “stovepipe” intelligence — that is, keep it to themselves and don’t share it with other agencies. For the U.S. government to operate effectively when dealing with little-known or little-noticed threats or attempting to persuade or influence other governments, multiple government agencies need to know who’s doing what, where, and when, and coordinate their actions.

 

But when agencies don’t stovepipe sensitive or classified information, and, say, the Central Intelligence Agency shares a lot of what it knows with the Pentagon, they can end up with problems like the one currently wracking the highest levels of the U.S. government, as the Wall Street Journal lays out:

 

The intelligence leak is shaping up to be one of the most damaging in decades, officials said. The disclosure complicates Ukraine’s spring offensive. It will likely inhibit the readiness of foreign allies to share sensitive information with the U.S. government. And it potentially exposes America’s intelligence sources within Russia and other hostile nations.

 

This is really bad news. I don’t begrudge anyone for choosing to pay attention to other news stories, but this is a far-reaching and consequential development that will probably get less attention than it deserves, because it doesn’t involve Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Ron DeSantis, or fit neatly into any partisan narrative.

 

The documents — really, photographs of classified documents — took an odd and circuitous route to the public’s eyes. Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative-journalism group, lays out the sequence:

 

The existence of the documents was first reported by the New York Times after a number of Russian Telegram channels shared five photographed files relating to the invasion of Ukraine on April 5 — at least one of which has since been found by Bellingcat to be crudely edited.

 

These documents appeared to be dated to early March, around the time they were first posted online on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers. . . .

 

Bizarrely, the Discord channels in which the documents dated from March were posted focused on the Minecraft computer game and fandom for a Filipino YouTube celebrity. They then spread to other sites such as the imageboard 4Chan before appearing on Telegram, Twitter and then major media publishers around the world in recent days.

 

At some point, someone altered the images to make it appear that Russia was inflicting way more casualties upon Ukraine than the other way around. It is unclear whether this was the work of the original leaker, or someone later:

 

There was only one image in common between the Telegram and 4chan posts: a map that showed a number of statistics, including the cumulative number of KIA (killed in action) soldiers on the Russian and Ukrainian sides through the course of the war.

 

However, the numbers on these two sources differed, with the first source (4chan) showing more Russian losses than Ukrainian, and the second source (Donbass Devushka) the reverse.

 

A closer examination of the second image, with the much higher Ukrainian KIA numbers, that was posted on Telegram shows crude image manipulation.

 

As well as the later posting time and far blurrier resolution, the numbers are out of alignment. Spacing between some numbers and letters is also too large to be consistent with the font.

 

It therefore seems that either the Donbass Devushka Telegram account, or a previous source posted by this account, altered the original image to paint the Ukrainian losses as heavier than in the original assessment.

 

Who’s got Gorilla Glue on their desk? Apparently, that’s a weird clue about who took the pictures: “Creases can be seen on the documents with items, such as a hunter’s scope box and some Gorilla Glue visible in the background of those dated from early March. This appears to indicate that at least some of the documents were photographed in the same location.”

 

Every major news organization has found the documents and is picking through them for scoops. In the middle of last month, a grim account from Washington Post reporters Isabelle Khurshudyan, Paul Sonne, and Karen DeYoung described “a palpable, if mostly unspoken, pessimism from the front lines to the corridors of power in Kyiv, the capital.”

 

This morning, the Post reports that the intelligence further confirms this grim outlook, that the Ukrainians are facing “alarming shortfalls in Western-supplied weaponry — especially ammunition and air defense”:

 

According to one of the documents, a late February assessment from the Defense Department’s Joint Staff, Ukraine’s “ability to provide medium range air defense to protect the [front lines] will be completely reduced by May 23. UKR assessed to withstand 2-3 more wave strikes” from attacking Russian missiles and drones.

 

“As 1st Layer Defense munitions run out, 2nd and 3rd Layer expenditure rates will increase, reducing the ability to defend against Russian aerial attacks from all altitudes,” the classified document says.

 

Up across our northern border, the Globe and Mail reports that one of the documents indicates Russian hackers conducted a successful cyberattack on a Canadian natural-gas-pipeline company — but at least some Canadians are saying the attack never happened:

 

Hackers working with Russia’s spy agency claimed earlier this year to have disrupted operations at a Canadian natural-gas pipeline company, inflicting costly damage on its infrastructure, leaked Pentagon documents say.

 

The Globe and Mail has been unable to independently verify the allegations in the U.S. intelligence documents, the contents of which have also been reported by U.S. media.

 

There is no evidence to date that a natural-gas pipeline company in Canada suffered such an attack, which the Pentagon documents suggest occurred earlier this year.

 

Timothy Egan, president and chief executive of the Canadian Gas Association, which represents the natural-gas delivery industry, said he’s following the matter closely – after being contacted by an American journalist on the same documents. However, he said he is not aware of any compromised gas distribution infrastructure in this country or of an attack on it by hackers.

 

These documents may be entirely true, or they may be a mix of disinformation, misinformation, errors, rumors, and just plain mistakes.

 

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the documents reveal that the South Korea government was wary about shipping ammunition to the U.S., for fear that we would turn around and give the ammunition to Ukraine:

 

[President Yoon Suk Yeol’s] secretary for foreign affairs, Yi Mun-hui, told his boss, National Security Adviser Kim Sung-han, that the government “was mired in concerns that the U.S. would not be the end user if South Korea were to comply with a U.S. request for ammunition,” according to a batch of secret Pentagon documents leaked through social media.

 

The secret report was based on signals intelligence, which meant that the United States has been spying on one of its major allies in Asia.

 

I don’t think any U.S. ally should be that shocked that the NSA intercepts their internal communications, but this revelation is an embarrassment, nonetheless. After Edward Snowden revealed so many secrets about the NSA’s spying programs, a report indicated that the U.S. had tapped the cell phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel.* The U.S. government wants to know what allied leaders are really thinking and saying behind closed doors; it is reasonable to assume that our allies are attempting to do the same to our leaders.

 

Meanwhile, CNN reports that the documents indicate that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has been attempting to influence Israel’s own domestic politics:

 

An intelligence report about Israel, meanwhile, has sparked outrage in Jerusalem. The report, produced by the CIA and sourced to signals intelligence, says that Israel’s main intelligence agency, the Mossad, had been encouraging protests against the country’s new government – “including several explicit calls to action,” the report alleges.

 

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office responded on the Mossad’s behalf Sunday morning, calling the report “mendacious and without any foundation whatsoever.”

 

“The Mossad and its senior officials did not — and do not — encourage agency personnel to join the demonstrations against the government, political demonstrations or any political activity,” the statement said. “The Mossad and its serving senior personnel have not engaged in the issue of the demonstrations at all and are dedicated to the value of service to the state that has guided the Mossad since its founding.”

 

Hey, now! Intelligence agencies are only supposed to meddle with and destabilize other countries’ governments, not their own!

 

NBC News reports that one document laid out how Israel could indirectly send weapons to Ukraine while remaining officially neutral:

 

A Feb. 28 document assesses “pathways” for Israel to provide “lethal aid” to Ukraine, providing hypothetical situations that might drive Israel from its balancing act between Kyiv and Moscow. Marked “secret,” the document also suggests what Israeli weapons could be transferred to Ukraine, such as Israel’s Javelin equivalent and other missile systems. The analysis says the “most plausible” scenario is that Jerusalem adopts a Turkish model under U.S. pressure. Like Ankara, it would mean that Israel “sells lethal defense systems or provides them through third-party entities” while openly advocating for peace and “offering to host mediation efforts.” Alternative scenarios consider how Moscow’s support of Iran’s military programs or proxy efforts in Syria could drive Israel to provide Ukraine with “lethal aid.”

 

The world knew that helping Ukraine repel the invading Russians was a high priority of the Biden administration. What we didn’t know was all the different ways that the U.S. was exerting pressure on allies to get them to send arms to Ukraine.

 

*Hey, when has a German chancellor ever created trouble for the United States, right?

 

A Serious Setback for Fox News in the Defamation Lawsuit

 

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Paul Clement, the former solicitor general under George W. Bush and the lawyer representing Fox News in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems Corporation and a similar $2.3 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic.

 

Shortly before I left on vacation, Fox News received a setback in the case, as Delaware Superior Court judge Eric Davis rejected Fox News’ argument that statements at issue were opinion and thus protected by the First Amendment and not a basis for a defamation lawsuit. In an 81-page ruling, Davis laid out 19 examples where figures such as Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Lou Dobbs, and others made statements on-air that asserted “facts and [were] therefore not protected under the opinion privilege.”

 

“The evidence does not support that [Fox News network] ‘conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting,” Judge Davis wrote. “Like in Cianci v. New Times Pub. Co., where the Second Circuit held that defendant’s failure to reveal facts and plaintiffs side of the story was not disinterested reporting, FNN’s failure to reveal extensive contradicting evidence from the public sphere and Dominion itself indicates its reporting was not disinterested.”

 

This is not the final ruling in the case, although this may increase pressure on Fox News to settle. The jury will be asked to consider whether the Fox News journalists, or the network as a whole, acted with actual malice — knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth — in broadcasting the claims, and whether damages are due.

Julian Assange Should Not Be Pardoned

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.

Assange, Greenwald, and Journalism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

In re: the Julian Assange case, Glenn Greenwald makes an important point, that as a First Amendment question, it does not matter whether Assange is a journalist.

Press freedoms belong to everyone, not to a select, privileged group of citizens called “journalists.” Empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections would restrict “freedom of the press” to a small, cloistered priesthood of privileged citizens designated by the government as “journalists.” The First Amendment was written to avoid precisely that danger.

That is well said, and the reminder is both urgent and necessary at this particular moment in our history. Greenwald continues:

Most critically, the U.S. government has now issued a legal document that formally declares that collaborating with government sources to receive and publish classified documents is no longer regarded by the Justice Department as journalism protected by the First Amendment but rather as the felony of espionage . . . .

And there is the problem. If the First Amendment does not create a set of privileges for a caste known as “journalists,” then journalists can be prosecuted for violating the law — including the laws governing the dissemination of classified information — in the same way any ordinary citizen would be.

The dissemination of classified documents is illegal in many circumstances. It is, under what seems to me the plain meaning of the law, precisely the felony of espionage in at least some cases. To decline to prosecute those crimes in the interest of enabling journalism is to create exactly the kind of professional caste privilege that Greenwald rightly warns against. We cannot simultaneously hold that the problem is “empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections” and then try to solve that problem by empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections.

I am not a lawyer and do not pretend to speak authoritatively about the Assange case, but the language of the federal criminal code appears — to my great surprise — clear enough about this matter.

And that is the fundamental issue: The government has too broad and sweeping power when it comes to classifying information, it uses that power too eagerly and too thoughtlessly — and too arrogantly, and too corruptly — for that power to be fully compatible with a free and open society. The solution to bad laws is to repeal or reform the law, not to construct a supplementary social theory to support its selective application.

In keeping with Greenwald’s concerns, writing a journalism carveout into the statute would be a disastrous undertaking, because it would amount to licensing journalists, which would radically reconfigure the First Amendment and our understanding of free speech in an unacceptable way. That is one significant problem with “campaign finance” laws that subject political speech to legislative discipline and then pretend to make an exemption for news media.

The more reasonable approach — which is naturally the more difficult one — would be to acknowledge that the government has a legitimate interest in keeping certain secrets but to narrow its discretion and scope in making those decisions. One important reform would be to eliminate the executive’s effective monopoly on declassification decisions, moving some of that authority into the House of Representatives or the Senate.

And then, if the New York Times receives a classified document through a criminal act or comes into possession of a document the publication of which would be a criminal act, it can make an editorial decision about whether the importance of the story justifies an act of civil disobedience and, if it comes to it, dare the government to prosecute it. Many Americans have sat in jail cells for honorable causes.

If we accept the proposition that the government has a legitimate interest in keeping secrets and in using the law to further that end — and there are some radical libertarians who reject that — and we also accept that the First Amendment applies in the same way to all citizens, then it follows that there will be prosecutions for violating that law, and that acting as a journalist does not provide immunity from such prosecution.

Julian Assange Was a Window into America’s Polarized Soul

By David French

Thursday, April 11, 2019

Julian Assange’s arrest and indictment should provide us with a moment of reflection. He is an awful man. He dumped American military secrets into the public domain without any regard for human life. He conspired with an American soldier to crack American security systems in the effort to deliver more secrets to the world public.

His co-conspirator, Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, wasn’t a “whistleblower” — and neither was Assange. Manning didn’t carefully extract evidence of alleged wrongdoing from classified files and go to the press (a defensible, though still illegal, act). He just dumped hundreds of thousands of pages of classified files into Assange’s hands, and Assange posted them, en masse, on the Internet.

Any jihadist or enemy with Internet access could read the documents and not just learn about the identities of American allies on the ground (placing them at immediate, mortal risk) but also gain extraordinary insight into American military tactics and plans — including learning exactly how effective (or ineffective) their own weapons and tactics were.

Manning committed treason. Assange helped him. And there were Americans who celebrated both men. Manning got a Vogue profile. Assange was the object of admiration. Remember when Atlantic contributor David Samuels wrote that Assange had performed a “huge public service”?

Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan — “a vicious antiwar type,” an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes — has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama administration.

Some even called Assange a “darling of the liberal left.” Republicans and mainstream liberals held a different view. The Obama administration condemned him, conservatives called him a traitor, and Donald Trump said WikiLeaks was “disgraceful,” adding that there should be the “death penalty or something” for its actions.

Fast-forward to 2016, and WikiLeaks enjoyed a reputational renaissance on the right. Why? Well, WikiLeaks was the same organization, but its target had changed. Rather than taking on alleged American imperialism, it was the conduit for an alleged Russian hack that was systematically embarrassing Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election.

 “I love WikiLeaks,” Trump declared to rousing cheers at a rally. Sean Hannity defended him during the election and even referred to Assange to advance his absurd Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

Even worse, the special counsel’s office has alleged that a “senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton Campaign.” Trump “loved” Wikileaks, and his campaign allegedly endeavored to get information from WikiLeaks — the same organization that had just a few years before conspired with a traitor to place American soldiers and American allies in mortal danger.

Julian Assange intentionally and deliberately works against American interests. Yet there are Americans who will intentionally and deliberately share WikiLeaks information, wield it as a weapon against their political opponents, and even attempt to make contact with Assange himself when it serves their domestic political interests.

There is no virtue in Assange. Those who celebrated his “transparency” in the Manning document dumps forget that responsible reporters who gain access to classified material carefully vet that material to make sure that their disclosures do not needlessly endanger innocent Americans, and they carefully weigh the value of the disclosure against the gravity of the harm. Assange and Manning did not seem to care about the men and women they betrayed.

Those who celebrated Assange’s role in the DNC and Podesta hacks forget that he was playing a willing and even eager role in a foreign plan to disrupt an election and divide our nation — a plan that worked beautifully in large part because of the very celebration of the hacks themselves. In “Flight 93 elections,” I suppose, advancing Russian interests is a small price to pay for a news cycle or two that humiliates Hillary.

And, by the way, if one is going to rightly denigrate the role that Russian hacking had in swaying the American election, how can one also then claim that advancing Russian interests and magnifying Assange was somehow important enough to be worth the costs? Trump and his close allies celebrated an American enemy to gain a microscopic electoral advantage at the cost of significant American division and resentment.

It’s become increasingly clear that there exists a class of Americans who view their fellow citizens — including politicians from the opposing political party — as almost an existential threat to the American republic. In that case, the enemy of their enemy becomes their friend, even when that “friend” is the actual entity trying to undermine American security, divide American society, and even threaten American lives. Julian Assange was a window into America’s polarized soul, and the view he revealed is ugly, petty, and deeply dispiriting.

Reality Winner and the ‘Resistance’ That’s Out of Touch with Reality

By Jonathan S. Tobin

Thursday, June 08, 2017

Efforts to portray the NSA leaker as a victim as well as a punchline on late-night television won’t wash. She’s just an impotent criminal who deserves to be prosecuted.

When the name of the first person to be prosecuted for leaking national secrets during the Trump administration was released, the late-night comics pounced. Reality Leigh Winner is the name of the 25-year-old contractor for the National Security Agency who is accused of leaking a classified document about Russian hacking to the press. But rather than mock the Air Force vet with the odd name and poor spycraft skills, the comedians employed her as yet another club with which to beat their favorite target: President Donald Trump.

According to Stephen Colbert, the only conclusion to draw from the story was that Trump “is at war with Reality.” Even the more apolitical Jimmy Fallon couldn’t resist cracking that Trump “wasn’t in contact with Reality.” Hysterical.

But even as the professional kibitzers are mining the story for all the puns they can find to pound Trump, a narrative about the leaker is emerging that is more significant than the question of which of the late-night jokes go viral. When it comes to stealing and leaking classified information, Reality Winner may be a rank amateur when compared to someone like Edward Snowden, who turned this kind of theft into an art form. But the emerging effort to paint her as a sympathetic character in the mainstream media has little to do with any concern about her fate and everything to do with the campaign to undermine Trump and to relitigate the 2016 election.

The stories about Winner make her sound like an all-American girl. She served in the U.S. Air Force and subsequently parlayed knowledge of various Asian languages into a post-service job as contractor for the NSA. When not working at a job that required a top-secret security clearance, she taught yoga and posted pictures of cats and favorite quotes on social media.

The upshot of these biographical details points to what is likely to be her defense in the court of public opinion if not in a court of law. We’ll be told Winner is a patriot whose leaking was motivated by the same spirit of public service that led her to join the military. Giving up a classified report about Russian hacking will be portrayed as an effort to get the truth to the American people. And unlike Snowden, whose massive downloads undoubtedly did more damage to U.S. security but who remains in a comfortable Russian exile, Winner is currently sitting in a Georgia jail cell paying the price he evaded with his sophisticated methods and clever escape plan.

Some are already also criticizing The Intercept, the publication that received the document Winner leaked, for its role in unmasking her identity. Apparently it sought to vet the document with the government, and that yielded up clues that betrayed Winner as the culprit. But even if that is true, her effort was so clumsy that it appears investigators would have easily identified her even if the magazine had said nothing.

But as Winner’s Twitter feed showed before she shut it down after starting at the NSA earlier this year, she is a fierce left-wing partisan, not a high-minded defender of national security. Winner is a vicious critic of Trump and a supporter of Black Lives Matter. But she’s also a defender of Iran’s government and pledged to “stand with” Tehran in the event of conflict with the U.S. While there is nothing illegal about calling Trump “the orange fascist we let into the White House” or Attorney General Jeff Sessions a “Confederate,” her motivation for leaking was about far-left politics, not blowing the whistle on some government wrongdoing.

Winner and those who share her view that Trump should be thrown out of office have every right to their opinions. But dissatisfaction with the outcome of elections is not a license to break the law. Nor is it a form of political persecution to hold a government employee accountable for violating her oath. That’s something we’re going to need to remember as the case against Winner proceeds at the same time Trump is under siege for his firing of FBI director James Comey amid the ongoing controversy about the Russia-collusion investigation.

It’s one thing when the loyal opposition in a democracy morphs into a “resistance” determined to damn the government and its leader under any and all circumstances. That’s a regrettable development, but its growth is the fault of Trump’s unorthodox behavior and statements and the chaotic circus in the West Wing since he took office as much as it is malevolent intent by the Left. But if those opposed to Trump embrace criminal acts such as the one Winner is charged with committing, it’s more than yet another breach of civility in a political culture that has already gone haywire. It will be a sign that the liberal resistance against Trump is seeking to erase a line that should never be approached, let alone crossed.

Every nation has a right and a duty to protect its national-security secrets. Disagreement with the policies of the government or the outcome of elections is not an excuse for violating laws that are in place to ensure that those secrets are protected. It doesn’t matter that Winner may seem to some to be a more attractive character than Trump or whether, like her, you think ill of the president. While no one seriously disputes that the Russians tried to intervene in 2016, any effort to use her leak to bolster the preposterous claim that the Russians somehow stole the election for Trump will do as much if not more to undermine democracy than anything Vladimir Putin has done.

Repairing the damage done to the fabric of our civic culture, which has been torn apart both by Trump and the “resistance,” won’t be easy. But it must start with a bipartisan consensus that Winner’s alleged actions were beyond the pale and deserve severe punishment. Anything less on the part of liberal critics of Trump will be a blow to the rule of law and cannot be tolerated.

Chelsea Manning Is Not a Whistleblower

By Kyle Smith

Friday, May 19, 2017

Let’s say you published something controversial on the Internet and you started getting death threats. How would you like being “doxed”? In other words, what would your reaction be if someone who didn’t like you tweeted out to the world your home address? And your phone number? And your photo? And photos of your children? And the address of their school? And information about when you left the house each day, the license-plate number of your car, and the location where it was parked?

Would you call someone who published this information a “whistleblower”? Let’s say the same person simultaneously published accurate information about wrongdoing by your neighbors or colleagues. Would that make you feel any better?

Picture such an information dump on a massive scale. That’s roughly what then-Bradley Manning did when he threw hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents into the public square. Manning made no effort to filter out information that didn’t show evidence of wrongdoing. He indiscriminately stole as many classified documents as he dared and sent them off for publication on the Internet.

Chelsea Manning is not a whistleblower. Shame on you, NBC News, for saying that he is. Shame on you, Time. You, too, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Sky News, Canada’s public broadcaster CBC News, and many other outlets.

You would expect extremists at InfoWars and The Intercept to label Chelsea Manning a whistleblower, and that is what they have done. But mainstream-media outlets have blithely taken to using the preferred terms of radicals when describing Manning’s actions.

Even if we assume that Manning (who legally changed his name from Bradley to Chelsea in 2014) successfully exposed some wrongdoing, it must be conceded that what he did was reckless. He endangered the lives of countless American and allied military personnel, diplomats, and others associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only way his act constitutes mass exposure of wrongdoing, and nothing more, is if you think everybody in the U.S. military and everyone who worked with it is automatically a moral criminal. Exposing personal information about people fighting a war isn’t close to seeking justice for malefactors. It’s more like vigilantism.

No evidence has emerged that anyone was killed because of the information Manning stole and made public. But even if Manning’s actions didn’t result in anyone’s death, that does not render them forgivable or harmless. If you set your car in neutral and let it glide down a hill toward a playground while you walked the other way, you would hardly be held blameless if the car didn’t happen to kill anyone. Moreover, Manning violated several tenets of the basic military oath, such as the vow to obey the orders of his superiors and to obey the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which strictly governs the handling of classified information. Think of anyone you have ever known who served in or alongside the military, and consider how that person could have been exposed by Manning. You may find yourself becoming angry with any institution that celebrates Manning by framing his actions as “whistleblowing.”

Liberals celebrating the premature release of Manning ought to ponder the nature of the man who abetted Manning in disclosing private information: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Remember him? The one you blame for working with the Russians to subvert democracy? He doesn’t necessarily have America’s best interests at heart, does he? He never did. Why is Assange an enemy of democracy for publishing purloined political gossip, but Manning a whistleblower for helping Assange publish far more sensitive, far more important, indeed life-endangering material? Among the documents Manning turned over to Assange were war logs that contained the names of hundreds of civilians who cooperated with U.S. forces. Assange simply published those logs en masse, without redacting the names of civilians involved, placing those fighting for freedom in their countries in great peril.

Assange and Manning wanted to stop the wars at any cost, even if — or maybe especially if — that meant America’s defeat and the failure of its goals, chiefly stable democracies for Iraq and Afghanistan. That puts Assange and Manning on the same side as the Islamist extremists seeking to rule both countries. They aren’t friends to liberty, they aren’t friends to America, and they aren’t heroes of the information age.