The Justice Department is poised to duck the First Amendment in seeking to prosecute WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange who has claimed that his organization is a publisher of newsworthy content. CIA Director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” and Assange a non-citizen with no First Amendment rights. (CNN, April 20, 2017, by Evan Perez, Pamela Brown, Shimon Prokupecz and Eric Bradner)
Jonathan H. Adler, The Washington Post, April 24, 2017, fears that there would be serious First Amendment concerns in prosecuting Assange under what he calls the “incredibly broad” Espionage Act. “If someone can be prosecuted for communicating classified national security information, all sorts of constitutionally protected activity would be threatened. Journalists and policy advocates routinely repeat national security information to others. It is one thing to prosecute those who, when given lawful access to such information, violate the terms and conditions upon which they were given access and leak classified information. It is quite another those to punish those who repeat such information, or even (as in the case of Assange) post it on the Web,” wrote Adler.