Hearings are underway in the United Kingdom to determine if WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be extradited to the U.S. for releasing thousands of secret cables and files related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange says he should be treated as a journalist with First Amendment protections. President Donald Trump faces a dilemma in that some conservatives want to try Assange for his assault on national defense while others want him free as someone who exposed Obama-era secrets that should have been public. (Liberty Nation, February 25, 2020, by Leesa K. Donner)
Judge Andrew P. Napolitano in Fox News, February 27, 2020, points out that the Supreme Court’s decision on the Pentagon Papers found that regardless of how information of public interest arrived, the news media could publish the information under protection of the first Amendment. Napolitano says that the Trump administration is ignoring the Pentagon Papers decision in charging Assange with 17 counts of espionage. “When lawyers blatantly reject well-accepted law for some political gain,” writes Natpolitano, “they violate their oaths to uphold the law. When government lawyers do this, they also violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution. For them, there is no escaping the Pentagon Papers Case. While the case turned on the concept of prior restraint of speech, it clearly reflects the views of the court that it matters not how the publisher obtained the secrets that he published.”