BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY JUNE 3, 2019) — The rest of the world might have moved on from him, but for THE PLANET, the Passion of Julian Assange gets more troubling.

Assange was arrested by British authorities and sentenced to a year for jumping bail, a set-up serving as the pretext for the Trump Administration to prosecute the Wikileaks publisher under 1917’s Espionage Act. Justice Department officials want to extradite Assange from his cell in London to stand trial in the U.S. for “publishing a narrow set of classified documents in which Assange also allegedly published the un-redacted names of innocent people who risked their safety and freedom to provide information to the United States and its allies.”

Bully for the Justice Department.

It’s telling that Justice charged Assange under the Espionage Act when it had at its disposal a mountain of draconian national security laws enacted after 9-11, including the Patriot Act. The barristers at Justice, however, evidently concluded they couldn’t make Patriot charges stick and so turned to the more amorphous EA, which has a “one size fits all” provision falling under “national security.” The Espionage Act criminalizes possession, retention, and/or publishing secrets determined to be essential for national security.

Fair enough, but who decides what “secrets” must be retained because of alleged “national security?” Presidential administrations have made profitable game of “national security” to hide a host of sins. The Justice Department’s pursuit of Assange does a similar thing, using “national security” as an excuse for a chilling attack on press freedom and the First Amendment. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has labeled Wikileaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” THE PLANET calls it a publisher.

Federal prosecutors say Assange tried to help Chelsea Manning steal classified documents. They claim Assange broke the law by ‘solici[ting]’ and ‘encourage[ing] sources’ to hand over classified material. Yes, and the point is? That’s what good journalists do. They cultivate and work with sources. America’s Constitutional freedoms protect them in their pursuit of information. Without those protections, you have a police state.

As the Wall Street Journal put it in an editorial (May 25, 2019), “The trouble is distinguishing [Assange’s activities] from what journalists do every day. Honorable reoprters … do urge sources to shed light on government misdeeds, which may include asking for classified material and publishing it. So how does the Justice Department draw a line between Mr. Assange and the Associated Press?” The day journalists stop encouraging sources and whistle blowers from spilling what they know will be the death of a free press and with it, the death of the United States of America.

Some argue that day is already upon us. The Trump Administration would love that to be the case. And it’s not just Trump. The Obama Administration, the WSJ says, sought and “obtained call logs for AP phone lines, including home phones of its editors.” Obama also tried to subpoena the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC News in an effort to stop press leaks.

“Julian Assange is no journalist,” said first assistant AG John Demers. “This is made plain by the totality of his conduct. … No responsible actor — journalist or otherwise — would purposely publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in war zones, exposing them to the gravest of dangers.”

Yet it’s the very “totality of Wikileaks‘ conduct” that makes Assange a journalist.

“The danger, in the Assange case, is that it becomes precedent for governments on the right or left to prosecute journalists they don’t like for reporting secrets,” the WSJ concludes. “The Espionage Act is too broad, and where is the limiting principle? … [C]ourts — and the public — need to make sure prosecutors aren’t abusing the law for political purposes.”

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“The world is charged with the grandeur of God” — Gerard Manley Hopkins, from his poem “God’s Grandeur.”

“OPEN THE WINDOW AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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