As the UK considers extraditing the WikiLeaks founder, American press freedom hangs in the balance
Does Merrick Garland, the Biden-appointed attorney general, really want his legacy to include a heavy blow to long-established press rights in the United States?
If not, Garland must drop the 17 charges under the Espionage Act against Julian Assange. This should have happened years ago but now is a key moment. The high court in London is considering this week whether to extradite Assange to the US to face those charges.
What the UK court does is important to Assange himself, who is in poor health after years of imprisonment and asylum-seeking. A decision to extradite, according to his wife, would be tantamount to a death sentence.
But the real answer to this troubling debacle lies across the Atlantic in Washington.
First, let’s deal with the argument so often heard about Assange – that he’s not really a journalist, rather a data-dumping publisher, at best, and therefore what happens to him won’t harm American press rights.
“The question of whether Assange is a journalist is a red herring,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told me in an interview this week.
The charges alone, Jaffer said, seek to criminalize the process of journalism – getting government secrets from informed sources and, eventually, revealing them to the public. In this era, when far too much information is classified in the United States, we rely on reporters to pry it out and let citizens know what their government is doing in secret.
With the protection of the first amendment, American journalists have been doing just that for decades.
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