Julian Assange accused of conspiring to break US Defense Dept's password
Virginia - Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia on Thursday unsealed a conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had been arrested by British police at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.
The narrow case - focused solely on a handful of interactions with Manning nine years ago - suggests the Department of Justice is hoping to avoid a fight over the First Amendment protections. Attempts to prosecute Assange under President Barack Obama faltered out of concern that doing so would be akin to prosecuting a news organization for publishing classified material.
Assange was indicted in March 2018 - just within an eight-year statute of limitations for the conspiracy crime. But a grand jury in Alexandria is continuing to investigate and Manning is currently in jail for refusing to testify before them. Prosecutors can add to the indictment until Assange is extradited from the United Kingdom.
Before the interactions regarding the password, Manning had already given WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified records, prosecutors allege. The material included four nearly complete databases, according to prosecutors, comprising 90,000 reports from the Afghanistan war, 400,000 reports from the Iraq War and 250,000 State Department cables.
"Yes," was the reply. When Manning sent a string of numbers, according to the military prosecutors, Assange replied, "Passed it on to our guys." At her court-martial in 2013, Manning said she only began sharing information with the group in February 2010 and did so entirely on her own initiative. Military prosecutors argued that the relationship started months earlier, not long after Manning deployed to Iraq.
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