Jeff Sessions, Julian Assange, and the First Amendment
WASHINGTON-I realize that Julian Assange isn't high on anyone's Christmas card list after he and WikiLeaks played monkey-mischief with the 2016 presidential election, largely through the dissemination of hacked emails in which was exposed the interior monologue of the Democratic National Committee. I realize that his defenders-Bernie Bros or not-can be completely insufferable and a plague upon Twitter feeds.
However, this is a truly terrible idea that should scare the socks off anyone committed to the free exercise of the First Amendment. From The Guardian:
Hours later it was reported by CNN that authorities have prepared charges against Assange, who is currently holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Donald Trump lavished praise on the anti-secrecy website during the presidential election campaign - "I love WikiLeaks," he once told a rally - but his administration has struck a different tone. Asked whether it was a priority for the justice department to arrest Assange "once and for all", Sessions told a press conference in El Paso, Texas on Thursday: "We are going to step up our effort and already are stepping up our efforts on all leaks. This is a matter that's gone beyond anything I'm aware of. We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks and some of them are quite serious."
This is a terrible idea for three reasons.
1) The Espionage Act is a terrible law, a monster out of the Wilson administration through which the spirit of A. Mitchell Palmer still stalks the halls of the Department of Justice. It should have been repealed years ago.
2) I can't see any way for the DOJ to proceed in a prosecution like this without threatening to subpoena journalists, or to actually charge them. The Obama administration's assault on leakers and the people to whom they leak was the worst part of that administration's record on law enforcement. They made the lives of reporters miserable. But this would be a giant step beyond anything that administration did. And, finally…
3) It's these guys. This is the lens through which any action this administration takes must be judged. The president* is Donald Trump. The attorney general is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. The presumption of incompetence on the one hand, and authoritarianism on the other, must always control in any action this administration takes. The Espionage Act is a terrible law. JeffBo is a terrible AG. This is the ironclad context in which any action taken should be judged.
I don't care what you think of Julian Assange, or Glenn Greenwald, or The Intercept, and I don't care which side you were on during the 2016 Democratic primaries. (In fact, I wish you'd all shut the hell up about that.) Unleashing Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III on the Bill of Rights is a ghastly prospect that should be fought at every turn. The only court in which Assange rightly should appear is in Sweden.
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