Assange Charged in U.S. With Hack Conspiracy Tied to Manning

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of taking part in a hacking conspiracy with ex-U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning to disclose classified government material.

In an indictment unsealed just hours after Assange’s arrest in London, the U.S. accused him of assisting Manning in “hacking a password stored on United States Department of Defense computers.” Assange’s anti-secrecy organization published the cables starting in 2010.

Assange’s arrest came after Ecuador expelled him from its embassy in London. The 47-year-old has been in the embassy there since 2012, when he sought to escape questioning in a Swedish sexual-assault case. While those charges were dropped in 2017, Assange remained in a small apartment in the embassy.

A battle for his extradition to the U.S. could last months or years. He appeared in a London courtroom on Thursday, where prosecutors said he had resisted his arrest and a judge said he had skipped bail. He pleaded not guilty to the bail violation and a failure to surrender. His first extradition hearing is scheduled for May 2.

Barry Pollack, a U.S. lawyer for Assange, didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a statement on WikiLeaks’ Twitter account attributed to him, the lawyer characterized Assange’s detention as “an unprecedented effort by the United States seeking to extradite a foreign journalist to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information.”

If Assange is extradited, he could provide new insights into WikiLeaks’ role in a different matter -- what Special Counsel Robert Mueller has described as a conspiracy by Russians to steal the Democrats’ emails.

WikiLeaks published Democratic Party emails hacked by Russians before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump campaign officials directed a Trump ally, Roger Stone, to contact WikiLeaks during the period when the activist website was publishing the emails, which embarrassed top Democratic officials, including Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, according to an indictment against Stone.

Click here to read the indictment

Assange drew worldwide notoriety in 2010 when WikiLeaks published the classified U.S. materials about the Afghan war that were stolen by Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst then known as Bradley Manning. Assange has said his activities were protected from U.S. prosecution because he acted as a journalist who published information about government activities.

But Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said last year that by exposing U.S. secrets and putting Americans at risk, WikiLeaks was more like a “hostile intelligence service.”

The existence of a Justice Department case against Assange came to light on Nov. 15, when federal prosecutors inadvertently disclosed charges against Assange in an unrelated case. That filing didn’t detail the nature of the case against Assange.

The indictment unsealed on Thursday was dated March 6, 2018.

The Charges

The long-sealed indictment accused Assange of agreeing in March 2010 to help Manning crack a password on a Defense Department computer network that stored classified documents and communications.

Manning, who had access to the computers as part of her duties as an intelligence analyst, gave a portion of the password to Assange to crack, storing it as a “hash value” in a computer file that she accessed using special software, the document said.

Manning used the computers to gain access to hundreds of thousands of classified documents and transmit them to WikiLeaks. While Manning was stealing troves of data, Assange encouraged her to keep going, prosecutors said.

They discussed the value of the Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment brief, after which Manning said, “that’s all I really have got left,” according to the filing.

Assange replied: “Curious eyes never run dry in my experience.”

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for violating the U.S. Espionage Act. After President Barack Obama commuted her sentence, she became an activist speaking on technology, artificial intelligence and national security issues.

In March, she was put back in U.S. custody for refusing to testify pursuant to a grand jury subpoena. She is appealing her civil contempt citation.

Assange faces as long as five years in prison.

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