(AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)
When Julian Assange abruptly found himself back in Australia and freedom this week after reaching a plea deal with the U.S. government, I found myself thinking back to my own marathon legal fight with the U.S. government and how it finally and suddenly ended.
I waged a seven-year legal battle against the George W. Bush administration and later the Obama administration, both of which demanded I reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for story I wrote about a botched CIA operation. I wrote about the CIA operation for the New York Times, but the paperâs editors suppressed the story at the governmentâs request, so I published it in my 2006 book, âState of War.â The government then launched a leak investigation, subpoenaing me in 2008 to try to force me to testify and reveal my sources. The government threatened that if I didnât comply, I could be thrown in prison for contempt of court. I refused and fought them all the way to the Supreme Court.
In 2015, as negative publicity mounted on the Obama administration for its campaign to put a reporter in prison, I was called to attend a court hearing. When the prosecutor asked me whether I would go to prison rather than reveal my sources, I said yes. This time the government backed down, abandoning its efforts to force me to testify. At the end of that hearing, I drove home and had a glass of champagne with my wife to celebrate. I felt free for the first time in seven years.
My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that began in the post-9/11 era and has continued ever since. The Assange case was part of that same anti-press campaign, one that the government has continued to conduct under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
My personal experience has made me sympathize with Assange, even as so many other Americans have turned on him. My legal fight left me exhausted, both mentally and physically, especially during the long periods when my case was being ignored by the press and the outside world. I learned firsthand that the Justice Departmentâs primary legal strategy in such cases is to try to bankrupt people and wear them down so that they cut deals rather than go to trial.
I emerged victorious when my case finally ended; I never revealed my sources. But the result of facing down the government for so long made me far more I suspicious of power and much less willing to accept authority.
I am sure that as Assange returns to Australia to try to put his life back together, he will recognize that he has changed in surprising ways as well.
To be sure, there are stark differences between Assangeâs experience and my own. Assange was a polarizing figure long before he faced prosecution, with enemies on both sides of the American political divide. Republicans hated him for what he did in 2010, when he published classified documents from the Pentagon and the State Department on his WikiLeaks website, while also sharing those documents with mainstream news organizations like The Guardian and the New York Times. Those documents led to a wide range of disclosures about the dark and abusive actions of the United States in the post-9/11 era, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond in the global war on terror.
Democrats, meanwhile, learned to hate Assange for what he did in 2016. Knowingly or not, he served as a go-between for Russian intelligence. Moscow hacked the emails of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and then turned them over to Assange, who published the emails and related Democratic Party documents on WikiLeaks, while also doling them out to reporters for mainstream news organizations during the 2016 presidential campaign, damaging the Clinton campaign and helping Donald Trump.
As if all of that wasnât enough, many others grew to hate him for evading sexual assault charges in Sweden.
When Assange was first charged in 2019 by the Justice Department under the Espionage Act for his involvement in the 2010 leak of classified documents from the State Department and the U.S. military, very few people, liberal or conservative, came to his defense. Democrats went along with his indictment by the Trump administration, even though he was not charged in connection with the hacking of Democratic Party emails and Russian election interference in 2016. And when Joe Biden became president, his Justice Department continued the Assange prosecution without extending the charges to cover his involvement in the 2016 election.
Now, after years in prison in Britain while fighting extradition to the United States, Assange has finally cut a deal with the Justice Department. He pleaded guilty this week to violating the Espionage Act and in return was released from prison for the time he has served in Britain. He was able to enter his plea agreement at a federal court in Saipan, a U.S. territory, and then fly directly to Australia.
Many of his supporters have declared this a victory for Assange.
Few have viewed Assange as a martyr in the cause of press freedom. But he is a victim of an abusive prosecution by a government seeking to silence whistleblowers.
