WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would agree to serve prison time in the United States in exchange for President Barack Obama granting clemency to Chelsea Manning, the group’s Twitter account said Thursday, 15 september 2016.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian computer programmer, publisher and journalist. He is editor-in-chief of the organisation WikiLeaks, which he founded in 2006.
WikiLeaks published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. By 2015 WikiLeaks had published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange himself as “a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents”.
The published material between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of publicity, but it was only after it began publishing documents supplied by Chelsea Manning that Wikileaks became a household name.
The Manning material included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010) which showed US soldiers shooting dead 18 people from a helicopter in Iraq, the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables(November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).
Chelsea Manning
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning is a United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly three-quarters of a million classified or unclassified but sensitive military and diplomatic documents. Manning was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years imprisonment, with the possibility of parole in the eighth year, and to be dishonorably discharged from the Army.
Manning is a trans woman who, in a statement the day after sentencing, said she had felt female since childhood, wanted to be known as Chelsea, and desired to begin hormone replacement therapy. From early life and through much of her Army life, Manning was known as Bradley; she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder while in the Army.
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, U.S. authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010 U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks.
It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia. An email from an employee of intelligence consultancy Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor) leaked in 2012 said, “We have a sealed indictment on Assange.” The U.S. government denies the existence of such an indictment.
In December 2011 prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an alleged WikiLeaks interlocutor they claimed to be Assange; he denied this, dismissing the alleged connection as “absolute nonsense.” The logs were presented as evidence during Manning’s court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they show WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password. The evidence that the interlocutor was Assange is circumstantial, however, and Manning insists she acted alone.
Assange was being examined separately by “several government agencies” in addition to the grand jury, most notably the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was still under “active and ongoing” investigation at that time.
Moreover, some Snowden documents published in 2014 show that the United States government put Assange on the “2010 Manhunting Timeline”, and in the same period they urged their allies to open criminal investigations into the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. In the same documents there was a proposal by the NSA to designate WikiLeaks as a “malicious foreign actor”, thus increasing the surveillance against it.
On 26 January 2015, WikiLeaks revealed that three members of the organisation received notice that “Google had handed over all their emails and metadata to the United States government”. In the notifications, there was the list of possible charges that originated the warrant to Google and that the secret grand jury intends to use against WikiLeaks and likely Assange too. They were espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and general conspiracy. They carry up to a minimum of 45 years in prison, if they amount to one charge per these five types; otherwise, even more years could be added.
U.S. President Barak Obama
“If Obama grants Manning clemency, Assange will agree to US prison in exchange — despite its clear unlawfulness,” the group said.
An attorney for Assange, Barry Pollack, told that the deal would have to include a pardon for Manning, who was convicted in 2013 of stealing and disseminating 750,000 pages of documents and videos to WikiLeaks in what has been described as the largest leak of classified material in US history. Manning was found guilty of 20 of the 22 charges against her, including violations of the US Espionage Act.
Assange has been granted political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London as he fights extradition to Sweden, where he faces sexual assault allegations. He has said he fears extradition to Sweden could lead to another extradition to the US, where he could face the death penalty if he is charged and convicted of publishing government secrets through WikiLeaks.
