Assange's indictment escalates Trump’s attacks on free speech, experts say

The Trump administration has launched one of the most potent attacks on journalism and the first amendment in US history by indicting Julian Assange on Espionage Act charges, free speech advocates have warned.

Assange had previously been charged with computer-related crimes and accused of a conspiracy with the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to steal classified information by offering to help crack a password.

But the justice department case against Assange has now shifted to a prosecution on 17 Espionage Act charges for seeking out and then publishing classified information – conduct indistinguishable from journalism, activists said.

“For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “This is an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on journalism, and a direct assault on the first amendment.”

Bradley P Moss, deputy executive of the James Madison Project, a public-interest group focusing on US intelligence and national security, cautioned last month that previous charges brought against Assange were not a frontal attack on journalism.

Not so with the Espionage Act charges.

Related: New US charges against Julian Assange could spell decades behind bars

“These new charges represent a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s war on leakers in a manner unprecedented in the 102-year lifespan of the Espionage Act,” Moss wrote in the Daily Beast. “It is effectively the first real attempt to ever prosecute the publisher of the leaked classified information, as opposed to the leaker him or herself.”

While Trump keeps up a daily attack on journalists and has branded the media the “enemy of the people”, the justice department on Thursday insisted that the new charges against Assange did not represent an attack on journalism.

“The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy, and we thank you for it,” said John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security. “It is not and never has been the department’s policy to target them for reporting. But Julian Assange is no journalist.”

Carrie DeCell, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, replied on Twitter: “The question isn’t whether Assange is a journalist, but whether the government’s legal theory threatens freedom of the press. It does.

“The government argues that Assange violated the Espionage Act by soliciting, obtaining, and then publishing classified information. That’s exactly what good national security and investigative journalists do every day.”

Assange was arrested last month in London after a seven-year-long asylum inside the Ecuadorian embassy. He was charged with violating a bail agreement, and Swedish prosecutors subsequently reopened a rape investigation against him.

“The fig leaf that this is merely about alleged computer hacking has been removed,” said Assange’s defense lawyer Barry J Pollack. “These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavor to inform the public about actions that have been taken by the US government.”

The Freedom of the Press Foundation called the charges “terrifying”. Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said: “Any government use of the Espionage Act to criminalize the receipt and publication of classified information poses a dire threat to journalists seeking to publish such information in the public interest.”

Related: Indicting a journalist? What the new charges against Julian Assange mean for free speech

The New York Times editorial board warned that the new indictment “is a marked escalation in the effort to prosecute Mr Assange, one that could have a chilling effect on American journalism as it has been practiced for generations.

“It is aimed straight at the heart of the first amendment.”

Edward Snowden, the state surveillance whistleblower who also faces Espionage Act charges, tweeted: “The Department of Justice just declared war – not on Wikileaks, but on journalism itself. This is no longer about Julian Assange: This case will decide the future of media.”

Manning issued a statement on Thursday evening. “I continue to accept full and sole responsibility for those disclosures in 2010,” she said. “It’s telling that the government appears to have already obtained this indictment before my contempt hearing last week. This administration describes the press as the opposition party and an enemy of the people.

“Today, they use the law as a sword, and have shown their willingness to bring the full power of the state against the very institution intended to shield us from such excesses.”