Assange's Latest Charge has First Amendment Advocates Alarmed
As the US government grows ever larger and more powerful, it will be of the utmost importance for Americans the nation over to be ultra diligent in bucking any overreaches of power.
We The People have built this nation for the purpose of advancing freedom both throughout our continent and abroad, through leadership by example.
Our legislators were purposefully given the title of “public servant”, as the job was never meant to be a lucrative one.
Of course, that has all changed over the course of the last 200+ years, and we are now staring down a ruling class in Congress made up of wealthy and out-of-touch career politicians.
It is now more than ever that we need someone like Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, to keep an eye on all of the government’s dirty tricks.
Unfortunately, Assange is currently incarcerated and awaiting trial, extradition, or both, and has added a troubling charge of “espionage” to his rap sheet this week.
It is this ridiculous assertion by authorities that has journalists the world over very worried.
The editors of the nation’s most influential newspapers on Friday warned against President Donald Trump administration’s latest threat to the First Amendment, expressing distress over the Justice Department’s unprecedented use of the century-old Espionage Act to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified material.
American media outlets regularly publish classified material, even on occasion over the objections of the White House, as a legitimate journalistic exercise in serving the public’s right to know. Previous administrations have conducted leak investigations, and sometimes have charged the alleged leakers, but they have uniformly opted not to prosecute the journalists.
There were some big names in the mix as well.
In statements to The Daily Beast, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron, Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Matt Murray, and USA Today Editor in Chief Nicole Carroll all sounded the alarm over the Trump administration’s latest attack on the news media, which the president regularly calls “the enemy of the people.”
Baquet called the indictment “a deeply troubling step toward giving the government greater control over what Americans are allowed to know.”
Advertisement - story continues belowAnd Baron, noting that government officials regularly over classify documents that pose zero threat to national security, said the indictment “undermines the very purpose of the First Amendment.”
The framing of this debate as an attack against President Trump is purely a “resistance”-minded maneuver, but make no mistake, Assange being charged with espionage is not okay.
Transparency in government is the only certain way to procure and hold freedom, and making disclosures such as Wikileaks’ revelations illegal only furthers our descent into tyranny.
