The United States Department of Justice on Thursday announced a criminal charge against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, accusing him of conspiring to hack into a classified U.S. government computer.
“The charge relates to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States,” the Justice Department said in a press release.
That alleged conspiracy involved Chelsea Manning, the former U.S Army intelligence analyst who was jailed last month for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating Assange’s document-sharing organization.
The announcement followed an extradition request by the U.S. for Assange, 47, who on Thursday morning was arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has lived for nearly seven years.
Assange faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison if convicted, though his actual sentence would likely fall below the legal max.
The indictment, filed under seal in the Eastern District of Virginia in March 2018, states that he and Manning worked together in 2010 to crack passwords on government computers and download reams of information with the intent of publishing them on WikiLeaks.
The alleged conspiracy has no direct connection to the 2016 presidential election, where Assange’s whistleblowing organization became a main engine of controversy by publishing troves of Democratic National Committee officials’ internal emails. U.S. intelligence officials alleged in a January 2017 assessment of Russia’s election meddling that Kremlin military intelligence gained access to DNC networks and fed the hacked information to WikiLeaks.
Trump had praised WikiLeaks repeatedly in the late stages of the election, in which he ultimately defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Manning, who held a top-secret security clearance, sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. military documents to WikiLeaks agents so that they could be publicly disclosed — and the website did publish the “vast majority” of those classified records between 2010 and 2011, the indictment alleges.
Those documents allegedly included approximately 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, a quarter-million State Department cables and 400,000 Iraq War-related reports.
In March 2010, Assange allegedly “agreed to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a United States government network used for classified documents and communications.”
Manning used a Linux operating system to access the password, which would help disguise her activities but was stored on a computer she did not have specific privileges to access, according to the court filing.
Assange was allegedly aware that Manning was providing him information in violation of Army regulations.
On March 8, 2010, before forging the agreement to crack the government password, Manning allegedly told Assange that “after this upload, that’s all I really have got left.”
The indictment says Assange replied: “Curious eyes never run dry in my experience.”
Assange had been holed up in the London-based embassy since 2012 in order to avoid an extradition to Sweden related to a sexual assault case. Two years earlier, Sweden had issued a warrant for Assange related to allegations of sexual assault and rape from two women. Those charges were dropped in 2017.
But Assange had refused to leave the embassy for fear of being extradited to the U.S. — a situation that reportedly wore thin for Ecuadorian officials.
Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno tweeted Thursday that his country had withdrawn Assange’s asylum status “after his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols.”
