At Assange Extradition Trial, Professor Says US Wants to Criminalize Journalism

An American journalism professor and former investigative reporter, testifying on behalf of Julian Assange at his extradition trial in London, said the WikiLeaks founder is being prosecuted by the United States to silence journalists and whistleblowers.

Mark Feldstein, who teaches at the University of Maryland, said US President Donald Trump's administration wanted a “head on a spike,” to deter prospective leakers and squeezed the Justice Department to get Assange to the US to face espionage charges.

Trump, who disdains the media and journalists and calls anything written negatively about him “fake news,” wanted to get Assange as an example, said Feldstein, adding that the President's Administration “had journalism firmly in its sights.”

Feldstein was responding to tough questioning from attorney James Lewis QC, prosecuting for the United States, who kept trying to undermine the professor's credibility but was constantly rebuffed.

When questioned by Assange's defense team, Feldstein said it's common practice for journalists to ask or solicit information from government employees, and that he had never heard of any previous prosecution on that basis.

“It’s a chilling prospect to criminalize that… it’s criminalizing journalism itself,” he replied, adding, “Journalists are not passive stenographers… It can’t be right that the only way journalists can get information is anonymously in the mail,” reported Bridges for Media Freedom, which is following the trial daily.

U.S. prosecutors have indicted the 49-year-old Australian on 18 espionage and computer misuse charges that carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison. His lawyers said he's the victim of a political witch hunt for embarrassing the government in a case that will put all journalists at risk for doing their jobs.

US authorities allege Assange conspired with former U.S. army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks released a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by US forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

Feldstein noted that former President Barack Obama's Administration, which aggressively prosecuted whistleblowers, backed off going after Assange after the Justice Department said it would be unconstitutional and set a precedent to hunt down other journalists because what Assange was doing was "too similar to the conduct of reporters at many other news outlets.”

Indeed, publications that have written about the WikiLeaks reports have not been prosecuted and Assange's supporters said he is just as much as journalist as reporters from mainstream outlets who use the same practices he did to reveal wrongdoing.

Feldstein was also asked by the defense about one of the charges Julian Assange is facing, that of soliciting classified information.

“This paints journalistic activities in a very nefarious light,” he said, adding that, “We teach acquiring secret documents in journalism school,” and he worked with contacts and sources to obtain information. “It’s standard practice,” he said.

Asked about Assange helping Manning hide she was his source, he said journalists have gone to jail rather than reveal them, and governments often classify information because it is embarrassing, not because it's a national security threat.