The Daily - The Moral Complexities of Working With Julian Assange

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

Many have considered Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to be a hero of the free speech movement and a partner to journalists. He also came to be seen as a threat to national security. Then, he helped Russia interfere in a United States election. And now, he has been arrested. Our colleague tells us about the moral complexities of working with Mr. Assange. Guest: Scott Shane, who covers national security for The New York Times, has been following Mr. Assange’s decade-long saga. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. First, he was seen as a hero of the free speech movement. Increasingly, he came to be seen as a threat to national security. Then, he helped Russia interfere in a U.S. election. Now, he's been arrested. Scott Shane on the moral complexities of Julian Assange.

It's Monday, April 15th. Scott, tell us what happened in London on Thursday. So a large squad of police showed up at the embassy of Ecuador, where Julian Assange has been holed up for seven years, not leaving the building. And the Ecuadorian authorities got a little sick of him. He would skateboard, and they complained about his skateboarding, the noise, the damage he was doing to the building. He would skateboard inside the embassy? You know, I mean, the guy was there for seven years. He couldn't go outside.

He would play with a soccer ball and throw it and kick it against the wall, and they got tired of that. A security guard came to take the soccer ball away, accused him of not taking care of his cat, not taking care of his bathroom. So it was almost like a bad scene in a college dorm, I think. We've got breaking news for you. And I have to tell you, the pictures are shocking from London today, where Julian Assange's long standoff with international authorities is finally over. Finally, the Ecuadorian authorities had made the decision to evict him. Finally, the Ecuadorian authorities had made the decision to evict him.

And they're the British police authorities where they're waiting to accept the body, so to speak. And he resisted, so they carried him out. Oh, my God, look at him. Look at him. The beard, I have not seen him looking like that. Clearly not being taken willingly. He's being dragged. And he was quite disheveled, white beard. Look at how many people it's taking to take him down. He's not going willingly.

He looks like Rip Van Winkle. And he was yelling, we can resist, we must resist, you can resist. And they sort of shoveled him into a gray police van. Julian Assange now faces a single U.S. federal conspiracy charge related to one of the largest ever leaks of government secrets. The U.S. is seeking to extradite him, but Assange is vowing to fight it. So you had this scene, which in some ways is quite appropriate, of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, against the world, against the powerful state, taking his stand and trying to rally his troops.

And Scott, what's the significance of this moment? Well, this was the end of a 10-year kind of global saga that involved the U.S., the U.K., Ecuador, Sweden, Russia, everybody with their own particular interest in Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. And I hesitate to say it's the end, but it's at least a milestone in the very colorful career of Julian Assange. Wikileaks had been founded by Julian Assange, this former hacker from Australia, in 2006. So these are, as far as we can tell, classical whistleblowers. And we had a number of ways for them to get information to us. They would collect whistleblower documents, various kinds of secret documents,

and put them up on the web for everybody to see. We'd get information in the mail, read it like a regular news organization, release it to the public, and then defend ourselves against the... But they hadn't really made much of a splash. No one had really heard of them. They hadn't gotten much media attention until 2010, when they got the motherlode essentially delivered to them by Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, this bored army private, low-level intelligence analyst in Iraq. And they were extremely happy to hear from her

and to handle her documents. And where were you in this moment? So I was in the Times Washington Bureau, and a team of us were sort of on the receiving end of this giant document dump from WikiLeaks. There were first the war logs, which were sort of on the ground secret reports from the troops and about the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then there were a quarter million confidential diplomatic cables, essentially the letters that diplomats send back from embassies around the world to the State Department in Washington and the instructions from the State Department out to the field. And no one had seen anything like this many confidential military and diplomatic documents before.

Well, tell me how you're thinking about what Assange is doing here by releasing so many secretive diplomatic documents and the role that you as a journalist are playing in that. I think you feel very ambivalent about a guy like Assange. He's somewhere on the boundary between a source and a kind of journalistic collaborator. and a kind of journalistic collaborator. What was different about this was usually your source is a government official and they kind of know the rules of the game and you know the rules of the game and they know the risk they're running and so on. Now we're dealing with somebody who is not only not a government official, but a very freewheeling, sort of ideologically driven, fairly eccentric character. Julian Assange had pronounced this theory, I guess you'd call it, that the powerful were hoarding information and keeping it from the people.

Information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good. And he wanted to set it free. The goal is justice. The method is transparency. It's important not to confuse the goal and the method. So he was inclined in a maybe oversimplified way to just throw everything out there

versus a more traditional journalistic approach, which is, first of all, we don't want to actually get people killed by just putting up confidential documents. We were trying to do editing and pick and choose and be careful in what we put out there and be selective and also try to make sense of it. So it was a complicated relationship on both sides. But I think that tension has been present in the relationship between WikiLeaks and traditional journalism, conventional journalism, you know, since its founding. And what was the response from the U.S. government once they learned that you had these diplomatic cables, that WikiLeaks had dumped all of these documents on you?

Well, I literally called over to the White House and said, we have a quarter million confidential cables, and we plan to publish a lot of them and to write a lot of stories about them. And somebody peeled themselves off the ground at the White House. Yeah. I think they had some inkling that something was afoot. They said, we'll get back to you.

They summoned us to the State Department at about 8 p.m., and we were led to this big room where there was basically a murderer's row of senior officials from a bunch of agencies, the Defense Department, the CIA. And the initial message was, you are in possession of stolen goods. We expect you to return the stolen goods, these cables, and not to write anything about them. And there was a sort of tense exchange in which Dean Bakay, who was speaking for us, made it clear politely but firmly that we intended to write about these things. And the meeting concluded with the idea that we would tell them which cables we intended to publish. As I recall, it was around 5 p.m. every day there'd be a conference

call between us and a bunch of State Department officials, and we would have identified, say, you know, 10 cables about Afghanistan that we intended to publish. And they would have their Afghan experts on the line, and we would go through the cables, and they would say, in some cases, you know, we have no problem with number three, but there are three names we'd like you to take out of cable six. In some cases, we would discover that we'd already decided to redact those names because it was clear that people might be endangered if we published the name. But then there were also a class of requests that essentially were clearly coming out of a sense of anguish at the State Department. They would say, if you publish this, it's going to really, really upset a lot of people in the country.

They're going to be extremely angry at our diplomats. It will strain relations. And in almost all of those cases, we said, look, we're sympathetic, but we can't withhold something based on that, and we're going to go ahead. So there was a whole range of decisions. And we published it. It got a lot of attention. Well, this isn't a WikiLeak. This is a WikiTorrent. WikiLeaks had help with this week's disclosures from three of the most prominent brands in journalism. The New York Times, The Guardian here in Britain, and in Germany to Der Spiegel, The Weekly. The documents reveal previously unreported killings of Afghan citizens,

and U.S. fears that some Pakistani officials were cooperating with the Taliban. Wikileaks has released more secret documents to the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR. They say it shows the extent of U.S. spying on allies and the U.N. The newest documents release detail extensive computer hacking operations originating in China. Why were Chinese leaders so obsessed with the web? Because, according to the cables, they were googling themselves and unhappy with the criticisms they found. And here's some of the latest revelations.

China appears to be losing patience with its longtime ally, North Korea. Senior figures in Beijing even described the regime as behaving like a spoiled child. And one U.S. diplomat says that China is genuinely rattled by North Korea's nuclear missile tests. WikiLeaks documents made public in the past 24 hours once again are embarrassing to America. They show that U.S. officials aren't convinced Pakistan is a reliable ally and that nuclear material from a Pakistani reactor may end up in the hands of terrorists. The latest secret U.S. diplomatic correspondence unearthed by WikiLeaks reveals Afghan and American criticism of British forces in 2008.

Meanwhile, new classified documents released by WikiLeaks reveal that TV shows like Desperate Housewives are helping fight extremism abroad. Good evening, it has happened again, and this time it's the Russians. In this new batch splashed across the web and on front pages in Great Britain and here in the U.S., there are allegations the Russians are running a mob state. Someone has compared Russian leaders Putin and Medvedev to Batman and Robin, and Putin comes under sharp attack as a macho character, oddly disengaged and at times working from home.

But after this elaborate redaction process that WikiLeaks had participated in, Julian Assange got in a dispute with a Guardian editor, and the outcome was that Assange decided to put up all the cables, all 250,000 on the web, unredacted and unedited. Wow. After all those discussions and deliberations about protecting people. Reckless and dangerous. That's how the White House is describing WikiLeaks release of thousands of classified State Department diplomatic documents. Listen to the statement by the press secretary for the White House and see the vehemence and the worry that's included in that. By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause

of human rights, but also the lives and works of these individuals. Well, one of the things that happened at the State Department was they convened a sort of emergency task force and sent out word to their embassies and to the people who wrote the cables in some cases saying, hey, some of your confidential contacts in your country may be in trouble. In some cases, they said, we will help you leave your country if you think your life would be in danger. they said, we will help you leave your country if you think your life would be in danger. So they did a lot of warnings, a lot of assistance with people moving around the world and trying to make themselves and their families safe. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is thinking very hard about, is there a crime here? Let me condemn in the strongest terms the leaks of information that have come.

Eric Holder, the attorney general at the time, actually announced that we have a very serious, active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature. They had opened a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and the people around it. I personally authorized a number of things last week, and I think that's an indication of the seriousness with which we take this matter and the highest level involvement in the United States Department of Justice. So the question was, were they going to sort of cross the Rubicon here and try to find a way to treat WikiLeaks not as a journalistic organization,

but as some kind of, you know, enemy intelligence organization and prosecute. Chelsea Manning got 35 years in prison. So, you know, Julian Assange is sort of the middleman between the person who goes to prison and us, the reporters who are writing these stories. And so, you know, in a way, he could be lumped by the government with Chelsea Manning and other leakers who may be violating the law, or he can be lumped with us as sort of journalistic collaborators. After a whole lot of work and a whole lot of hand-wringing and contemplation, the Obama administration decided that prosecuting WikiLeaks would be essentially a bridge too far. It would be a danger to freedom of the press and sort of come up against the First Amendment in this country. And the decision under Obama was made, no, they were not going to do that.

So if the U.S. government decides to treat Assange as a journalist and kind of out of the reach of repercussions for these giant leaks, how do we end up where we are right now? Well, Assange has a complicated life. The tables, well, they've turned on the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, says he has been the victim of a leak. A British newspaper published details of a Swedish police report. Two women in Sweden approached the authorities with complaints about Julian Assange's sexual conduct with them. Prosecutors want to question the Australian computer hacker about

rape and sexual molestation allegations made by two WikiLeaks volunteers. There are no charges, but the Swedish investigators want to interview Julian Assange. So Assange at this point believes that not without reason that the U.S. may end up charging him. He's fearful that if he makes himself available to the Swedish authorities, that if he makes himself available to the Swedish authorities, that Uncle Sam will be sort of lingering in the back room. The Swedes will extradite him to the U.S. and he'll face God knows what. So he approaches the Ecuadorian authorities, seeks sanctuary in Ecuador's little embassy in London, probably not expecting to spend the next seven years there, but that's what happens. Got it. And then, of course.

Breaking tonight as Dems gather in Philadelphia this coming week, a shocking new email dump of DNC emails threatens to cast a shadow over their convention. 2016 happens. 2016 happens. 2016 happens. WikiLeaks posting thousands of leaked emails between top Democratic Party officials, some of which suggest the DNC favored Hillary Clinton. 19,000 emails posted by WikiLeaks show DNC officials apparently scoffing at Sanders and his supporters, and in one instance, questioning his commitment to his Jewish religion.

And, you know, I think a lot of people who were cheering Julian Assange on when he was making public, you know, secret documents from the Iraq war, suddenly found themselves with very mixed feelings. This is a Watergate-like electronic break-in. And anyone who would exploit for this purpose of embarrassment or something like that is an accomplice to that. It was somewhat clear from the beginning, though not explicit, that this was the result of Russian hacking. Russia has many reasons for opposing

Hillary Clinton. So they get in touch with WikiLeaks. But there is another factor that comes into play. The American liberal press, in falling over themselves to defend Hillary Clinton, are erecting a demon that is going to put nooses around everyone's necks as soon as she wins the election, which he is almost certainly going to do. Assange has it in for Hillary Clinton as well. Why? Because Clinton had, not surprisingly, as Secretary of State, she sort of was the leading voice in denouncing WikiLeaks for making available these 250,000 diplomatic cables. Those were her diplomats who were put in this very difficult situation. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people,

and there is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends. And now she's running for president. And Assange, through Twitter, makes it very clear that he is going to do what he can to damage Clinton's campaign. So this starts to feel more like Putin and Assange having a similar goal here. And that's quite different than what had happened with WikiLeaks and its role in the past. Absolutely. I think the Russians are sort of driving the car here, but I think it's probably Assange who's making these decisions to dump three days before the Democratic Convention opens 20,000 emails from inside the DNC.

I mean, you're totally disruptive. And does this change how we treat the documents that he's helping disseminate about the Democrats? promotions and WikiLeaks understood, Julian Assange certainly understood, was that in the middle of a heated, hotly contested U.S. presidential campaign, if you give reporters catnip, which is to say inside documents, the reporters are not going to say, geez, it would be unfair for us to use these because we don't have the equivalent from the other side. No, they're going to write about them. And we at The New York Times wrote about them. Everybody wrote about them.

I wrote about them. I should acknowledge. You wrote about them. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of stories. And one of the most eager readers was, of course, Donald Trump. Hillary had no defense for her secret speeches to Wall Street and international banks that she hid from the public and which were exposed by Wikileaks. Right, and there's this sort of fascinating dynamic

that emerges during this period where Donald Trump, this nationalist Republican candidate for president, ends up going before these giant crowds celebrating this kind of anarchic figure of Julian Assange and saying that he loves his anarchic website, WikiLeaks. Exactly.

WikiLeaks. I love WikiLeaks. I love WikiLeaks. He said it again and again and again and again. Oh, we love WikiLeaks. Boy, they have really WikiLeaks. Talk about an odd couple. But, hey, you know, Julian Assange was helping him in this campaign, and that was enough for Donald Trump, at least at that time. So, again, Scott, I have to ask, if we were in a moment where Trump was saying, I love Julian Assange, If those leaks may have literally helped Trump get elected, how do we get to this moment where the U.S., under a Trump administration, is charging Assange with a crime?

I think we don't know all of the details of the answer. But the basic facts are that Julian Assange was helping out Donald Trump on the campaign trail. But the campaign was over. And one thing that probably made a big difference was that in March 2017, WikiLeaks put up a large collection of extremely sensitive, highly classified documents related to CIA's hacking program. So this infuriated people at the CIA. And Mike Pompeo, who was then CIA director, said publicly, As long as they make a splash, they care nothing about the lives they put at risk or the damage they cause to national security. WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a

hostile intelligence service. That he considered Wikileaks to be a non-state hostile intelligence organization. And we began to get rumors that the Justice Department was again considering the possibility of some kind of prosecution. And how does the U.S. get around the journalism question this time? The fact that we have decided as a country that he is a journalist? Well, what they do is they do an end run around the journalism question. They find evidence, which the Obama administration Justice Department had looked at as well, The Obama administration Justice Department had looked at as well that shows, at least according to the indictment, that Chelsea Manning had essentially asked Julian Assange for his expertise in trying to crack a password that would give her access to this big database of secret documents and would also have the effect of blurring her responsibility for the leak. It would sort of cover her tracks a little bit.

And so they decide that they can interpret this as a conspiracy to commit essentially hacking, and they can make this into a crime. And that breaks a law that has nothing to do with journalism. So we can charge you with this and avoid the whole uncomfortable question of are we violating the First Amendment? And the question is, is this computer intrusion charge, this conspiracy charge, really just a fig leaf for the U.S. government punishing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing material that the government didn't want published. He can go to trial and we'll see if they have the evidence to prove him guilty. So, Scott, what should we make of this journey over the past 10 years when it comes to Julian

Assange? He has gone from this sort of internationally almost revered figure, a kind of freedom fighter, to this disheveled guy being dragged out of the embassy in London, someone who is very happy to work with the Russian government and pick sides in a U.S. election. So what are you thinking about with this arrest,

having been along intimately for the entire ride? Well, I think he's a contradictory figure. He was sort of the right guy to see the potential of the internet for empowering the individual who felt previously perhaps powerless to do anything. All of a sudden, here's WikiLeaks. I can get in touch with WikiLeaks. I have access to these documents.

And they can air these crimes. They can right these wrongs. There was a journalistic imperative there. there. And we certainly at the New York Times recognized it in collaborating with WikiLeaks, which now is a global brand name. I think whistleblowers are going to continue to bring it material. It will probably continue to shed light on some very important topics. Whether Assange will still be involved from his presumably jail cell or not remains to be seen but at the same time

you know he's a problematic figure to say the least he's just such a flawed figure at this point but that doesn't mean that the work he's done is you know, easily dismissed. Thank you, Scott. Thanks, Mike. We'll be right back.

Thank you. unlimited supply. On Sunday, the Trump administration said it was considering a plan to send detained migrants to sanctuary cities on the East and West Coast as a form of retaliation against the president's critics. Is the president serious? Does he really intend to ship thousands of immigrants all across the country to cities like New York and San Francisco and a lot of other places. In an interview with Fox News Sunday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said that the plan would force democratically controlled cities to confront the impact of undocumented immigration on the same scale as towns near the Mexican border. We have to look at all options across the table so that the towns right there on the border aren't taking on the entire burden and that we're shifting some of that burden to places who constantly claim to want to have open borders and want to have an open city. So let's put some of those people into their communities and into their towns and see if

they are okay then with that same impact. The legality of the plan is unclear, and it has already triggered objections from inside the Trump administration. Take a look at some of the objections that DHS raised. They said Congress has approved no specific money for this purpose. ICE says it would be, quote, an unnecessary operational burden. Sending them to sanctuary cities, which don't cooperate with federal enforcement of immigration laws, would make it harder to round them up later. And it also might be an incentive to more illegal immigration. So I guess the question is, how do you overcome all of those problems?

Again, nobody thinks that this is the ideal solution. But until we can fix the crisis at the border, we have to look at all options. This is one of them, whether or not it... That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.