I once lived with Julian Assange — and he’s making a big mistake

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is in the midst of hearings in his bid to stop extradition to the US. The authorities there want him in connection with his website’s publication of

classified US documents throughout 2010 and early 2011.

To many of us, this will feel like just the latest in a decade of exhausting legal dramas around Assange. He was arrested in Sweden on unrelated sexual assault and rape allegations in the

summer of 2010, and then mounted a lengthy legal challenge to avoid extradition to Sweden via the European Arrest Warrant.

Having exhausted every legal avenue, up to and including the UK Supreme Court, in a bid to avoid what was a fairly conventional European Arrest Warrant, Assange fled bail and sought

sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Assange remained locked in this diplomatic stand-off for years, the relationship with his hosts souring with every passing month. Eventually, relations were so bad that the government of

Ecuador negotiated a deal with UK and US authorities that allowed police into the embassy to remove and arrest Assange, leading to his current confinement in Belmarsh prison, where he awaits

extradition.

It’s a messy backstory — but WikiLeaks’ activities in the years between Chelsea Manning’s release of the Afghan War logs and the present day make it murkier still. On multiple occasions, the

site published hacked information of questionable public interest, including material obtained by Anonymous, the “hacktivist” group.

In 2016, WikiLeaks went further still, publishing hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and from a key Hillary Clinton aide. These were exploited relentlessly by Donald Trump

and his presidential campaign, as well as by Fox News and similar outlets. They even led to the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which baselessly suggested that leading Democratic figures were

part of a paedophile ring.

Those emails, it emerged, were hacked under the orders of the Russian government as part of their bid to interfere in the US election and aid Donald Trump. No one has offered any evidence

suggesting WikiLeaks or Assange knew their Russian origin. However, when evidence suggesting this surfaced, Assange shamefully hinted his source may have been Seth Rich, a young Democratic

staffer who had been murdered in Washington DC. It’s a claim he must have known was false, and one that fuelled conspiracy theories and caused Rich’s family great distress.

Given his chaotic and damaging personal and professional track record, support for Assange has dwindled dramatically. He doesn’t cut a particularly sympathetic figure to me — and I used to

work for him, and (briefly) live with him, at the time WikiLeaks was publishing the State Department cables. He’s a chaotic and mercurial boss who would often lie to the public and cover up

his mistakes. He had troubling allies, including notorious anti-Semite Israel Shamir. Assange was also an unreliable ally to whistle-blowers of the world, at a time when they really needed

help.

This makes the approach of his defence team all the more difficult to understand. They have, at various turns, suggested Assange’s pre-trial detention amounted to unfair punishment (a hard

argument given he previously skipped bail), that Assange cannot have a fair trial because the judge is biased, that the courtroom was chosen to make it hard for protestors to visit, or that

surveillance of Assange by Ecuador in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had sheltered himself by choice, was an outrage.

These arguments may or may not have merit, though they look like a clumsy attempt to throw everything at the wall in the hope something might stick on appeal. But they have one thing in

common: they’re all about Julian Assange.

This tactic is a baffling one, because there are serious and global principles at stake: the extradition and subsequent prosecution of Assange for his work publishing Manning’s leaks is a

genuine menace to press freedom and free expression.

The Manning leaks revealed the callous disregard of US pilots for civilian casualties; the existence of death squads operating in Afghanistan; the real civilian toll of the Iraq invasion and

subsequent civil war; the extent of US spying on the UN and other diplomats, and dozens of other matters of serious public interest.

Despite attempts to frame the extradition as one around hacking, the US is trying to prosecute Assange, a non-US citizen, under the Espionage Act, for his role in those 2010 publications. If

Assange is found guilty for that today, why not the editors of the New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde and more tomorrow? For that matter — why not me?

The free expression argument, and the accompanying politicisation of prosecuting Assange and not those others, is the best argument against Assange’s extradition, and one even those who hate

the man himself should rally behind. Doing so becomes much easier if Assange and his defence team make that argument much, much more clearly than they have done so far.

If he wishes to be a free man, Julian Assange needs to try something he has rarely, if ever, tried before: he needs to make this about more than just himself.

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