Julian Assange was never a journalist or a whistle-blower. But they’re right to free him

Open this photo in gallery:

Julian Assange is a fraud who called himself a journalist and a whistle-blower while greatly hindering and inconveniencing the cause of journalism and making life much harder for actual whistle-blowers. He is a tool of dictators whose greatest offence, for which he has not been charged, was to help Russian president Vladimir Putin throw the 2016 U.S. election.

He is also a man who was excessively prosecuted for the wrong crimes, and is rightfully free today.

Mr. Assange’s negotiated guilty plea on a single charge of stealing government secrets – a charge that gives him too much credit for his middleman role in someone else’s act – will allow him to go free, as he’s already served more than five years in England’s Belmarsh Prison awaiting trial on 18 charges of espionage.

The overzealous and expensive prosecution did not make Washington look good. Worse, though, it bolstered Mr. Assange’s cultivated image as a persecuted whistle-blower and journalist.

He was never either. From its beginnings in the late 2000s, Mr. Assange’s WikiLeaks was a great disservice to actual journalists. I had the experience of attempting to deal with WikiLeaks during those years, and saw Mr. Assange in action. Beneath his blustering speeches about bringing down governments, he was, in practice, a rather crude broker who retailed other people’s leaks for his own benefit.

During the peak of his celebrity, Mr. Assange described himself a “market libertarian” on an ideological mission: “In order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.” Yet his signature role was to distort and decontextualize information in distinctly un-transparent ways.

WikiLeaks first came to mass public attention in the spring of 2010, when it published what it claimed to be an exclusive leak of a U.S. military video of a 2007 incident in which helicopters opened fire on a number of people, including civilians, in Baghdad. The video, edited to remove much of its context, was posted on a WikiLeaks site called Collateral Murder and promoted as a world exclusive. In fact, the incident had been fully reported and investigated by actual journalists; the contents of the full video had been described in complete detail a year earlier by Washington Post reporter David Finkel, with fact-checking and important context missing from Mr. Assange’s rerun.

After that, Mr. Assange shifted his tactics to ensure that people wishing to leak documents would send them not directly to newspapers but to his middleman organization, which offered “bounties” of up to US$100,000 for leaks – something no credible journalistic organization would do – and then often brokered slices of them to news outlets in complex and time-consuming negotiations designed to benefit the WikiLeaks organization (newspapers that had written unflattering stories about him were often denied access to the leaks).

In every case I’m aware of, the leaks would have gone directly to a news outlet, and probably would have been published safely and with proper fact-checking and context, if not for Mr. Assange’s organization intervening. In 2017, defence contractor Reality Winner leaked intelligence documents related to Russia’s interference in the U.S. election the previous year; instead of going to WikiLeaks, she gave them straight to the news site The Intercept. WikiLeaks offered a US$10,000 bounty to anyone who could get the Intercept reporter fired.

By then, Mr. Assange seemed to have become motivated by a personal sense of geopolitical revenge. In the autumn of 2016, WikiLeaks released emails that had been hacked from the servers of the Democratic Party and many of its candidates by the Russian military-intelligence agency GRU. The Robert Mueller special investigation into Russian interference found that the GRU had provided the hacked emails to WikiLeaks, which then communicated with Donald Trump’s campaign and made them aware of the hacks, often in advance of their release. The emails contained nothing incriminating or even especially embarrassing about the Democrats, but the frequent stories about “Hillary’s emails” created a sense that the party had lax control of its information and were found to have had a detrimental effect on voters – exactly what Mr. Putin had reportedly intended.

Though he later denied it, Mr. Assange said at the time that he believed the leaks were “probably” coming to him from Moscow. In the end, Mr. Trump’s agent Roger Stone went to prison for using WikiLeaks to interfere with the election (and was later pardoned by the then-president he helped elect) and several GRU agents were charged.

But Julian Assange has so far escaped prosecution for his central role in this historic subversion of democracy. Instead, he will be remembered as a confessed and convicted felon for his middleman role in a leaks scandal. But, his self-aggrandizing claims aside, he should never be remembered as a journalist.