Assange Charged in U.S. With Hack Conspiracy Tied to Manning

The U.S. accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of taking part in a computer-hacking conspiracy related to the disclosure of diplomatic cables extracted by former U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning.

In a March 2018 indictment unsealed on Thursday just hours after Assange’s arrest in London, the U.S. accused Assange of assisted Manning in “hacking a password stored on United States Department of Defense computers,” according to the indictment. Assange’s anti-secrecy organization published the cables starting in 2010.

Assange’s arrest came after Ecuador expelled him from its embassy there. The 47-year-old has been in the embassy since 2012 when he sought to escape questioning in a Swedish sexual-assault case. While those charges were dropped in 2017, Assange has remained in a small apartment in the London embassy.

If Assange is extradited, he could provide new insights into WikiLeaks’ role in a different matter -- what Special Counsel Robert Mueller has described as a conspiracy by Russians to steal the Democrats’ emails.

WikiLeaks published Democratic Party emails hacked by Russians before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump campaign officials directed a Trump ally, Roger Stone, to contact WikiLeaks during the period when the activist website was publishing the emails, which embarrassed top Democratic officials, including Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, according to an indictment against Stone.

Assange drew worldwide notoriety in 2010 when WikiLeaks published the classified U.S. materials about the Afghan war that were stolen by Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst then known as Bradley Manning. Assange has said his activities were protected from U.S. prosecution because he acted as a journalist who published information about government activities.