Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Charged With Violating Espionage Act

Daily Mail: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is hit with 17 new charges in America under the Espionage Act for conspiring with Chelsea Manning to disclose national defense information - and now faces 170 YEARS in prison

* Assange was hit with 18 counts on Thursday by a grand jury in Virginia
* Seventeen are new and are violations of the Espionage Act which is ordinarily reserved for government officials
* They indictment alleges he and Manning conspired to disseminate classified information in 2009 and 2010
* They used her access to defense department computers to harvest the information and publish it
* He has always argued he was right to publish it on WikiLeaks as a 'journalist'
* It's the first time in history that anyone operating in a journalistic capacity has been charged under the Espionage Act
* WikiLeaks on Twitter called Assange's prosecution 'the end of national security journalism and the First Amendment'
* US authorities now have until June 11 to submit their extradition case to the UK
* Assange is in London, completing a 50 week jail term, for violating the conditions of his bail from a 2012 sex assault arrest in Sweden
* He was arrested in April after being thrown out of the Ecuadorian embassy
* He spent seven years hiding there from both US and Swedish authorities

Julian Assange has been charged in the US with 17 violations of the Espionage Act for conspiring with Chelsea Manning.

A federal grand jury returned the indictment against him in Virginia on Thursday afternoon. Now, the 47-year-old WikiLeaks founder faces 170 years behind bars.

Seventeen of the 18 charges are violations of the Espionage Act.

They are; one count of conspiracy to receive national defense information, eight counts of obtaining national defense information, eight counts of disclosure of national defense information.

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