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Jamil Jaffer:
Well, one, he’s not a U.S. citizen, so he doesn’t actually have rights from the U.S. Constitution. Now, he’s being brought here, prosecuted here. Presumably, those rights will apply once he’s here and in our courts. But having published from abroad, he doesn’t actually have First Amendment rights.
That being said, even if we apply the First Amendment to him, he doesn’t do the things that you would expect a journalist to do. He doesn’t comply with journalistic ethics. He doesn’t abide by these things. In fact, the whole reason Ecuadorian Embassy kicked him out after seven years is, he was behaving poorly while there.
On top of all that, even if you put aside the hacking charges, right, journalists don’t normally solicit classified information in the sense of like, go get this specific information out of a classified database. If they receive it, sometimes, they will publish it. But even when they publish it, they take efforts to redact information that is sensitive, protect sources of methods and the like, give the government a chance to respond.
Julian Assange didn’t do any of that, because he’s not a real, legitimate journalist. And the idea that this prosecution would undermine any journalist’s rights, it just makes no sense to me.
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