The Dept. of Justice has just announced an additional 17 new charges against Julian Assange. A grand jury indicted the Wikileaks founder on felony violations of the Espionage Act, including conspiracy to receive national defense information.
“The new charges include allegations that he violated the law not only by soliciting and receiving national security information,” Buzzfeed News reports, “but also by publishing what John Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, described to reporters on Thursday as a ‘narrow subset’ of documents that identified the names of individuals who were working with the US government, including sources in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
The charges are not related to Wikileaks’ publication of data stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Each count carried a five to 10 year maximum sentence if convicted, CBS News notes.
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