WikiLeaks’ Assange arrested on U.S. charges he helped hack Pentagon computers

British police arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Thursday, a move they made in response to a U.S. extradition request on charges that he aided efforts to hack classified material on U.S. government computers in 2010.

The indictment, revealed Thursday by the Justice Department and dated March 6, 2018, alleges Assange aided former U.S. intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning with “cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers” that contained classified documents and secrets. He is charged with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.”

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“Manning, who had access to the computers in connection with her duties as an intelligence analyst, was using the computers to download classified records to transmit to WikiLeaks,” DOJ said. “Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log on to the computers under a username that did not belong to her. Such a deceptive measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the illegal disclosures.”

London police said they were invited into the embassy by Ecuador’s ambassador after Ecuador withdrew Assange’s asylum. Assange had taken refuge in the embassy in 2012 after he was released on bail while facing extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations that have since been dropped.

The charges appear to have no direct connection to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mueller’s indictment of Russians for hacking and releasing Democratic emails in 2016 — emails that were later published by WikiLeaks — alluded to Assange but did not name him.

Assange has been under U.S. Justice Department scrutiny for years for WikiLeaks’ role in publishing thousands of government secrets.

Congress has also signaled an interest in Assange. The House Judiciary Committee sought documents from him as part of its sprawling investigation of potential obstruction of justice and abuse of power by President Donald Trump, but Assange declined to cooperate, claiming he should be treated as a journalist and not forced to reveal his information at the outset of a congressional investigation.

The U.S. intelligence community has identified Assange as an outlet for Russian propaganda, but the nature of the charges against him will be closely scrutinized. Assange and his supporters say he had no role in hacking Democratic documents or harvesting other government secrets but simply acted as a publisher and journalist — and that his prosecution would set a dangerous precedent for other journalists.

The ACLU echoed this concern in a statement warning against charging Assange for simply publishing government secrets.

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee last year criticized Trump’s campaign for “ill-advised” contacts with WikiLeaks — several senior officials on the campaign, including Trump himself, hailed and promoted WikiLeaks’ hacked emails. Several Trump associates also attempted to contact Assange throughout the 2016 election.

Assange had not come out of the embassy for almost seven years because he feared arrest and extradition to the United States for publishing thousands of classified military and diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks. Although Sweden has dropped the sexual assault case that first led to Assange’s arrest in Britain, U.K. authorities said he would be rearrested if he ever left the embassy because he skipped bail in the original case.

In a statement Thursday, the U.K.’s Home Office confirmed Assange’s arrest was related to an extradition request from the U.S., noting that “he is accused in the United States of America of computer related offences.”

Barry Pollack, an attorney for Assange, demanded “access to proper health care” for Assange, which he said Assange had been denied for seven years.

“Once his health care needs have been addressed, the UK courts will need to resolve what appears to be an unprecedented effort by the United States seeking to extradite a foreign journalist to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information,” he said in a statement.

His arrest drew mixed responses, with some coming to his defense and others decrying his publication of thousands of classified U.S. military and diplomatic cables as well as his frequent alignment with and defense of Russia.

Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse called Assange’s arrest “good news for freedom-loving people” and in a statement derided WikiLeaks as “an outlet for foreign propaganda” and its frontman as an “enemy of the American people.”

“He deserves to spend the rest of his life in an American prison. Assange is no ally to serious journalists or to defenders of free speech,” Sasse continued. “He’s in bed with Vladimir Putin who murders journalists and dissidents.”

Jeh Johnson, former President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security secretary for much of the time Assange spent holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, asserted Thursday that “I do not regard him as a hero.”

In an interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” Johnson alluded to the already-revived debate about whether Assange has any protections under the First Amendment.

“He apparently aided and assisted in the leak of classified information — at some point there may be a debate whether he was a journalist and that was journalist activity,” he said, arguing that the distinctions for what can be considered “legitimate journalist activity and what constitutes a journalist is a more complex question in the age of the internet.”

Christophe Deloire, the executive director of the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders implored the U.K. to “stick to a principled stance” and ensure Assange’s protections under local and European law are “relevant to his contributions to journalism.”

“Targeting Assange because of Wikileaks’ provision of information to journalists that was in the public interest would be a punitive measure and would set a dangerous precedent for journalists or their sources that the US may wish to pursue in future,” Deloire warned.

The ACLU similarly raised the alarm about the precedent prosecuting Assange would set.

“Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange for Wikileaks’ publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations,” said Ben Wizner, director of the group’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

“Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public’s interest.”

Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, said his government made a “sovereign decision” to revoke Assange’s political asylum due to “repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life.”

“Today I announce that that the discourteous and aggressive behavior of Mr. Julian Assange, the hostile and threatening declarations of its allied organization, against Ecuador, and especially the transgression of international treaties, have led the situation to a point where the asylum of Mr. Assange is unsustainable and no longer viable,” Moreno said in a video released on Twitter.

Video posted online by Ruptly, a news service of Russia Today, showed several men in suits carrying Assange out of the embassy building and loading him into a police van while uniformed British police officers formed a passageway. Assange sported a full beard and slicked-back grey hair.

Pollack called Ecuador’s treatment of Assange “bitterly disappointing.”

Edward Snowden, who like Assange is a whistleblower and a fugitive and who is holed up in Russia to avoid prosecution in the U.S., also came to Assange’s defense.

In a series of tweets, Snowden referred to Assange as a “publisher of–like it or not–award-winning journalism” and speculated that images of his tense arrest “are going to end up in the history books.”

“Assange’s critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom,” he wrote.

WikiLeaks quickly drew attention to U.S. interest in Assange.

“Powerful actors, including CIA, are engaged in a sophisticated effort to de-humanise, de-legitimize and imprison him,” the organization said in a tweet over a photo of Assange’s smiling face.

London’s Metropolitan Police Service said Assange was taken into “custody at a central London police station where he will remain, before being presented before Westminster Magistrates’ Court as soon as is possible.”

His arrest came a day after WikiLeaks accused Ecuador’s government of an “extensive spying operation” against Assange.

WikiLeaks claims that meetings with lawyers and a doctor inside the embassy over the past year were secretly filmed.

WikiLeaks said in a tweeted statement that Ecuador illegally terminated Assange’s political asylum “in violation of international law.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.