October 2, 2021
Earlier this week, a bombshell report was published by an investigative journalism team at Yahoo News, alleging that the Trump administration — led by then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo — discussed aggressive options for bringing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to justice, including potentially kidnapping or even killing him.
That discussion reportedly set off a flurry of conversations about “legality and practicality,” with none of the options ever being approved, although some staffers were sufficiently worried that they alerted their contacts on Capitol Hill.
This episode raises important questions that are key to protecting American elections and democracy going forward, our mandate here at the USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative:
- What is the most effective, legal, and fair way to bring these hostile non-state actors (who are often supported by various foreign governments) to justice?
- Who is a journalist, and what information should be published under the rubric of free speech? Should the “mainstream media” use hacked materials in their reports?
- And how do we combat these hacks of confidential campaign information — attacks designed to sway voters’ opinions — and not just focus on preventing our actual election infrasture from being undermined? After all, this type of interference is in some ways more insidious and harder to counter.
WikiLeaks has been a thorn in the side of American national security officials for years. The group first gained widespread prominence in 2010 for releasing a trove of confidential U.S. government information, including videos of airstrikes in Iraq provided by Chelsea Manning. The organization, however, had been releasing hacked information since 2006 — including some related to the 2008 American elections.
Its activity reached a zenith during the 2016 presidential election, when the website released emails and files stolen from the Democratic National Committee and from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta (the latter coming only one month before the November election). The U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Russian intelligence stole this information and then provided it to WikiLeaks (among others) for public release, in an attempt to hurt Clinton’s chances and weaken her if she ultimately prevailed.
Media outlets used the hacked information prolifically in their reports leading up to and after the election, which many analysts (myself included) absolutely believe swayed some voters’ opinions of Clinton and thus impacted how they voted. Some of the information contained in these leaked documents was incredibly widely shared on social media and in conservative press circles, many of which have huge followings.
As someone who began her career at the CIA, and was its Press Spokesperson during some of the WikiLeaks releases, I have seen firsthand the damage that can be done from putting confidential information into the public domain. The concern with the diplomatic documents WikiLeaks released wasn’t just the threat to our relationships with other countries — although that was real — but also to locals who had assisted the United States, who were outed by these releases and thus put in danger. WikiLeaks did not take any care to protect innocent people who were caught up in their self-proclaimed efforts at increasing U.S. Government transparency.
There should be real and serious consequences for those who put people’s lives, as well as intelligence sources and methods, in jeopardy. That tends to be a law enforcement matter, although intelligence collection plays a key role as well. (The tension between those two sides of the coin — law enforcement vs. intel — is one that has played out in a range of policy debates, including how to take on WikiLeaks and Assange.)
Some activists have argued that Manning and even Assange should be treated like whistleblowers for exposing facts about American foreign policies that the U.S. Government wanted to keep secret.
While I do not think there is any compelling case to include Assange in this category, I do in general believe deeply in the protections given to whistleblowers in the U.S. Government who are trying to expose wrong-doing. Government officials like Manning have an obligation to first attempt to rectify that wrong-doing through official channels (such as through Inspectors General or Congressional oversight committees), but it is an important part of our democracy to have protections for people to raise concerns.
WikiLeaks’ activity related to political campaigns and elections is a different animal. To begin, when it comes to hacking political information in an attempt to influence an election, that does not, in my opinion, come close to meeting any definition of whistleblowing. That isn’t exposing official waste, fraud, and abuse — it’s interfering in the democracy of another country through illegal means, with the goal of achieving a specific political outcome for a hostile foreign actor.
When Julian Assange and his allies jumped from focusing on foreign policy decisions they disagreed with — albeit using illegal means and damaging sources and methods in the process — to trying to influence an election on behalf of Russia, they also lost any ability to claim status as a media organization, a difficult claim to make beforehand and an impossible one to make after.
To be clear, I do not support assassinating or kidnapping Julian Assange like the Trump administration considered doing. I do, though, believe there need to be ways to bring him and others like him to justice.
Assange is currently in prison in the United Kingdom, while the U.S. awaits a decision from its ally on whether to extradite him. Assange faces 18 counts in an American indictment and up to 175 years in jail if convicted of all charges.
The United Kingdom should allow him to be extradited so he can face the American judicial system. They, more than many countries, understand the damage that WikiLeaks has done to our foreign policy apparatus and to our elections. They themselves have faced foreign interference in their own elections, most notably leading up to the 2016 vote deciding whether to stay or exit the European Union.
In closing, though, I return to an issue I discuss in every one of our regular workshops with state and local elections officials: Voters have to want to know when they’re being used as pawns in this foreign interference game online — which isn’t always the case. There were disturbing anecdotes after the 2016 election about voters who were not particularly upset that they had attended rallies organized by Russian Facebook accounts pretending to be Americans, or about how many voters continued to believe false stories even after being shown incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
And, of course, too many Americans have embraced WikiLeaks for providing confidential information about their political opponents, ignoring the overall damage the organization has done to our country in the service of short-term political gain.
At the end of the day, we can use every intelligence, legal, and diplomatic tool to bring criminals like Julian Assange to justice. But as long as there is a willing and captive audience in the United States for this kind of information, there will always be another threat lurking around the corner — which means we can’t just focus on punishing those who have already attacked us, but on countering the next threat as well.
Marie Harf
International Elections Analyst, USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative
Marie Harf is a strategist who has focused her career on promoting American foreign policy to domestic audiences. She has held senior positions at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, worked on political campaigns for President Barack Obama and Congressman Seth Moulton, and served as a cable news commentator. Marie has also been an Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.