When campaigning in 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump was delighted by leaked, hacked or disclosed material that wound its way to the digital treasure troves of WikiLeaks.  The online publisher of government secrets had become an invaluable resource for Trump’s battering of the Democratic establishment hopeful, Hillary Clinton, with her nonchalant attitude to the security of email communications and a venal electoral strategy.  “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks,” he tooted on what was then Twitter.  “So dishonest!  Rigged system!”  After winning the keys to the White House, he mysteriously forgot the organisation whose fruit he so merrily feasted on.

During the Biden administration, the fate of the founding publisher of WikiLeaks, an Australian national who had never been on American soil and had published classified US defence and diplomatic material outside the country (Cablegate was a gem; Collateral Murder, a chilling exposure of atrocity in Baghdad), was decided.  Kept in the excruciating, spiritually crushing conditions of Belmarsh Prison in London for over five years, Julian Assange was convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917 in June 2024, the victim of a relic dusted and burnished for deployment against the Fourth Estate.  Assange’s conviction on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information has paved a grim road for future prosecutions against the press, a pathway previously not taken for its dangers.

With this nasty legacy, recent threats by Trump against journalists who published and discussed the findings of a leaked preliminary........

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