Publication of secret government documents is absolutely legal. 1st amendment protects all publishers from the New York Times to this fellow. Espionage is an ambiguous joke that died at the Ellsburg trial. It is totally over. Move on.
These aren’t top secret documents. They are embassy cables on a much lower level of classification. Documents like these are opportunistic quoted and leaked all the time by the favored elites in the MSM and “public notables” who have served, and are serving, in government. The only difference is that Assange is making these documents, such as those further implicating the federal government in climategate, to the taxpayers who funded them on a much less selective scale. In this, he is performing a great service.
WRONG.... you are uninformed.
The legal questions that were handled during the Ellsberg/Pentagon papers cases were
(1) about “prior restraint” — i.e., whether the govt could prohibit publication of classified materials beforehand (as compared with prosecutions after the fact).... the SCOTUS said that prior restraint would require a very high standard of imminent harm which (in their lofty judicial opinions) was not met in the “Pentagon Papers” case.... in fact the SCOTUS allowed prosecution of Ellsberg and Russo to proceed under the Espionage Act of 1917.
(2) the govt then botched the legally permissible prosecution of Ellsberg and Russo with illegal activities such as wiretaps, breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. THAT is what got the Ellsberg case thrown out, govt misconduct.
Certainly the bar is high for prosecutions of “espionage” and the MSM has been given (in my humble opinion) too much latitude and discretion, but there is no legal precedent barring prosecutions of illegal releases of classified materials as espionage.
Anyway, Assange and Wikileaks are not themselves “media” entities by any reasonable standard — the govt would hesitate to prosecute media outlets even after the fact, given the climate of the past 40 years, but Assange may have a steep road to convince anyone that hackers and transmitters of stolen documents should themselves be treated as “press”....