25 Jan US Can’t Tie Assange to Manning
An important update from NBC News:
U.S. military officials tell NBC News that investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between a jailed army private suspected with leaking secret documents and Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.
This obviously undermines the Obama administration’s efforts to prosecute Assange for conspiracy — itself a terrible idea, as Jack Goldsmith has explained at Lawfare.
I thought the whole way WikiLeaks handles any material was essentially drop boxes/contacts, making it unlikely any core members of WikiLeaks would have been the direct recipient to begin with.