Thread by @aaronjmate

The charge against Assange is that he "agreed to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Dept. of Defense computers." It looks like their alleged "password-cracking agreement" wasn't even successful. Assange faces 5 years in prison over it.
(justice.gov/usao-edva/pres…)

Due to the use of the conditional tense & the fact that prosecutors don't claim the password was cracked, it looks like this alleged "password-cracking agreement" between Assange & Manning -- the crime Assange is accused of -- wasn't even successful. (justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/w…)

So after years of trying to find a way to get Assange, this is what Trump's DOJ goes with: an alleged -- & apparently unsuccessful -- attempt to crack a password *after* "Manning had already provided Wikileaks with hundreds of thousands of classified records."

If Assange is only being charged for allegedly trying to crack a password, is that a tacit recognition that they can't actually charge him for receiving those classified records that "Manning had already provided" to him?

What's going on here looks pretty obvious to me: DOJ knew they couldn't get Assange on receiving or publishing the material that "Manning had already provided," so they went after him on a "password-cracking agreement" that looks like it wasn't even successful.

Per @Isikoff, Assange attorney Barry Pollack says "the factual allegations...boil down to encouraging a source to provide him information & taking efforts to protect the identify of that source." I think that's a fair reading of the indictment:

Note also the lone example of Assange encouraging Manning: "curious eyes never run dry in my experience." By then writing "Following this..." is the DOJ trying to suggest Assange spurred Manning to "download the U.S. Dept. of State cables that Wikileaks later released publicly"?