U.S. charges WikiLeaks founder Assange with hacking conspiracy

According to REUTERS Assange was arrested by British police in London and carried out of Ecuador’s embassy there, faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison on the American charges, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement. His London arrest paved the way for his possible extradition to the United States.

WATCH: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrested by police in London almost 7 years after he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy. – @NBCNews #bonanaija pic.twitter.com/sAfDiosETQ

— bonanaija.com (@BonaNaija) April 11, 2019

Assange’s indictment arose from a long-running criminal investigation dating back to the administration of former President Barack Obama. It was triggered in part by the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of U.S. military reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and American diplomatic communications.

The Justice Department said Assange, 47, was arrested under an extradition treaty between the United States and Britain and charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.

The indictment said that Assange in March 2010 engaged in a conspiracy to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications.

Representatives for Manning had no immediate comment on the indictment.

The Justice Department said Manning had access to the computers as an intelligence analyst and was using them to download classified records to transmit to WikiLeaks. Cracking the password would have enabled Manning to log on to the computers under a username other than her own, making it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the illegal disclosures, the department said.

Manning was jailed on March 8 after being held in contempt by a judge in Virginia for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in what is widely believed to be related to the Assange investigation.

Manning was convicted by court-martial in 2013 of espionage and other offenses for furnishing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks while she was an intelligence analyst in Iraq. Obama commuted the final 28 years of Manning’s 35-year sentence.

The Obama administration decided not to prosecute WikiLeaks and Assange on the grounds that the work of the website was too similar to journalistic activities protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.