Washington tried to prosecute Ellsberg and the New York Times, but the presiding judge declared a mistrial citing government misconduct so severe as to "offend the sense of justice."

Four decades later documents were leaked by Manning to Assange at Wikileaks who made them available to the New York Times and The Guardian, both of which published some of the documents, and the leaked information was published by Wikileaks. Assange was not the leaker but had the role of the New York Times in the 1970s. The documents exposed US war crimes and deceptions by Washington of allies.

In the intervening years between Ellsberg and Assange "the sense of justice" has departed the American and British governments and courts. The American and British media whose free speech rights are destroyed by the persecution of Assange actually helped the two corrupt governments to build a public case against Assange. Consequently, the written US Constitution and the unwritten British Constitution have been undermined as protections against vengeful arbitrary actions of governments. Assange has been incarcerated in one form or another for more than a decade in complete violation of habeas corpus. The British play a game of keeping Assange in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison, where he most certainly does not belong, while appeal after appeal plays out. It is a way of imprisoning Assange without convicting and sentencing him.

The broader issue is that Assange's persecution is achieving the criminalization of truth if told about government misdeeds. The inability to hold government accountable doesn't seem to bother anyone in media or government and very few among the population, most of whom were worked up into fury over "the traitor Assange." The same lawlessness and blind emotion characterize the Democrats' persecution of Donald Trump.