With the US investigating WikiLeaks over its role in Russia’s campaign to interfere with last year’s election, Comey said he did not believe the group or its founder Julian Assange merited protections US journalists have in publishing classified material.
“It crosses a line when it moves from being about trying to educate a public and instead becomes about intelligence porn, just pushing out information about sources and methods without regard to the First Amendment values that normally underlie press reporting,” Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Instead, by publishing leaked Democratic Party communications, CIA hacking secrets and other materials, WikiLeaks “simply becomes a conduit for the Russian intelligence services or some other adversary of the United States just to push out information to damage the United States.”
“We can all agree there is nothing that smells ‘journalist’ about some of this conduct,” he said.
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last month that the Justice Department has made it a priority to arrest Assange, who has been holed up at the Ecuadoran embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces a rape allegation that he denies.
Assange has said he expects the US to seek his extradition from Britain or Sweden if he leaves the Ecuadoran mission.
But any charges the United States might lodge against Assange could be challenged by his claims that WikiLeaks has been publishing stolen, secret US materials as a legitimate media group, and that US journalists are mostly protected from prosecution when they publish secrets.
Comey, who would not confirm any investigation of WikiLeaks, rejected that claim.
“In my view, a huge portion of WikiLeaks’s activities has nothing to do with legitimate newsgathering, informing the public, commenting on important public controversies,” he said.
Instead, the group “is simply about releasing classified information to damage the United States of America.”