Julian Assange is reportedly on his way to freedom after agreeing to plead guilty to a felony under the Espionage Act. Maybe a sentence of time served is enough, given his five years in British prison and his seven years holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted “publisher.”

Julian Assange is reportedly on his way to freedom after agreeing to plead guilty to a felony under the Espionage Act. Maybe a sentence of time served is enough, given his five years in British prison and his seven years holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted “publisher.”

Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo once described WikiLeaks as “a nonstate hostile intelligence service,” and the label fits. When the U.S. indicted Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act in 2019, Assistant Attorney General John Demers cited the totality of his conduct, soliciting and dumping online classified information that could put the lives of American allies in jeopardy: “No responsible actor—journalist or otherwise—would purposely publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in war zones.”

A year later, in unveiling a superseding indictment alleging a broader conspiracy on computer intrusion, the Justice Department said Mr. Assange “communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack.”

Amid the 2016 election, WikiLeaks published embarrassing internal emails from Democratic power brokers.