A month ago, when much of the political establishment was celebrating the arrest of Julian Assange and his indictment by the Trump administration, ostensibly for the crime of hacking, many prominent left-wing figures warned against this behavior. While Assange had seemingly been charged with committing a narrow crime, voices on the left warned that, given the nature of the Trump administration and the actual details of the indictment, there was a good chance it was simply a prelude to a more explicit assault on the First Amendment later on.

To what should be no one’s surprise, that’s exactly what has happened, with the Trump Justice Department indicting Assange last week on seventeen counts of violating the Espionage Act, the antiquated World War I-era law originally enacted to prevent military secrets from being passed on to an enemy power, but used predominantly by Obama and Trump to shut down unflattering leaks about their administrations. As the indictment makes clear, there’s no beating around the bush: Assange’s crime, in the eyes of the Justice Department, was soliciting and publishing information the US government deemed secret.

The Trump administration is now attempting to fulfill one of the national security state’s most cherished goals: to muzzle the free press on national security issues. America’s absolutist view of free speech has come under a lot of criticism in recent years, but it has left the US media uniquely powerful and privileged compared to its counterparts in other countries. In the UK, for instance, former prime minister Tony Blair blocked the publication of a five-page memo in 2005 that allegedly showed everyone’s new favorite president George W. Bush musing about bombing Al Jazeera studios around the Middle East, something Blair accomplished by threatening to prosecute news outlets under the country’s Official Secrets Act. The memo still hasn’t seen the light of day.