ArcaMax

But the Obama administration pulled back in his second term after Holder held meetings with press freedom organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I'm a board member.

Holder assured us at the time that he had no intention to lock up journalists. The Trump administration appears to be leaning in the other direction in the Assange case. "The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy," John Demers, the head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, told reporters when he announced the indictment May 23. "But Julian Assange is no journalist. This is made plain by the totality of his conduct as alleged in the indictment."

But who is to decide these days who's a journalist and who isn't? Demers, like many others, judges Assange's "conduct" to be unbecoming of a good journalist. It may not be his intention, but do we want government officials to tell us who is and isn't a journalist, as they do in countries that license journalists?

Having participated in numerous discussions on this topic since the rise of the internet age in the 1990s, I hear the question of who's a journalist in the same way that a Supreme Court justice defined obscenity: I know it when I see it. I see Assange as a journalist, although an often disturbingly and even dangerously freewheeling example of the breed.

If the Trump administration continues its pursuit of the Australia-born Assange under a law intended to capture and punish spies, it could ultimately set a dangerous precedent to be settled by the Supreme Court, where the outcome would be unpredictable. And prosecutors similarly should be concerned about pitting press freedom against government accountability in a bruising constitutional battle.

Assange may fall way short of being a model journalist, but pursuing him as a spy only makes bad matters worse.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

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