Julian Assange hit with 18 federal charges in new indictment

“The superseding indictment alleges that Assange was complicit with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, in unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents related to the national defense,” the department said in a statement.

The department said Assange “engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning’s transmission of classified records to Assange” and “actively encouraged” Manning to hack into a military computer network. In 2010, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other sensitive material that Manning provided.

Manning was arrested in 2010 and convicted of espionage. She served seven years in prison before her sentence was commuted by President Obama shortly before he left office in 2010.

In March, she was sent to jail by a federal judge in Virginia for refusing to appear before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. She was briefly released when the grand jury’s term expired, but ordered back to jail when she refused to comply with a new subpoena. It’s unclear whether either either grand jury returned Thursday’s indictment.

Assange was until recently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had been granted asylum after jumping bail in 2012. He was arrested in April and ordered to serve a 50-week prison term in the U.K. Federal prosecutors in the U.S. unsealed an indictment of one conspiracy charge soon after, and Assange now faces possible extradition to the U.S.

Meanwhile, Swedish prosecutors have said they are reopening a rape case against Assange. They said they will seek his extradition after he has served his sentence in the U.K.

Clare Hymes contributed reporting.