Defense Lawyer Barry Pollack On the Questions Left Unanswered After Julian Assange’s Plea Deal
It’s hard to imagine a more eventful month for a Washington, D.C. white-collar litigator than the June that Barry Pollack of Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler just had.
On June 12, in a trial that pushed off just after Memorial Day, jurors in D.C. Superior Court found Pollack’s client—fellow D.C. defense lawyer Jonathan Jeffress—not guilty of sexual assault. The case, where another attorney accused Jeffress of choking and assaulting her in his parked vehicle in 2022, saw both lawyers testify in a trial that captured the attention of the D.C. legal community.
Then last week, after a whirlwind trip around the globe, Pollack saw the culmination of more than a decade of work for longtime client, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in a case that’s drawn international attention. Pollack was alongside Assange in U.S. District Court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, as his client pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act and was released on time previously served in custody in the United Kingdom.
“Crazy last month. No question about it,” said Pollack, when we caught up with him yesterday. Pollack moved his practice focusing on representing individual defendants from Miller & Chevalier to litigation boutique Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber in 2018. Then after Robbins Russell merged with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel in 2022, he moved to Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler last year. Pollack said that conflicts that come with practicing in a large firm make his practice better suited for a boutique and his recent stretch of activity shows just how broad his criminal practice can be.
“I've always had the good fortune in the years that I've been practicing to have a varied criminal practice that runs the gamut of criminal investigations and criminal prosecutions,” Pollack said. So having a sexual assault case running alongside a federal Espionage Act case, was “in some ways typical,” he said.
What was atypical then of the recent stretch?
“To have two cases of that magnitude that active simultaneously,” Pollack said.
Pollack said that the complex plea negotiations in Assange’s case came to a head simultaneously with the Jeffress trial. He said he found himself on breaks during the trial sneaking off into a witness room to speak with either Assange or the Department of Justice.
“To be in the middle of that trial and also trying to negotiate a resolution to a case that had international implications and a lot of moving parts was a real challenge,” he said.
He said even though he was working toward Assange’s plea agreement during the Jeffress trial, Pollack anticipated there would be a little bit more time than there was between the trial’s end and the resolution of the Assange matter. He was actually in Denver for a white-collar conference sponsored by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, expecting he’d have time to get back to Washington, D.C. when he had to change plans to travel for Assange’s sentencing hearing.
Pollack flew directly from Denver to London late last month where he met Assange at the airport as his client was released from U.K. custody. Pollack and Jennifer Robinson, one of Assange’s other lawyers, accompanied their client alongside the Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. and other officials on a jet chartered by Assange’s home government. Although he was transferred to the airport in the middle of the night for security reasons, Assange and company didn’t fly out until the following evening. The trip also included a seven-hour layover in Bangkok timed to try to minimize the time on the ground in U.S. territory. Assange and company got back on the plane to fly to Canberra after the hearing before Chief U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona in Saipan where he was sentenced to time served.
“For me, it was quite an odyssey,” Pollack said. “When you're on a private plane, chartered by the Australian government, you can land at an Australian Air Force Base. Once you're back to being a private citizen, there are no international flights from Canberra,” he said, noting he flew back to Sydney and caught a commercial flight back home.
As far as the experience on the ground in the Northern Mariana Islands, the docket number assigned to Assange’s case—1:24−cr−00014—says a lot about the volume of activity the federal courthouse on the Pacific island typically sees. But Pollack said everything on the ground there was “remarkably easy,” and much like any experience he’d have in federal courts outside his home turf in D.C. He found local counsel Richard Miller, who sponsored his pro hac vice status. “So here you might be 6,000 miles from home, but it's the same Rules of Criminal Procedure,” Pollack said. “In some ways, the court in the Northern Mariana Islands was more familiar to me than D.C. Superior Court.”
As to the negotiated deal that brought the Assange matter to a close, Pollack said that his client wasn’t willing to do any more time in prison or to step foot on the U.S. mainland for fear of being arrested on some other charge or taken into custody by immigration authorities or some other agency. Pollack pointed out that the stipulated facts were quite narrow and based on things everyone agreed upon: Chelsea Manning leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks published that information. Pollack said there were no allegations of hacking or actitivites outside “standard journalistic activities” included.
Pollack said that while the two cases that kept him busy last month differed greatly, both raised important issues. He said that while the #MeToo movement has led to the “positive development” of alleged victims of sexual assault being taken more seriously, he said there’s also “a remarkable danger” in charging criminal cases based “almost exclusively on the word of the single witness.”
“These are very serious criminal allegations, and they need to be treated as very serious criminal allegations,” he said. “I don't think in any other realm would the government prosecute somebody based on the uncorroborated word of a single witness.”
Pollack said he thinks the Assange case presents “critical questions” about how democracies like the U.S. balance national security interests with a free press. “I think, unfortunately, those questions largely were left unresolved in Julian's case,” Pollack said. “I think the fact that his case was charged has a tremendous chilling effect on journalists, and particularly national security journalists, not just in this country, but all over the world.”
“I hope that the Department of Justice will not pursue journalists and publishers in the future,” he said. “But if it does, I think courts will have to wrestle with those questions in some other case.”
