A gaffe is when a politician recklessly tells the truth, Michael Kinsley once said.

Sir Kim Darroch is not a politician. He is a diplomat. And the truth he spoke was not a gaffe. It was a leak. But it functions like a gaffe, a truth blurted out in a context in which it wasn’t supposed to be uttered.

There is a lot to digest in the superseding indictment of Julian Assange, which charges the Wikileaks founder with 17 counts under the 1917 Espionage Act in connection with the Chelsea Manning disclosures. But three of those counts represent a profoundly troubling legal theory, one rarely contemplated and never successfully deployed. Under those counts, the Justice Department now seeks to punish the pure act of publication of newsworthy government secrets under the nation’s spying laws.

On Thursday, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia returned a superseding indictment charging WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17-counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The full document is below.

On Thursday, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed an indictment charging Daniel Everett Hale, a former intelligence analyst with the Air Force and National Security Agency and a former contractor at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, with five counts, including four under the Espionage Act, for providing classified information to a reporter.