WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being aggressively pursued by the Trump administration, despite Donald Trump's enthusiastic embrace during the 2016 election campaign.

Mr Trump famously declared "I love WikiLeaks" during the campaign as WikiLeaks began rolling out a series of leaks damaging to Hillary Clinton.

Mr Assange — an Australian citizen — is now charged with 17 counts of espionage and one count of hacking and faces a possible 175 years in jail if he is eventually extradited to the United States and found guilty.

The Obama administration also looked at the possibility of charging Mr Assange with espionage but eventually decided that a prosecution under the espionage act would be too problematic.

They concluded that if the US courts could charge WikiLeaks with publishing the classified information, they could also charge The New York Times.

The Trump administration obviously doesn't feel The New York Times problem is so acute.

'Be careful what you wish for'

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PJ Crowley is a former assistant secretary of state for public affairs who worked under Hillary Clinton. He describes the turn of events as a "delicious irony".

"There's an irony here that Julian Assange helped get Trump elected, yet now the President wants to prosecute him. It comes into the category of — be careful what you wish for," he told Four Corners.

The new administration's about-face was made plain just a few months after the Trump inauguration.

The then-CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, described WikiLeaks as a hostile intelligence service.

"It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is — a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia," he said.

Mr Assange's London-based lawyer Jennifer Robinson says the charges are not unexpected.

It is what they had been warning would happen ever since Mr Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

"This is terrifying language for the Trump administration to be using about an Australian citizen and a publisher," she said.

Is Assange a journalist?

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In its justification for charging Mr Assange, the US has made a clear distinction between the WikiLeaks founder and other journalists. Mr Assange, they maintain, is not a journalist.

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson says this question of whether Mr Assange is, or isn't, a journalist is "ridiculous".

"Telling the truth is a revolutionary act, they say these days. That's true," he said.

"But the question of whether he's a journalist is a very serious one for a very obvious reason, because those who say that he isn't a journalist are those who are in power who want to decide who is a journalist and thereby, basically, what is news and what is the truth."

Mr Assange and his WikiLeaks supporters don't agree with the mainstream media on much at all these days, but the one thing that does bring them to the same concluding point is the broader threat posed by a successful prosecution under the US Espionage Act of 1917.

'I deplore some of the things he's done'

Alan Rusbridger was the editor of The Guardian — one of the mainstream newspapers which collaborated with Mr Assange in 2010 on some of the biggest leaks, including the Afghan and Iraq war logs.

His assessment is unequivocal. He told Four Corners he doesn't like Mr Assange, but he is one of the many detractors who now say the charges need to be separated from the man.

There is, he says, a much bigger issue at stake.

"I don't like him. I deplore some of the things he's done. I don't agree with him about some of the ways in which he handled information," he said.

"But as charged, I think we have to stand with him because journalism isn't espionage. I mean, whatever Julian was up to, I don't think it was espionage."

Scott Shane, the reporter from The New York Times who also cooperated with WikiLeaks in the early days, agrees a successful prosecution would create a broader threat to freedom.

"I think once you choose to charge Assange with publishing information that the Government said was secret, it's not a huge step to charge The New York Times or a New York Times reporter or editor with publishing information the Government said should be secret," he said.

Hrafnsson agrees.

"A line has been drawn in the sand and either you are going to support Julian and fight this retribution and those indictments, or you basically step back and the lights will go out. That's how serious it is," he said.

Rusbridger says the precedent any successful prosecution of Mr Assange would set should worry everyone.

The implications for freedom of speech would be grave indeed, and not just in the United States.

"Julian's not American. He's Australian. So if we are saying that somebody who's not a citizen of a country that he's writing about is bound by their official secrecy laws and can be extradited to their country to spend time in their prisons, where does that leave us?" he asked.

Watch part two of Four Corners' investigation into Julian Assange at 8.30pm on ABC TV and iview.