THE hypocrisy is breathtaking. But it looks as if the Trump administration really is going after WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, the self-styled transparency campaigner who runs it from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for five years evading extradition to Sweden to face a rape allegation.

As a candidate, Donald Trump said he loved WikiLeaks for helping his campaign by publishing embarrassing e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, hacked by the Russians. Now he is in the White House, he views leaks less indulgently. On April 20th the attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, declared that the arrest of Mr Assange had become “a priority”. He added: “We are going to step up our efforts, and are already stepping up our efforts, on all leaks.” The Department of Justice is said to be preparing charges against Mr Assange.

In a speech made a few days before Mr Sessions’s announcement, the director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, excoriated WikiLeaks as “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia”. Mr Pompeo’s wrath had been incurred after the release by Mr Assange’s outfit of information about some of the CIA’s surveillance tools. Mr Pompeo, like his boss, had previously been a WikiLeaks fan, regularly tweeting its revelations last summer to attack Hillary Clinton.

Even if Mr Pompeo’s designation of WikiLeaks is accurate—and Susan Hennessey, managing editor of the Lawfare blog, thinks it may be—it may not provide a path to prosecution. But Ms Hennessey says an indictment might be possible under the Espionage Act, or laws governing theft of government property and computer abuse.

Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst jailed for providing WikiLeaks with a huge dump of classified material in 2010, was indicted under all three laws, though her sentence was commuted by Barack Obama before he left office. It appears that Mr Assange may have both incited Mr Manning (as he then was) to commit his crimes, and helped to facilitate them. If so, says Ms Hennessey, it might be fairly easy in purely legal terms to bring a conspiracy charge against Mr Assange.

This raises the question of why the Obama administration, not known for its tolerance of leaks, decided to stay its hand when it came to Mr Assange. The reason was the difficulty of distinguishing WikiLeaks’ activities from investigative journalism, which is protected by the bit of the First Amendment covering freedom of the press. Mr Obama was far from convinced that WikiLeaks and Mr Assange did merit such protection, but was troubled about where a prosecution might go politically.

Mr Trump’s intense hostility towards the “mainstream media”, for what he perceives as its bias against him, means that he is unlikely to feel any such compunction. The overlap between what WikiLeaks and traditional media organisations do has also become increasingly blurred. News outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have introduced SecureDrop, which describes itself as “an open-source whistleblower submission system that media organisations can use to securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources.”

Given that both newspapers published the best bits of the material WikiLeaks ran from the DNC hack, it must be assumed that if Russian intelligence agents had opted to provide it to them via SecureDrop, they would happily have used it. They know that if they do not publish such material, there are plenty of rivals who will.

Ms Hennessey argues that there is still a vital difference between WikiLeaks and, say, the New York Times. The Times edits and checks; its motives are different; it is not linked to hostile intelligence agencies. Such distinctions may not trouble Mr Sessions but, as Mr Trump has found, the courts do not always do his bidding.