Assertions of an indictment must be based on evidence or things the prosecutor has reason to believe the evidence will prove. In the numbered paragraphs where the indictment refers to specific events with quoted statements, that means there are documents that support those allegations.
I'd draw your attention to paragraph 4-6, where Assange recruited hackers to collect a "most wanted" list of confidential material and explained how he had exploited a vulnerability in the Congressional Research Service to get copies of draft reports. Also paragraphs 19-22, where communications between Assange and Manning indicate that Assange was trying to help Manning log into the system with a different login than her own, by getting a password from a hash. Whether or not he actually succeeded, if he actually attempted to crack the password, that would be an illegal conspiracy. (Conspiracy doesn't require being successful--it's enough to take the first step towards an illegal goal, in this case logging into the DOD network using someone else's account.)
Rather than go over these claims point by point, I'd direct your attention to the case of Katherine Gun in the UK (admittedly a different legal system).
Gun was a GCHQ agent (a UK citizen that agreed to the restrictions that come with being a government intelligence analyst) that leaked evidence of the US plan to rig the UN vote around the Iraq War. She got off because the crown declined to prosecute because her defense strategy was one of necessity, showing that the government knew what they were doing was illegal and that it would imminently result in the deaths of innocents.
"Some of the information that would have been revealed at her trial, in particular Lord Goldsmith’s “conflicting arguments” as to the legality of the invasion, did not fully emerge until the publication of the report of the Chilcot inquiry in 2016. In its absence, Tony Blair won another election in 2005. Gun is grimly amused to see his current return to the moral high ground over Brexit."
In Mr. Assange's case, he is neither a US citizen nor a sworn intelligence analyst. He did in fact reveal crimes that horrified the world. They are trying to get him for running some code on a computer to see what the criminals were saying. Those people were knocking over countries and killing innocent people (something that he was able to show live in the helicopter gunship video).
The US standard for this case compared to Kat Gun is mind blowingly authoritarian and criminalizes effective dissent.
Given that we can plainly see from the chat logs that the allegations in 19-22 are baseless, why is it reasonable to believe that the allegations in 4-6 are supported by evidence?
It seems just as likely to me that Assange was advocating for hackers to spend some of their time looking for documents he feels are in the public interest. I'm just speculating here, but isn't it likely that the congressional records system was not hacked but rather documents posted on it were simply difficult to find, and that if Assange could convince hackers to spend their time researching this then more information could be reported to the public?
Given how badly the prosecution has outright lied and also twisted facts to fit its narrative in this case, and how it has abused process and procedure, why should we give it any benefit of the doubt? Who says this indictment is based on evidence? It's not as if the prosecutor is going to be punished at all when he turns out to be lying.
I just watched the conference it is alluded to in paragraphs 4-6. Well, that does not look to me like 'recruiting'... (particularly not 'hackers', when he insists that hacking expertise is not really relevant) I also see that the documents in the "most wanted list" are documents that any investigative journalists would be interested in obtaining - i.e., the list is to trivial to be novel or original. I would say that Trump has uttered many more statements that could in the same vein be seen as "Conspiracy" and emboldening others to conspire.
Also, when reading paragraphs 19-22, it really looks to me that the supposedly criminal acts performed by Assange (attempted cracking of a password hash) was to protect the anonymity of the source - and that impression comes from the text of the indictment itself "Such a
measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of
unauthorized disclosures of classified information."
There is a comical piece within the indictment that HN readers will enjoy:
"Manning did not have-administrative-level privileges, and used special software, namely a Linux operating
system, to access the computer file"
