Koh Letter to Wikileaks [Updated]

Late Saturday night the State Department released a strongly worded letter from Legal Advisor Harold Koh to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his attorney concerning the apparently imminent publication of 250,000 secret State Department documents.  The letter says that the release will harm lives, military operations, and diplomatic cooperation.  It asks Assange to stop publication of the materials and destroy all records of them in the Wikileaks database.  It is very doubtful that Wikileaks will do any such thing, which makes one wonder about the point and timing of the letter.  Perhaps the letter was sent in anticipation of legal proceedings against Assange, either in the United States or in cooperation with other counties.  Or perhaps it has something to do with what Koh interestingly describes as U.S. government “conversations with representatives from The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Speigel” about the documents. UPDATE: A reader points out that Koh’s letter responds to a letter from Wikileaks that claims to seek State Department assistance – after Wikileaks has conveyed the classified documents to the media – in trying to mitigate the harms of publication of the documents to individuals, and that Wikileaks had sent a similar letter in connection with an earlier leak, and had received a similar letter in response from DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson.  This suggests that my musings above are wrong.