Julian Assange Got What He Deserved – The Atlantic

James Ball: You dont have to like Julian Assange to defend him

According to Interior Minister Mara Paula Romo, this evidently exceeded redecorating the embassy with excrementalas, we still dont know whether it was Assanges or someone elsesrefusing to bathe, and welcoming all manner of international riffraff to visit him. It also involved interfering in the internal political matters in Ecuador, as Romo told reporters in Quito. Assange and his organization, WikiLeaks, Romo said, have maintained ties to two Russian hackers living in Ecuador who worked with one of the countrys former foreign ministers, Ricardo Patio, to destabilize the Moreno administration.

We dont yet know whether Romos allegation is true (Patio denied it) or simply a pretext for booting a nuisance from state property. But Assanges ties to Russian hackers and Russian intelligence organs are now beyond dispute.

Special Counsel Robert Muellers indictment of 12 cyberoperatives for Russias Main Intelligence Directorate for the General Staff (GRU) suggests that Assange was, at best, an unwitting accomplice to the GRUs campaign to sway the U.S. presidential election in 2016, and allegedly even solicited the stolen Democratic correspondence from Russias military intelligence agency, which was masquerading as Guccifer 2.0. Assange repeatedly and viciously trafficked, on Twitter and on Fox News, in the thoroughly debunked claim that the correspondence might have been passed to him by the DNC staffer Seth Rich, who, Assange darkly suggested, was subsequently murdered by the Clintonistas as revenge for the presumed betrayal.

Mike Pompeo, then CIA director and, as an official in Donald Trumps Cabinet, an indirect beneficiary of Assanges meddling in American democracy, went so far as to describe WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. For those likening the outfit to legitimate news organizations, Id submit that this is a shade more severe a description, especially coming from Americas former spymaster, than anything Trump has ever grumbled about The New York Times or The Washington Post.

Russian diplomats had concocted a plot, as recently as late 2017, to exfiltrate Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy, according to The Guardian. Four separate sources said the Kremlin was willing to offer support for the planincluding the possibility of allowing Assange to travel to Russia and live there. One of them said that an unidentified Russian businessman served as an intermediary in these discussions. The plan was scuttled only because it was deemed too dangerous.

Read: The radical evolution of WikiLeaks

In 2015, Focus Ecuador reported that Assange had aroused suspicion among Ecuadors own intelligence service, SENAIN, which spied on him in the embassy in a years-long operation. In some instances, [Assange] requested that he be able to choose his own Security Service inside the embassy, even proposing the use of operators of Russian nationality, the Ecuadorian journal noted, adding that SENAIN looked on such a proposal with something less than unmixed delight.

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Julian Assange Got What He Deserved - The Atlantic