President Trumps former campaign chairman Paul Manafort reportedly held secret meetings with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Veuer's Sam Berman has the full story. Buzz60

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort departs the federal court house after a status hearing in Washington, DC, earlier this year.(Photo: Shawn Thew, EPA-EFE)

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assangeinside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the Guardian reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

The British publication said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and then around the time he joined the campaign.

The Guardian said, according to a "well-placed source," a casually dressed Manafort met with Assange for about 40 minutes around March 2016.Ecuadorian sources said the visit would normally have been logged, but they told the Guardian the 2016visit was not.The paper said it was "unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed."

Manafort, 69, told the newspaper the story is "100 percent false."

In a separate statement, Manafort, now in jail awaiting sentencing on two financial fraud convictions,went on to characterize the article as "deliberately libelous."

"I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him," Manafort said in a statement distributed by his spokesman."I have never been contacted by anyone connected to Wikileaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or Wikileaks on any matter."

"We are considering all legal options against the Guardian who proceeded with this story even after being notified by my representatives that it was false, he said.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has made contacts between Assange and people connected to President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign a focus of his investigation into Russian election meddling. WikiLeaks published emails damaging to the Democratic National Committee and Trump's opponent Hillary Clinton ahead of the election emails that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded were stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

Mueller has searched for evidence that people in Trump's orbit had advance knowledge of the emails as part of his inquiry into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin's efforts to sway the election.

Russia probe: House Democrats aim to unmask Trump Jr.s blocked call

Manafort's reported contact with Assange could shed new light on Mueller's efforts to tie the campaign to Assange, which so far have focused on former Trump adviser Roger Stone and conservative conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.

'I did not intentionally lie': Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi rejects Mueller deal

Manafort is currently awaiting sentencing after being convicted in August on eight countsof financial fraud in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. He also entereda separate guilty plea in the District of Columbia as part of deal with the government in which he agreed to cooperate with Mueller's team.

But on Monday, the special counsel's office said Manafort lied repeatedly to the FBI after agreeing to cooperate and recommendedthat he get no credit to reduce his prison sentence. He faces the prospect of perhaps a decade in prison in the D.C. case alone.

Assange has taken refuge in Ecuador's embassy in London since 2010, largely out of concern the U.S. would seek his extradition on charges related to WikiLeaks' publication of confidential State Department cables.

Lastweek, prosecutors inadvertentlydisclosedthat "Assange has been charged" in an unrelated case, although it was not revealed what the charges were, nor when and where the alleged crime occurred. A judge is currently reviewing journalists' request to unseal the charges.

More: No decision yet on unsealing possible charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

"If true, the revelation that Paul Manafort repeatedly met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London raises serious new questions about Mr. Manaforts relationship with WikiLeaks," Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said in a statement Tuesday.

"Given that Secretary Pompeo met with Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Valencia yesterday morning, the State Department and the intelligence community must immediately brief the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Mr. Manaforts interaction with Mr. Assange, as well as the Ecuadoran governments role in any meetings," Menedez said. "Similarly, as evidence continues to mount about WikiLeaks interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Ecuadors government must reevaluate the risks of harboring an individual who has damaged democratic processes around the world."

More: Ex-Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos begins two-week prison sentence

Contributing: Kevin Johnson

Autoplay

Show Thumbnails

Show Captions

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/27/manafort-meetings-assange/2125595002/

Read this article:
Paul Manafort, Julian Assange held secret meetings ...

The United States is reportedly closing in on prosecuting Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has spent over six years holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London avoiding extradition.

But while the ethics of WikiLeaks operations and its motives are contested, the organization has revealed undeniably newsworthy information that authorities sought to keep from the public. These are some of the biggest stories that came from WikiLeaks.

The U.S. Military Killed Civilians And A Reuters Cameraman In Iraq

In 2010, a video shot on board an American helicopter operating in Iraq documented the U.S. killing a 22-year-old Reuters cameraman and his driver in an air attack in Baghdad. WikiLeaks released the footage of the strike, which killed at least a dozen people, in a 38-minute video called Collateral Murder. It shows the graphic killings along with audio of the aircrew laughing and referring to those killed as dead bastards. The U.S. militaryinitially claimedthe Reuters crew was killed in a firefight with insurgents, an explanation that the video contradicted.

The video and more than 700,000 leaked documents sparked a major scandal and outcry from human rights groups. It also led to the arrest of Chelsea Manning, a U.S. intelligence officer who had illegally downloaded the documents from a military base before providing the information to WikiLeaks.

Corruption, Killings And Abuse In Iraq And Afghanistan

After WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, it continued with other document dumps from the Manning files. The documents revealed extensive corruption and human rights abuses in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as an apparent lack of action from U.S. officials to investigate or prevent such abuses. Some of the files detailed that U.S. forces knew of Iraqi police abuse, including torture and rape, but often did nothing to punish those acts. Another release concerned U.S. Marines killing or wounding dozens of unarmed civilians near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, while they fled from an attack.

The U.S. Spied On Its Allies And Tapped Foreign Government Phone Calls

A 2015 release revealed the U.S. had been spying on a number of allies, using the National Security Agency to intercept the phone calls of top foreign officials, businesses and leaders. The revelations caused an international political uproar, forcing President Barack Obama to issue apologies to Germany, France, Brazil and Japan all of which were targeted in the spying. In the case of Germany, WikiLeaks alleged the files showed the NSA had tapped the German chancellery going back decades.

Intelligence Reports On Guantanamo Bay Prisoners

Hundreds of reports on operations and inmates at Guantanamo Bay gave insight into operations at the secretive U.S. detention camp and the status of its prisoners. The 2011 release revealedthat dozens of the inmates struggled with depression and mental illness, that the United States was obtaining information through torture, and that some prisoners were detained on slim evidence or because of mistaken identity. The files also showed that 172 of the prisoners there had been deemed high-risk prisoners who would pose a threat to the U.S. if released.

Australias Internet Blacklist

In one of its early leaks from 2009, WikiLeaks published a list of nearly 2,400 web pages that the Australian government was allegedly planning to permanently block access to in the country. The list, which the Australian government disputed, included sites that involved child pornography and extreme violence but also included several other pages that included YouTube videos, WikiLeaks entries and poker sites. The release intensified a public debate over internet censorship, while child rights advocates condemned WikiLeaks for publicizing the names of sites that abuse children.

Kenyas Extrajudicial Killings

WikiLeaks published a suppressed report from Kenyas National Commission on Human Rights in 2008 that contained allegations of extrajudicial police killings in the country. The publication received widespread support from human rights groups, and Amnesty International gave WikiLeaks a media award in 2009 as a result.

The CIA Targeted Smartphones And Computers

Not to be confused with Edward Snowdens leak of documents detailing NSA surveillance measures, WikiLeaks released its own files in 2017 purporting to show the CIAs extensive hacking capabilities. The files alleged the CIA can target individual computers and smartphones with malware that can allow the agency to view the contents of a device. In one especially creepy document, the CIA detailed how it could attack a Samsung smart television so that the device appeared to be in off mode when it was, in fact, turned on and recording conversations around it.

The Inner Workings Of Sony Pictures

A cyber attack exposed thousands of internal documents and emails from Sony Pictures in 2014 as part of a bizarre incident U.S. officials believed was linked to North Korea taking offense at a Seth Rogen comedy that mocked its leader Kim Jong Un. While WikiLeaks wasnt connected to the initial release of the documents, the site later collected and released all of the hacked files in a searchable database that gave an in-depth look at conversations between Hollywoods top executives.

The Hillary Clinton Emails

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails from Hillary Clintons campaign chief, John Podesta, which Russian hackers had stolen from his Gmail account. The emails were an embarrassing look into Clintons private circle and offered her critics an array of easy targets to attack her on, including an email that showed that CNN contributor and later Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile hadleaked a question from a town hall-style Democratic primary debate to Clinton in advance.

The WikiLeaks emails damaged Clinton and her campaign, while the question of who knew about the documents ahead of their release and how the leak relates to Russias interference in the U.S. election is a major focus of special counsel Robert Muellers ongoing investigation. Mueller has questioned many associates of political consultant Roger Stone, who worked for President Donald Trumps campaign, to determine whether Stone or his associates were conduits between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.

More:
Julian Assange Faces Federal Charges. But Let's Not Forget What We've ...

The Justice Department is about to indict Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. Thats according to various reports.

The Democrats are cheering because surely Assange will reveal some deep secrets about Russians and the last presidential election.

In the first place, the media of the world should be coming to Assanges defense. He was, after all, breaking news just like the press does.

But theres something else. Assange hinted prior to the election that the Russians werent the source of all the Democratic Party e-mails he published. What if the leak was from inside the Democratic Party itself?

What if Assanges testimony, when it is forced, shows that the leaker was a disgruntled anti-Hillary Clinton Democrat who happened to be mysteriously murdered in a case that hasnt yet been solved?

That, my friends, is one of the shockers that could hit the press and the financial markets in the months ahead. The Democrats should be careful what they wish for when it comes to Assange.

Bloomberg News reported this week that the Justice Department is looking into whether traders had been using another cryptocurrency to manipulate the price of bitcoin, which has been crashing in value of late.

Let me repeat this. Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies are worthless. All they are is a confidence game a scam. And when the prices drop, there is nothing anyone can do to keep the confidence and the price up except manipulate these phony currencies.

Worthless by the end of 2019: Thats my prediction.

Go here to read the rest:
Julian Assange's indictment may cause trouble for Democrats

When the history of American foreign policy and the misery Washington has caused throughout its tenure as world policeman is written, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks will have many entries in the footnotes, not to mention the index. The publication of Chelsea Mannings treasure trove of US diplomatic history thousands of cables describing the interactions of US decision-makers with world leaders through the decades alone gives WikiLeaks the title of most important journalistic outlet of the new millennium. And that is just the crown jewel in a diadem of journalistic triumphs stinging exposures of the War Party and their corrupt enablers no other outlet can hope to match. It is therefore with very little surprise that one reads the news that the Justice Department has secretly indicted Assange and please pay special attention to how that has been revealed.

The New York Times had the scoop: in an unrelated case, the geniuses over at the Justice Department had mistakenly copied phrases from the secret indictment in publicly available court documents.

Really? That doesnt seem very credible, and the specific document the Times refers to throws the whole matter into serious question: the mention of Assange is simply inserted into text that is about someone who is alleged to have coerced a child, and asks for the documents in the case to be sealed. The insertion reads:

Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.

How is this relevant to the case of the child-coercer? Is he really all that sophisticated? As sophisticated, say, as the founder of WikiLeaks?

And, more importantly, how did this weird mistake come to the attention of the New York Times and other media outlets? Who was trawling through months-old court documents about an obscure case and to what purpose?

The Times has been one of the chief conduits for the Deep States leaks designed to undermine Trump on every front, and this most recent scoop is no different. This is the way the national security Establishment announces its intention to destroy its two principal enemies: not just Assange but also the President, who has, after all, declared I love WikiLeaks!

Thats why liberals of the anti-Trump persuasion are already composing polemics justifying the prosecution of Assange for publishing government secrets think of campaign finance laws, they babble, dont they limit speech as well? And wasnt WikiLeaks part and parcel of the Trump campaign, a weapon in the Orange Monsters hands? The Louise Mensch crowd, i.e. the Democratic party and its crazed base are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of Russo-Trumpian collusion being exposed at Assanges trial.

Thats why the pathetically weak take of the anti-Trump but pro-Assange left on the whole affair is so absurd: Glenn Greenwald is desperate to blame the Evil Trump for Assanges indictment: throughout his Intercept piece he refers to the Trump DOJ and the most extreme faction of the Trump administration as the culprits behind the move, but this ignores the outright warfare that the DOJ filled with Clintonite holdovers has engaged in with this administration since before Trump even took office.

Furthermore, we dont know the provenance of the Assange indictment: when was it composed, and by whom? The likelihood is that the DOJ is simply editing the previous draft indictments which were undoubtedly written during the Obama administration. The difference is that the Obama crowd concluded theyd lose in court: the authors of the current indictment seem more optimistic.

We dont even know what Assange is being charged with: speculation is that violation of the Espionage Act is at the top of a long list.

Espionage on whose behalf? The Times reports that the CIAs renewed pursuit of Assange began when Mike Pompeo took the helm and probed into the alleged collusion between WikiLeaks and the Russians. So is the Trump administration going to prosecute Assange for colluding with Vladimir Putin to get Donald Trump into the White House? This is what were asked to believe not only by the Times, but also by Greenwald and the NeverTrump left: Trump and his team are lemmings, and are running rapidly toward those cliffs.

I dont believe it for a minute. There is more to this story than meets the incurious eye not that anyone seems interested in following up on the several clues embedded therein. A major clue is the timing: why is this information coming out now just at the moment when the Mueller investigation is reportedly heating up, and a Democrat-controlled House is gearing up for renewed probes into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the ever-present and apparently omnipotent Russians, who managed to tip a presidential election with a few Facebook ads?

The left will never forgive Assange for supposedly being the decisive factor in Hillary Clintons humiliating defeat. The neoconservative Right which is even more vehemently anti-Trump than the leftist elements of the NeverTrump cult licks its chops at the prospect of his coming martyrdom. His biggest defenders are on the Trumpian Right: Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and, of course, the President of the United States.

On the left, Assanges defenders consist of two people that I know of: Greenwald and the independent journalist Michael Tracey. (Oh yeah, and Noam Chomsky.)

And doesnt that say all that needs to be said?

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

Ive written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].View all posts by Justin Raimondo

More:
Pursuing Julian Assange and the President - Antiwar.com ...

17 November 2018

A court document dated August 22 was made public Thursday night which confirms that the US Department of Justice is in possession of sealed criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange. As soon as he is forced out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he sought political asylum in 2012 and is now being denied any right to communicate with the outside world by the Ecuadorian government, a warrant will be issued for his extradition to the United States.

The court document, which related to a case that had no remote connection to Assange, contained two paragraphs that named him. It stated that the sealing of an indictment was necessary because no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged. It requested that the charges remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.

The Department of Justice would only tell media that Assange was named in the document in error. It did not deny that charges against him have been filed and sealed. Sources told the Washington Post that they have definitely been laid.

Regardless of how the existence of charges has been revealed, it confirms all the warnings that Assange and his legal and political defenders have made since Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant against him, in November 2010, to purportedly answer questions over allegations he had committed sexual offences.

The Swedish allegations were fabricated against Assange under conditions in which WikiLeaks had published explosive leaks that exposed US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq and imperialist intrigues around the world.

The allegations had two purposes. Firstly, they were intended to malign Assange as an individual and undermine public support for WikiLeaks. Secondly, they were to be used to force him to Sweden from where he would have been extradited on to the US to face espionage charges.

Assanges decision to seek political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy is the only reason he has avoided a lengthy prison term or potentially even a death sentence.

The court document verifies what has been obvious since Swedish prosecutors finally dropped their groundless case against Assange in May 2017, without ever laying any charges against him. The only other criminal complaint against Assange is the British charge that he breached bail conditions when, out of necessity, he sought asylum. The plan of the US state has been to wait until he can be imprisoned by British authorities and then issue its indictment against the journalist and publisher.

The fact that the existence of charges has now been made public may well be an indication that Ecuador has agreed to hand Assange over.

The court document does not reveal the nature of US charges. As well as espionage accusations relating to the 2010 leaks, it is also possible that Assange has been indicted for conspiracy.

In 2016, WikiLeaks published leaked emails that exposed how the Democratic National Committee sought to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The documents also provided evidence of Clintons sordid relations with Wall Street banks.

As part of the hysterical campaign in the US establishment to blame Clintons election defeat on Russian interference, the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller has impliedwithout a shred of credible evidencethat WikiLeaks received the leaks from Russian intelligence and published them to assist the election of Donald Trump.

In fact, Assange publicly compared the choice presented to American voters of Trump or Clinton as like choosing between gonorrhea or syphilis. In a statement issued on the eve of the 2016 election, Assange stressed that having received the Democratic Party leaksfrom a source he denied had any Russian connectionsWikiLeaks believed it was obligated to publish them.

Assange wrote: The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaksan organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself. Our organization defends the publics right to be informed.

WikiLeaks, Assange declared, remains committed to publishing information that informs the public, even if many, especially those in power, would prefer not to see it It must publish and be damned.

The relentless persecution of Assange has not only been aimed at preventing WikiLeaks from publishing the truth. It is part of an attempt by the ruling class to intimidate and silence all critical and independent journalists and media organisations, as well as would-be whistleblowers around the world.

The attempt to paint Assange as a criminal has been at the forefront of sweeping censorship and an assault on fundamental democratic rights under way around the world. The lurch towards dictatorial forms of rule is being driven by the terror of the capitalist oligarchs and their governments that a mass movement of the working class is developing internationally against ever widening social inequality and the growing danger that economic and strategic conflicts between the major powers will lead to war.

As Leon Trotsky noted in 1937, the true criminals hide under the cloak of the accusers.

The US state, however, under both the Obama and Trump administrations, has only been able to conduct and sustain its vendetta against Assange because of the shameless support it has received internationally.

The establishment media, particularly publications such as the Guardian and the New York Times, has completely aligned with the effort to destroy WikiLeaks and suppress all other independent publications.

Successive Australian Labor and conservative governments have refused to defend Assangean Australian citizen. The entire official Australian political and media establishment, including the Greens, parliamentary independents and the trade unions, has thrown Assange to the wolves. None gave support to the rally organised by the Socialist Equality Party and addressed by filmmaker John Pilger on June 17 this year, which demanded that the government use its legal and diplomatic powers to secure Assanges freedom and right to return to Australia.

In Britain, the role of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been particularly pernicious. Corbyn, who once mouthed support for WikiLeaks, has refused to publicly demand that the Tory government drop the bail charges against Assange, guarantee he will not be extradited to the US and allow him to leave both the Ecuadorian embassy and the United Kingdom if he chooses.

The Ecuadorian government, under its current president, Lenin Moreno, has turned on Assange in order to ingratiate itself with Washington. In March this year, it cut off his ability to communicate and has taken additional vindictive measures to pressure him to leave the embassy.

Most striking, however, has been the abandonment of Assange by virtually all the middle class pseudo-left organisations in the US, Australia, Britain and around the world. Flowing from their support for gender- and race-based identity politics and for the imperialist intrigues in Ukraine and Syria, which Assange opposed and exposed, they either maintain a complete silence on his persecution or have joined in slandering the WikiLeaks publisher as a rapist or stooge of Russia or Trumpeven as Trumps administration has stepped up the US effort to silence him.

The line-up of forces serves only to underscore that the defence of Assange, WikiLeaks and all democratic rights requires the independent political mobilisation of the international working class against the entire existing political establishment and the capitalist system it serves.

Every effort must be made to alert workers and youth to the immense implications of the persecution of Julian Assange and the necessity for the most wide-ranging campaign to demand his immediate and unconditional freedom.

James Cogan

Google is blocking the World Socialist Web Site from search results.

To fight this blacklisting:

See more here:
Defend Julian Assange against US charges! - World Socialist ...

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department inadvertently named Julian Assange in a court filing in an unrelated case that suggests prosecutors have prepared charges against the WikiLeaks founder under seal.

As CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti reports, Assange remains holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London -- in large part out of fear that if he leaves he'll be extradited to the U.S., and this latest revelation could be an indication that his fear is well founded.

Assange's name appears twice in an August court filing from a federal prosecutor in Virginia, who was attempting to keep sealed a separate case involving a man accused of coercing a minor for sex.

In one sentence, the prosecutor wrote that the charges and arrest warrant "would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter." In another sentence, the prosecutor said that "due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged."

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia, told CBS News on Friday that the court filing, "was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing." The Eastern District has been investigating Assange's actions.

Any charges against Assange could help illuminate whether Russia coordinated with the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election. It would also suggest that, after years of internal wrangling within the Justice Department, prosecutors have decided to take a more aggressive tact against the secret-sharing website.

The Washington Post reported late Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Assange had indeed been charged. CBS News has not been able to confirm that.

It was not immediately clear what charges Assange, who has been holed up for more than six years in the embassy, might face.

But recently ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year declared the arrest of Assange a priority. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating whether Trump campaign associates had advance knowledge of Democratic emails that were published by WikiLeaks in the weeks before the 2016 election and that U.S. authorities have said were hacked by Russia. Any arrest could represent a significant development for Mueller's investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the election.

Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange, told the AP earlier this week that he had no information about possible charges against Assange.

In a new statement, he said, "The news that criminal charges have apparently been filed against Mr. Assange is even more troubling than the haphazard manner in which that information has been revealed. The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take."

WikiLeaks condemned what it referred to as "public confirmation" of pending U.S. charges against its founder in a statement on Friday.

"U.S. authorities have consistently refused to confirm the existence of any such charges, while the U.K. government has been unwilling to confirm or deny that an extradition request for Mr. Assange has been received," the organization said. "Mr. Assange has consistently stated his desire to engage with any legal processes in the U.K., as long as there is a guarantee of no extradition to the U.S. where he could face life in prison, or worse."

The filing was discovered by Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, who posted it on Twitter hours after The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute Assange and said, "To be clear, seems Freudian, it's for a different completely unrelated case, every other page is not related to him, EDVA just appears to have Assange on the mind when filing motions to seal and used his name."

Assange, 47, has resided in the Ecuadorian Embassy in a bid to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he was wanted to sex crimes, or to the United States, whose government he has repeatedly humbled with mass disclosures of classified information.

The Australian ex-hacker was once a welcome guest at the Embassy, which takes up part of the ground floor of a stucco-fronted apartment in London's posh Knightsbridge neighborhood. But his relationship with his hosts has soured over the years amid reports of espionage, erratic behavior and diplomatic unease.

Any criminal charge is sure to further complicate the already tense relationship.

Ecuadorian officials say they have cut off the WikiLeaks founder's internet access and will restore it only if he agrees to stop interfering in the affairs of Ecuador's partners -- such as the United States and Spain. Officials have also imposed a series of other restrictions on Assange's activities and visitors and -- notably -- ordered him to clean up after his cat.

With shrinking options (an Ecuadorian lawsuit seeking to reverse the restrictions was recently turned down) WikiLeaks announced in September that former spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who has long served as one of Assange's lieutenants, would take over as editor-in-chief.

WikiLeaks has attracted U.S. attention since 2010, when it published thousands of military and State Department documents from Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning. In a Twitter post early Friday, WikiLeaks said the "US case against WikiLeaks started in 2010" and expanded to include other disclosures, including by contractor Edward Snowden.

"The prosecutor on the order is not from Mr. Mueller's team and WikiLeaks has never been contacted by anyone from his office," WikiLeaks said.

Link:
Julian Assange charges prepared in US, "error" in Eastern ...

The US government has filed sealed charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Washington Posts Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett confirmed Thursday.

The specifics of the charges arent yet known. The news only became public now due to a government slip-up: an unrelated legal filing contained references to sealing charges against Assange, apparently because of a cut-and-paste error. Seamus Hughes flagged the filing on Twitter, spurring the Post reporters to confirm the information.

Assange remains holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has resided for six years in an attempt to avoid extradition. But his relationship with his hosts has frayed, and there are some indications that he may lose their protection soon.

Over the past decade, WikiLeaks has posted a plethora of leaked material from the State Department, the US military, the CIA, and various corporations and emails from the DNC and John Podesta that were stolen by Russian government hackers.

So far, theres no indication that the Assange charges are part of special counsel Robert Muellers probe. (The errant government filing mentioning him was from another office, the US Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.)

And its not clear which of WikiLeaks document dumps, if any, the charges against Assange relate to, or what law hes been accused of breaking. Thats tremendously important because there have long been serious concerns about what prosecuting WikiLeaks founder for publishing stolen information would mean for freedom of the press.

Assange is an Australian hacktivist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, with the stated goal of publishing information the powerful were trying to keep secret. The group had its greatest successes in obtaining and posting US military, national security, and foreign policy documents, and Assange was a harsh critic of what he deemed the USs imperialist ambitions.

Starting in 2010, WikiLeaks published a video of an airstrike in Iraq that killed civilians, military documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and State Department cables in which diplomats gave candid assessments of foreign governments all provided by US Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning. The unprecedented leaks gained enormous attention and made Assange a sort of celebrity and a target, as top US officials like Attorney General Eric Holder publicly mused about how they could charge him.

So in June 2012, Assange, a citizen of Australia who had lived abroad for several years, showed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and asked for political asylum. His imminent danger was extradition to Sweden, where authorities were investigating a rape allegation against him. But Assanges pitch was that he truly needed asylum from the United States, because of WikiLeaks work. The Ecuadorian government granted his request, and hes been holed up inside the embassy ever since for more than six years now.

In that time, WikiLeaks has continued to post new material and grown more controversial. Assange roiled the 2016 presidential campaign by posting hacked emails from, first, the Democratic National Committee and then Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. (Mueller has since charged several Russian intelligence officers with carrying out these hacks.)

Was Assange simply bringing more transparency by publishing powerful peoples communications? Was he effectively just helping out the Russians and Donald Trump? Was he engaged in a project to weaken the US politically? Perhaps it was all of the above. (We believe it would be much better for GOP to win, Assange wrote privately in late 2015, according to messages obtained by the Intercept. Hillary Clinton, he continued, was a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.)

But Assanges leaks didnt stop once Trump was elected. In early 2017, WikiLeaks posted a new set of material about the CIAs hacking capabilities, in a leak referred to as Vault 7. The New York Times wrote that this appeared to be the largest leak of CIA documents in history, and a former CIA software engineer, Joshua Schulte, has been charged in connection with it.

Top US officials have explored charging Assange for many years, but no action ended up being taken during the Obama administration. Shortly after the Vault 7 leak in early 2017, though, CNN reported that charges against Assange had been prepared.

Then the discussion was revived this Thursday, when the Wall Street Journals Aruna Viswanatha and Ryan Dube reported that the Justice Department is preparing to prosecute Assange and is increasingly optimistic it will be able to get him into a US courtroom suggesting, perhaps, that Ecuador might withdraw their protection of him so he could be extradited.

But in a twist, the Journal piece spurred Seamus Hughes to point out on Twitter that there were odd, seemingly errant mentions of Assange in recent court filings for an unrelated case.

The filing, from an assistant US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in August, is about why a criminal complaint and arrest warrant against someone else should be sealed. But then it starts talking about why charges against Assange should be sealed:

Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.

The complaint, supporting affidavit, and arrest warrant, as well as this motion and the proposed order, would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.

The mistake seemed likely to have been due to cutting and pasting language from an earlier, similar document that was about Assange.

So Washington Post reporters Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett asked about what happened and were told by people familiar with the matter that, yes, Assange had in fact been charged under seal (and that the court filing disclosure was unintentional).

We dont know. And its really important.

The US government has already charged people whom theyve accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, like Manning and Schulte. But charging Assange or WikiLeaks solely for publishing such information is a more troubling thing to do, due to its implications for freedom of the press.

Never in the history of this country has a publisher been prosecuted for presenting truthful information to the public, the American Civil Liberties Unions Ben Wizner told CNN last year. Any prosecution of WikiLeaks for publishing government secrets would set a dangerous precedent that the Trump administration would surely use to target other news organizations.

Indeed, many journalists often publish important and newsworthy stories based on leaked classified information. This was one reason why the Obama Justice Department opted not to charge Assange they called it a New York Times problem, the Washington Posts Sari Horwitz reported in 2013.

If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britains Guardian newspaper, Horwitz wrote, describing the officials conclusions.

However, it is possible that prosecutors are alleging that Assanges conduct goes beyond simply receiving and publishing of stolen information the Lawfare team and Marcy Wheeler have each floated various other possibilities. Depending on what exactly the governments legal theory is, the implications for journalists could be enormous, or relatively minor.

We dont even know which of the leaks, if any, the charges are about. Its entirely possible that they pertain to the CIA hacking tool leaks (theres been a lot of action in the prosecution of accused leaker Joshua Schulte lately), rather than the DNC or Podesta emails. To get a better idea, well have to wait for the charges to be unsealed.

Read the original post:
Julian Assange charged under seal by the US Justice ...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged under seal, prosecutors inadvertently revealed in a recently unsealed court filing a development that could significantly advance the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and have major implications for those who publish government secrets.

The disclosure came in a filing in a case unrelated to Assange. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, wrote "due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged." Later, Dwyer wrote the charges would "need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested."

Dwyer is also assigned to the WikiLeaks case. People familiar with the matter said what Dwyer was disclosing was true, but unintentional.

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Virginia said, "The court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing."

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have long been investigating Assange, and in the Trump administration had begun taking a second look at whether to charge members of the WikiLeaks organization for the 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents which the anti-secrecy group published. Investigators also had explored whether WikiLeaks could face criminal liability for the more recent revelation of sensitive CIA cyber-tools.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller III has also exploring the publication by WikiLeaks of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Officials have alleged the emails were hacked by Russian spies and transferred to WikiLeaks.

Mueller has also been exploring, among other things, communications between the group and associates of President Donald Trump, including political operative Roger Stone and commentator and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.

In July, his office charged 12 Russian military spies with conspiring to hack DNC computers, steal the organization's data and publish the files in an effort to disrupt the election and referred in an indictment to WikiLeaks, described only as "Organization 1," as the platform the Russians used to release the stolen emails.

A spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment.

It was not immediately clear what charges Assange would face. In the past, prosecutors had contemplated pursuing a case involving conspiracy, theft of government property or violating the Espionage Act. But whether to charge the WikiLeaks founder was hardly a foregone conclusion. In the Obama administration, the Justice Department had concluded that pursuing Assange would be akin to prosecuting a news organization. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, though, had taken a more aggressive stance and vowed to crack down on all government leaks.

Barry Pollack, one of Assange's attorneys, said, "The only thing more irresponsible than charging a person for publishing truthful information would be to put in a public filing information that clearly was not intended for the public and without any notice to Mr. Assange. Obviously, I have no idea if he has actually been charged or for what, but the notion that the federal criminal charges could be brought based on the publication of truthful information is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set."

The filing in the Eastern District of Virginia came on August 22, in a case that combines national security and sex trafficking. Seitu Sulayman Kokayi, 29, was charged with enticing a 15-year-old girl to have sex with him and send him pornographic images of herself. But he was detained in part, according to the court filing, because he "has a substantial interest in terrorist acts."

His father-in-law, according to the filing, has been convicted of terrorist acts. The case involves previously classified information, according to government filings, and prosecutors plan to use information obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Kokayi was indicted last week and is set to be arraigned Friday morning.

The case had been sealed until early September, though by itself it attracted little notice. On Thursday evening, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University who is known for scrubbing court filings, joked about the apparent error on Twitter which first brought it to the attention of reporters.

Even if he is charged, Assange's coming to the United States to face trial is no sure thing. Since June 2012, Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy, afraid that if he steps outside he will be arrested.

When he first sought asylum in the embassy, he was facing possible extradition to Sweden in a sex crimes case. He has argued that case was a pretext for what he predicted would be his arrest and extradition to the United States.

In the years since, the Swedish case has been closed, but Assange has said he cannot risk leaving the embassy because the U.S. would attempt to have him arrested and extradited for disclosures of U.S. government secrets. Throughout that time, the U.S. has refused to say whether there are any sealed charges against Assange.

If Assange were to leave the embassy and be arrested by British authorities, he would likely still fight extradition in the British courts.

The Washington Post's Rachel Weiner and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

Follow this link:
Julian Assange has been charged in the United States ...

Breaking News Emails

Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.

Nov. 16, 2018 / 7:11 AM GMT/ UpdatedNov. 16, 2018 / 9:29 PM GMT

By Ken Dilanian and Dennis Romero

A court document filed by mistake has revealed that the Justice Department has filed undisclosed criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In a slip unearthed by a former U.S. intelligence official and posted on Twitter, Assanges name appears twice in an August court filing by a federal prosecutor in Virginia an argument to keep sealed an unrelated case involving an accused child sex criminal.

The prosecutor wrote that the charges and arrest warrant would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.

At another point in the document, the prosecutor wrote that due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.

It's not clear what allegations could be connected to the filing, which was a motion to seal a complaint and supporting documents in the unrelated case.

However, special counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year cited WikiLeaks participation in Russias efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. U.S. intelligence agencies have said that WikiLeaks disclosed thousands of emails stolen in a covert Russian intelligence operation to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, noticed that Assange's name was in the filing, and he tweeted about it. Hughes is also a former official at the National Counterterrorism Center.

On Thursday night, WikiLeaks' Twitter account further publicized the filing.

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement that that court filing "was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing."

The filing was first reported by The Washington Post.

WikiLeaks and Assange loom large in the investigation of Russian influence on the election.

The website released unflattering Hillary Clinton campaign emails beginning Oct. 7, 2016, just weeks before the presidential election.

Mueller, who's directing a federal inquiry into election meddling, in July charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with conspiring to hack Democratic National Committee computers in an effort to disrupt the 2016 election. The indictment referred to WikiLeaks as Organization 1, and described its role in receiving and disseminating the emails, without addressing whether Assange knew the material came from the Russians.

Barry Pollack, a U.S. lawyer representing Assange, criticized the move to charge the WikiLeaks founder.

The news that criminal charges have apparently been filed against Mr. Assange is even more troubling than the haphazard manner in which that information has been revealed, Pollack said in a statement. The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take.

In a statement Friday the director of the American Civil Liberties Unions Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Ben Wizner, seemed to agree.

"Any prosecution of Mr. Assange for Wikileaks publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations," he said. "Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest."

Mueller has been investigating whether anyone close to President Trumps 2016 campaign, including his longtime associate Roger Stone, acted as a conduit of stolen emails between WikiLeaks and the campaign.

WikiLeaks communicated through Twitter with the presidents son, Donald Trump Jr.

Assange came to prominence after WikiLeaks published secret military and diplomatic documents leaked in 2010 by Pvt. Chelsea Manning.

Manning served 7 years in prison, but WikiLeaks was not prosecuted. Justice Department lawyers concluded at the time that they could not charge Assange and WikiLeaks even as American newspapers, protected by the First Amendment, were publishing the leaked material.

But in recent years, U.S. officials have sought to distinguish WikiLeaks from journalists, as when then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo referred to it as a "hostile non-state intelligence organization." American officials came to view WikiLeaks as working hand in glove with American adversaries, particularly Russia.

In 2017, WikiLeaks published information about CIA hacking exploits, and last year a former government software engineer was charged with leaking that information. Officials said the disclosures were damaging to U.S. national security, and computer security experts criticized WikiLeaks for providing criminal hackers with new tools.

Assange, an Australian national, has lived at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since being granted asylum in 2012 as he tried to avoid extradition to Sweden. Sweden's top prosecutor later dropped a long-running inquiry into a rape allegation against him, saying there was no way to detain or charge him because of his protected status in the embassy.

In a recent lawsuit, Assange said that Ecuador is changing the terms of his protection there.

CORRECTION (Nov. 15, 2018, 2:45 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated where Julian Assange is currently living. He is in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, not Ecuador.

Ken Dilanian is a national security reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Dennis Romero

Dennis Romero is a freelance reporter based in Los Angeles.

Associated Press contributed.

See the original post here:
Filing indicates DOJ filed criminal charges against Julian ...

WASHINGTON The Justice Department has secretly filed criminal charges against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, a person familiar with the case said, a drastic escalation of the governments yearslong battle with him and his anti-secrecy group.

Top Justice Department officials told prosecutors over the summer that they could start drafting a complaint against Mr. Assange, current and former law enforcement officials said. The charges came to light late Thursday through an unrelated court filing in which prosecutors inadvertently mentioned them.

The court filing was made in error, said Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the United States attorneys office for the Eastern District of Virginia. That was not the intended name for this filing.

Mr. Assange has lived for years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and would have to be arrested and extradited if he were to face charges in federal court, altogether a multistep diplomatic and legal process.

The disclosure came as the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is investigating links between President Trumps associates and Russias 2016 election interference. WikiLeaks published thousands of emails that year from Democrats during the presidential race that were stolen by Russian intelligence officers. The hackings were a major part of Moscows campaign of disruption.

Though the legal move against Mr. Assange remained a mystery on Thursday, charges centering on the publication of information of public interest even if it was obtained from Russian government hackers would create a precedent with profound implications for press freedoms.

[Mr. Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for years. Heres how he got there.]

Mr. Assange has been in prosecutors sights for years because of WikiLeakss publication of thousands of secret government documents. Mr. Assange and his upstart website rose to prominence when Chelsea Manning, a low-ranking Army intelligence analyst, handed over thousands of classified Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, which began publishing them in 2010.

Barry Pollack, an American lawyer representing Mr. Assange, denounced the apparent development.

The news that criminal charges have apparently been filed against Mr. Assange is even more troubling than the haphazard manner in which that information has been revealed, Mr. Pollack wrote in an email. The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take.

Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at George Washington University who closely tracks court cases, uncovered the filing and posted it on Twitter.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to say on Thursday what led to the inadvertent disclosure. It was made in a recently unsealed filing in an apparently unrelated sex-crimes case charging a man named Seitu Sulayman Kokayi with coercing and enticing an underage person to engage in unlawful sexual activity. Mr. Kokayi was charged in early August, and on Aug. 22, prosecutors filed a three-page document laying out boilerplate arguments for why his case at that time needed to remain sealed.

While the filing started out referencing Mr. Kokayi, federal prosecutors abruptly switched on its second page to discussing the fact that someone named Assange had been secretly charged, and went on to make clear that this person was the subject of significant publicity, lived abroad and would need to be extradited suggesting that prosecutors had inadvertently pasted text from a similar court filing into the wrong document and then filed it.

Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged, prosecutors wrote.

They added, The complaint, supporting affidavit, and arrest warrant, as well as this motion and the proposed order, would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.

The Justice Department has been studying how to charge Mr. Assange or WikiLeaks with some kind of criminal offense since the site began publishing its trove of secret military and diplomatic documents. Prosecutors, for example, toyed with the idea of charging Mr. Assange as a conspirator in Ms. Mannings crime of unauthorized disclosure of secrets related to national defense. And it eventually became public that a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia was investigating people with links to WikiLeaks.

But even as the Obama administration brought criminal charges in an unprecedented number of leak-related cases, it apparently held back from charging Mr. Assange. Members of the Obama legal policy team from that era have said that they did not want to establish a precedent that could chill investigative reporting about national security matters by treating it as a crime.

Their dilemma came down to a question they found no clear answer to: Is there any legal difference between what WikiLeaks was doing, at least in that era, from what traditional news media organizations, like The New York Times, do in soliciting and publishing information they obtain that the government wants to keep secret?

And such organizations, including The Times, have published many news articles based on documents that WikiLeaks published starting in 2010, including tranches of logs of significant combat events in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and diplomatic cables leaked by Ms. Manning, and the Democratic emails in the 2016 election that were hacked by Russia.

The debate over whether to charge Mr. Assange continued under the Trump administration and was being accelerated by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to former government officials involved in the discussions, about whether Mr. Assange qualified as a journalist.

Charges against Mr. Assange raised the question of whether the Justice Department abandoned concerns about setting a precedent that would chill press freedoms after WikiLeakss role in Russias 2016 election interference and its publication of documents about C.I.A. hacking tools, or whether prosecutors decided that the new circumstances raised by the publication of the stolen emails opened a new legal avenue.

While prosecutors in the Manning era were focused on WikiLeakss publication of classified government documents activity that they analyzed primarily through the lens of the Espionage Act the Democratic emails were not government documents or national security secrets.

In July a month before the erroneous court filing Mr. Mueller charged 12 Russians with several crimes related to hacking and disseminating the emails as part of a foreign conspiracy to interfere in the election, which that indictment styled in part as a conspiracy to defraud the United States. Part of that indictment referred to WikiLeaks, which it identified as Organization 1.

In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the D.N.C. and the chairman of the Clinton campaign to Organization 1, the July indictment said, referring to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. The conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Mr. Stueves explanation about the inadvertent filing left open the possibility that the language in the unrelated court document was lifted from a draft document written in preparation for eventual charges, not necessarily one handed up by a grand jury and sealed by a court.

Mr. Assange became something of a cult figure for those advocating greater transparency in government and in the corporate world. The prominence of WikiLeaks also generated a debate about the boundaries of journalism and the protections of free expression in the digital age.

At the same time, Mr. Assange was pursued by Swedish prosecutors on charges of sexual abuse ultimately forcing him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in the summer of 2012. He has remained there since.

In October, Mr. Assange sued the Ecuadorean government for limiting his visitors and online activity.

WikiLeaks has been attacked for its publication of the hacked Democratic emails. In April 2017, the C.I.A. director at the time, Mike Pompeo, called it a hostile intelligence service that was aided by Russia and accused Mr. Assange of making common cause with dictators.

Mr. Hughes, the terrorism expert, who is the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, posted a screenshot of the court filing on Twitter shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute Mr. Assange.

You guys should read EDVA court filings more, Mr. Hughes wrote, cheaper than a Journal subscription.

See original here:
Julian Assange Is Secretly Charged in U.S., Prosecutors ...