The FBI would likely use Jonassons sitting on the story between 2011 and 2016 against his credibility.<\/p>\n
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, US authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecuting them under theEspionage Act of 1917.In November 2010US Attorney-GeneralEric Holdersaid there was an active, ongoing criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federalgrand juryin Alexandria, Virginia.An email from an employee of intelligence consultancy Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor)leakedin 2012 said, We have a sealed indictment on Assange.The US government denies the existence of such an indictment. <\/p>\n
In December 2011 prosecutors in theChelsea Manning caserevealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an alleged WikiLeaks interlocutor they claimed to be Assange;he denied this,dismissing the alleged connection as absolute nonsense.The logs were presented as evidence during Mannings court-martial in JuneJuly 2013.The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password, but evidence that the interlocutor was Assange was circumstantial, and Manning insisted she acted alone. <\/p>\n
Assange was being examined separately by several government agencies in addition to the grand jury, most notably theFBI.Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was still under active and ongoing investigation at that time. <\/p>\n
Moreover, someSnowdendocuments published in 2014 show that the United States government put Assange on the 2010 Manhunting Timeline,and in the same period they urged their allies to open criminal investigations into the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.In the same documents there was a proposal by theNSAto designate WikiLeaks as a malicious foreign actor, thus increasing the surveillance against it. <\/p>\n
On 26 January 2015, WikiLeaks revealed that three members of the organisation received notice that Google had handed over all their emails and metadata to the United States government.In the notifications, there was the list of possible charges that originated the warrant toGoogleand that the secret grand jury intends to use against WikiLeaks and likely Assange too. They were espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and general conspiracy. They carry up to a minimum of 45 years in prison, if they amount to one charge per these five types; otherwise, even more years could be added. <\/p>\n
The United States investigation confirmed its ongoing proceedings against WikiLeaks in a 15 December 2015 court submission. <\/p>\n
Robert Mueller was FBI Director in 2011 when the planeload of FBI agents was sent to Iceland, one year before the second election of Barack Hussein Obama as POTUS.<\/p>\n
What information was a Mueller-led FBI trying to keep from coming into public view?<\/p>\n
This is a question that leans heavily on his role as Special Counsel.<\/p>\n
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