WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was finally released from prison earlier this year for the crime of “journalism.” He spent years in exile at the Ecuadoran embassy in London and then five hellish years in a maximum-security British prison without ever going to trial.
Assange spoke out earlier this month for the first time about what actually happened to him. He delivered remarks before a council of 46 nations in the European Union. His surprising speech, which was almost universally not covered here in the US, reveals that the CIA had agents dug in like ticks in Donald Trump’s administration.
By the end of Barack Obama’s time in office, the US government had given up on the idea of prosecuting Julian Assange. One of the main whistleblowers for WikiLeaks, former intelligence analyst and US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, was arrested by Obama in 2010. After years of harassing WikiLeaks, including sending teams of CIA agents to Iceland to confiscate all the publication’s legal journalistic equipment and freeze all its bank accounts, they ended up never charging Julian Assange with a crime.
There was nothing to charge him with. Obama’s Justice Department ultimately decided that Assange had committed no crime. It would have taken a radical reinterpretation of the Constitution to be able to charge a publisher with a crime for publishing government information, which had been done previously by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other news outlets.
Everything changed when Donald Trump got into office, however. The CIA swarmed around his administration and unfortunately, he ended up appointing a lot of the agency’s spooks to important positions. Trump had no knowledge of a lot of these agents and they were actively working (along with almost every other federal agency) to try to undermine him at every turn.
Two of the key figures were Mike Pompeo, a former arms contractor and congressman who Trump appointed to run the CIA, and Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, who spent the first six years of his career in Washington, DC working for the CIA.
Assange then detailed the campaign of harassment that Mike Pompeo waged against him to try to either kill him or get him to leave the Ecuadoran embassy so he could be snatched off the street and “disappeared.” Pompeo ordered agents to draw up a plan to kidnap Assange inside the embassy and assassinate him.
The CIA began harassing Assange’s European colleagues. Agents stole computers and electronic devices from his colleagues, hacked them, and planted false evidence on them. Pompeo permanently assigned a CIA agent to follow Assange’s wife. He even assigned agents to try to obtain a DNA sample from the diaper of Assange’s six-month-old infant son.
We know all this now because whistleblowers in federal agencies have revealed it to other media outlets—mainly outlets in Europe since the American media is controlled by the CIA. Former CIA officer Joshua Schulte is believed to be one of WikiLeaks’s sources, although Assange won’t confirm or deny that.
Assange notes that Schulte was sentenced to 40 years in prison in Europe this year at the behest of the CIA. Schulte is being held in a prison cell with blacked-out windows and a white noise machine that plays 24/7 is positioned above his door, so he can’t even yell through it. He’s being tortured in worse conditions than any Al Qaeda terrorist in Guantanamo Bay has ever been subjected to.
Pompeo finally convinced Bill Barr to issue a warrant for Assange’s extradition from the UK, and the two CIA buddies were only too happy to help them out. The UK government kept the warrant secret for two years as Pompeo and the British and Ecuadoran governments all colluded to arrest a journalist for conducting journalism.
That was what finally led to Assange’s arrest followed by five years of captivity in a British prison without ever being charged with a crime. All these sinister maneuvers were conducted without President Trump’s knowledge.
Assange says he was targeted by “wolves in MAGA hats.” This all goes to show just how dangerous and out-of-control the intelligence agencies are. They think they are above the law. And we’d be foolish to think that they were not involved in the assassination attempts against President Trump this year.
