Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, has been arrested

The US Department of Justice has indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 17 counts of violating the US Espionage Act for his alleged role in seeking and publishing classified materials from former US Army analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010.

The new indictment has dramatically transformed the case against Assange, who was arrested in London last month and indicted by the US on one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. Prosecutors allege that Assange worked with Manning to hack a password on a Department of Defense computer to access classified government documents.

Is the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange justice against a man who broke the law, or is it a warning shot that journalism is under threat in the United States?

It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because it brings up a host of other related questions: Do you consider WikiLeaks a journalistic organization or not? Did Assange actively participate in criminal activity to obtain classified intel, as the US government alleges, or did he just disseminate information passed on to him and is therefore protected by the First Amendment? Does it matter that Assange and his organization seem to have developed at the very least an affinity to Russia? And is the single charge he faces in the United States the total of the government’s push for justice — or is it just the opening salvo in what will become a larger war to punish Assange (and anyone else who publishes classified information)?

Julian Assange’s dramatic arrest on Thursday happened because the government of Ecuador — which had protected the WikiLeaks founder in its London embassy for seven years — finally decided to kick him out.

So why did the Ecuadorians suddenly turn on their controversial lodger? The decision came down to two completely different rationales: a desire for better relations with the US, and exasperation with Assange’s horrible houseguest etiquette.

President Donald Trump on Thursday is now pretending not to know anything about WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, was arrested earlier in the day in the UK — despite the fact that the president has publicly professed his “love” for the organization in the past.

“I know nothing about WikiLeaks,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday. “It’s not my thing,” he added.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London by British police Thursday after being expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy — and he’ll now likely face extradition to the United States.

“We can confirm that Julian Assange was arrested in relation to a provisional extradition request from the United States of America,” the UK Home Office said in a statement. “He is accused in the United States of America of computer related offences.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by British authorities on Thursday after his expulsion from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He will likely face extradition to the United States for charges dating back to March 2018 that were unsealed following his arrest in the United Kingdom.

Soon after Assange’s arrest on Thursday, the Justice Department unsealed court documents of charges related to WikiLeaks’ publication of videos and documents leaked by US Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning starting in 2010. The indictment alleges that Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Manning to crack a password on a Defense Department computer network for classified documents and communications to download classified records and transmit them to WikiLeaks.

Update: On April 11, 2019, Julian Assange was arrested by British authorities in London and faces extradition to the United States, where he has been charged with conspiracy to hack a government computer.

Earlier update: On May 19, Swedish authorities dropped sexual assault charges against Julian Assange. However, British authorities stated that his arrest warrant still remains active.

Months of speculation came to a close Thursday when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by British authorities after being expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, ahead of his planned extradition to the United States.

The UK Home Office said in a statement that the Australian hacktivist is accused of “computer related offences.”

Right-wing conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump ally Jerome Corsi wants you to believe that God, not Julian Assange or any other human source, provided him with foreknowledge about WikiLeaks’ plans to publish emails hacked from the Clinton campaign in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Seriously.

According to draft court documents obtained by NBC, while he was vacationing in Italy on August 2, 2016, Corsi emailed longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone and told him, “Word is friend in embassy [WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange] plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”

During a question-and-answer session with reporters outside the White House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump was asked if he thinks WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should “be able to go free.” The president attempted to deflect the question with a bizarre rant about how Chuck Schumer’s daughter works for Facebook.

But a few minutes later, the reporter tried asking Trump about Assange again. This time, the president claimed that “I don’t know anything about him. Really, I don’t know much about him, I really don’t.”

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

The specifics of the charges aren’t 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.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may be one of the world’s most feared activists after helping Russia interfere in elections and exposing military secrets of the United States. But he’s also one of the world’s worst houseguests.

Assange has lived inside Ecuador’s embassy in London for about six years after he fled there to escape extradition to Sweden in 2012. But now he’s overstayed his welcome — mostly because he won’t take care of his cat.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to testify privately about Russian interference in the 2016 election. We know this because WikiLeaks, well, leaked the letter.

The intelligence panel won’t verify whether the request is real. But if it is, and Assange officially agrees to be interviewed about possible collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it would be a big deal.

Donald Trump Jr. and the WikiLeaks Twitter account exchanged several private messages during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to a new story by the Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe, who obtained messages turned over to congressional investigators.

Trump Jr. sent at least three direct messages, or DMs, to WikiLeaks. He also told several top Trump campaign staffers by email that WikiLeaks had reached out to him, back in September 2016. And when WikiLeaks suggested tweeting out a link to its site hosting Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s hacked emails, he did so.

Andrew O’Hagan was an ardent supporter of WikiLeaks, or at least the romanticized idea of it, when he began ghostwriting Julian Assange’s autobiography in January 2011. O’Hagan, one of Britain’s finest contemporary essayists, is passionate about speaking truth to power. He believed the world needed a transparency organization exposing power’s lies and abuses, such as those committed by the American and British militaries during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

After years of in-depth conversations with Assange, O’Hagan came to believe that Assange had sabotaged the transparency agenda. The biography project collapsed before Assange moved into the Ecuadorian Embassy during August 2012, but O’Hagan tried to help Assange until late 2013.

Swedish prosecutors announced today that they are dropping a years-long rape investigation against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange, 45, has spent the past five years hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, sheltered both from extradition to Sweden, where he faced rape charges, and possible extradition to the United States, where he is under investigation for the release of thousands of highly classified documents leaked by former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

But just because Sweden is dropping the rape charge doesn’t mean he’s free.

Julian Assange insists, against all evidence, that the hacked Democratic emails WikiLeaks published didn’t come from Russian intelligence services. “Our source is not the Russian government,” he said in a Tuesday interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

This is a touch hard to believe. Publicly available evidence, including unique code and Russian writing in the hacked documents themselves, links the document theft to Russian state-sponsored hacks. Every US intelligence agency that has investigated the issue has concluded Russia is, in fact, responsible. Leaks from their analyses, reported by CNN and the Washington Post, indicate that the US has identified the go-betweens used by Russia to hand documents to WikiLeaks. Assange is either lying or willfully blind to the facts.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has leaked thousands of secret, sensitive US government documents in an overt attempt to damage America’s position in the world. More recently, he has been a pawn in Vladimir Putin’s campaign to interfere with the US election. The idea that an American leader would praise Assange, effusively, seems like it should be absurd.

Yet that’s exactly what Donald Trump did in two tweets on Wednesday morning. Trump praised Assange’s comments bashing the US media, made in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday night. Trump also repeated Assange’s claim, one contradicted by the consensus of the US intelligence community, that the Russians did not give Assange the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta that were then posted on WikiLeaks:

Hillary Clinton told a joke. Speaking to a roomful of Goldman Sachs bankers in June 2013, Clinton said that Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein could leave the Wall Street firm that’s made him a billionaire to start a soup kitchen:

This exchange was written down by Clinton’s aides as they gathered information on what parts of her paid Wall Street speeches could prove damaging should they leak to the press. Her team filed it under the heading, “AWKWARD.”

One of the weirdest sub-dramas of the 2016 US presidential election has been WikiLeaks, an organization nominally dedicated to “radical transparency,” serving as a de facto Donald Trump Super PAC.

In March, the group dumped a trove of emails from Clinton’s private email server. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, it released embarrassing private emails from the Democratic National Committee obtained by a Russia-linked hacker. In October, the group published private emails from a top Clinton aide, John Podesta, which included quotes from Clinton’s speeches to big banks like Goldman Sachs.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange might live in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, but he considers himself to be unlawfully “detained” because a Swedish rape charge and the UK government’s promise to arrest him and extradite him to Sweden prevent him from leaving the embassy. So in 2014, he appealed to a United Nations human rights body, asking it to rule on whether this “detention” by the UK and Swedish governments is legal.

The UN ruling has just come back, and the UN has sided with Assange. It’s not legally binding — the UK isn’t now required to let him go free, and has explicitly stated that it won’t — but Assange is likely hoping this will help him build a larger case for one day convincing the UK it should let him leave the embassy where he’s lived since 2012.