Assange Charged in U.S. With Hack Conspiracy Tied to Manning

[brooklynite]

Source: Bloomberg

The U.S. accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of taking part in a computer-hacking conspiracy related to the disclosure of diplomatic cables extracted by former U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning.

In a March 2018 indictment unsealed on Thursday just hours after Assange’s arrest in London, the U.S. accused Assange of assisted Manning in “hacking a password stored on United States Department of Defense computers,” according to the indictment. Assange’s anti-secrecy organization published the cables starting in 2010.

Assange’s arrest came after Ecuador expelled him from its embassy there. The 47-year-old has been in the embassy since 2012 when he sought to escape questioning in a Swedish sexual-assault case. While those charges were dropped in 2017, Assange has remained in a small apartment in the London embassy.

If Assange is extradited, he could provide new insights into WikiLeaks’ role in a different matter -- what Special Counsel Robert Mueller has described as a conspiracy by Russians to steal the Democrats’ emails.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-11/assange-charges-revealed-by-u-s-hours-after-london-arrest

[Ellipsis]

1. I was just going to post this. k/r

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/wikileaks-founder-charged-computer-hacking-conspiracy

[True Blue American]

2. Is that

Espionage?

[Ellipsis]

3. Conspiracy to commit computer intrusion

Assange is charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. A friend of Assange said today that UK agreed to not extradite to countries w death penalty.

USA has death penalty for some treason cases.

[Denzil_DC]

8. Assange isn't a US citizen, so can't be charged with treason.

Some headlines have said the UK won't extradite to a country that has the death penalty, which isn't quite right.

It won't extradite to countries under charges which could carry the death penalty.

[True Blue American]

9. The warrant and charge

Are from the US! He is being charged today in Court.

And, who knows how many new charges there will be?

The rape victim’s case was thrown out because they could not charge him.

[Denzil_DC]

11. That doesn't make Assange a US citizen, so he can't be charged with treason.

He's currently in the UK court system and will pass through its mill, starting with the charge of skipping bail, for which he can opt for a jury trial if he wants.

There are restrictions on new charges being added to those that are the grounds for an extradition order, though they could be waived by the UK.

The alleged rape victim's case (there were actually two) wasn't thrown out at all. It was abandoned because Assange wouldn't submit to due process in a way that meant Swedish courts could progress the case, but it's still within the statute of limitations and the Swedish courts could revive it if they chose to - one of the women has already called for that to happen today.

[Cold War Spook]

12. I don't know the laws of other countries,

but US laws suspend the stature of limitations in this case because he was in a foreign embassy. You commit a crime that has a statute of limitations of 7 years but you hide out in a foreign embassy. If you leave 20 years later and are caught within 7 years, you can be charged.

[Denzil_DC]

13. Nor do I.

But nevertheless, the Swedish cases are within the statute of limitations.

Assange has now already been to court for skipping bail and been found guilty, and awaits sentencing for that (usually 3-12 months in prison), and is due in court for the extradition proceedings on 2 May.

[True Blue American]

18. Now we wait to see

What happens between the UK and US.

[Denzil_DC]

19. Sweden may delay things for the US:

Link to tweet

David Allen Green @davidallengreen

Breaking - the Swedish Prosecution Authority has announced it is now formally reviewing whether to renew its extradition request fro Assange.

This follows a request today by the @ElisabethMFritz, lawyer for the complainant.

Åklagarmyndigheten ✔
@aklagareSE

Uppdatering i Assangeärendet https://bit.se/uN9rQS

The statute of limitations under the Swedish system runs out in August 2020, so a UK court might decide to give the rape allegations precedence.

He also faces up to 12 months in jail in the UK for the breach of bail, which may slow things down further.

[True Blue American]

20. Sounds good to me.

The victims will get a chance.

Thanks for the info. Who knows what will happen next?

[True Blue American]

15. I never said

Assange was a citizen. Why do you keep dwelling on that?

I do think Assange is connected to the Roger Stone case.

But like you I have no idea what is going to happen. Just like none of us know about Mueller and Barr. Anything can happen.

[Denzil_DC]

17. Because you chipped in on a reply of mine addressing BdlP raising the issue of treason.

Read back the thread and you may be able to see why I assumed you were pressing that point, but since you're not, that's fine. The rest of my comments stand.

[Jose Garcia]

4. I wonder what Manning is up to these days

[brooklynite]

5. Sitting in a jail cell...

Under Contempt ruling for refusing to testify.

[DirtEdonE]

6. Any charges for hacking the DNC and aiding the gop?

Or is this case going to tie up all the loose ends for the guy who had him extradited?

[True Blue American]

10. wickileaks mentioned Roger Stone this morning.said he exaggerated

Hack, cough!

[Blue_Tires]

14. Today must be my birthday or something

LOL

[True Blue American]

16. Well

Happy Birthday or something.

I am watching a Soap, but honestly can not tell the difference these days.

Friday cliff hangers on Soap and real life.

[matt819]

21. Am I the only one who's perplexed?

Putting aside Trump's "I know nothing" comment. . .

And putting aside how you might have felt when Wikileaks first came on the scene -


Clearly (at least to those of us in the reality-based universe), at some point Wikileaks morphed into a Russian intelligence asset and proceeded to hack the Dems for the benefit of Putin and Trump. Assange was in contact with Stone, Manafort, and probably a whole host of unsavory people.

I would suggest that Trump was behind these efforts or certainly knew about them and acquiesced in exploiting those efforts. (Unless, of course, he "knew nothing," which appears to have been is MO re criminal activity for 50-odd years.)

Why, then, would the US bring Assange back here to stand trial for, well, for hacking?

Unless, as I think about it, the fix is already in. The fix being that in the end he won't stand trial and thus be free to either remain in the US or go pretty much anywhere he wants that will have him. I'm guessing Russia.

Or, the fix being that he'll go to trial but it will be, well, fixed, to ensure an acquittal. That sad possibility may be in the Mueller report (that is, not enough evidence of guilt), or evidence of his guilt is in the report but won't be released "for national security reasons," and thus no trial or trial/acquittal.

Now, if Sweden were to reinstate charges against him now or once he was in the US, then that could make things interesting.

And if all of this sounds like an America you don't recognize, count me in that group. This is weird beyond words.

[Denzil_DC]

22. I could fish out the links if necessary (I've typed far too much about this already today),

but I believe Wikileaks backed off exposing anything about Russia after a bald threat a number of years ago.

The rest is a product of Assange's opportunistic nihilism.

I'm also disturbed that the grounds for extradition so far relate to revelations of war crimes rather than what else Wikileaks under Assange has been up to. If you're conspiracy-minded, you could say that this offers Assange the best prospects of a public interest defence, but then, as you imply, why would the US authorities go for extradition at all?

Sweden's role is more likely to be to slow proceedings down if their prosecutor decides to proceed - the rape allegations need to be pursued before August 2020, so the UK courts could decide they take precedence over the US claims.

I've said this before on DU today, but if I was Assange, I'd be very wary of a fatal "accident" while in US custody. He knows too much for some powerful people's convenience and taste, in the US, Russia and beyond.

[Denzil_DC]

23. Ah, I got a second wind after all. Here's one story from 2010 about the Russian threats:

WikiLeaks: Is Russia the Next Target?

Say what you will about Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, but his work has shown him to be pretty fearless. After his site published the biggest cache of secret files in U.S. history on Oct. 22, detailing some of the ugly truths about the war in Iraq, he continued to travel around Europe despite U.S. reprimands and warnings. He even told the global media that new leaks would expose more secrets not only about the U.S. military but about other "repressive regimes," such as Russia and China. The signals coming from Moscow, however, suggest that the Russian reaction will not be as reserved as America's. So is WikiLeaks really ready to take on the world's more callous states?

It's certainly talking the talk. In an interview published on Tuesday, Oct. 26, in Russia's leading daily newspaper, Kommersant, WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said that "Russian readers will learn a lot about their country" after one of the site's upcoming document dumps. "We want to tell people the truth about the actions of their governments."

So far Russia has had no official response. But on Wednesday, an official at the Center for Information Security of the FSB, Russia's secret police, gave a warning to WikiLeaks that showed none of the tact of the U.S. reply to the Iraq revelations. "It's essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever," the anonymous official told the independent Russian news website LifeNews.

When reached by TIME, the FSB, which is the main successor to the Soviet KGB, declined to elaborate on the comment or say whether it was the agency's official position. But history has shown that the FSB readily steps in to shut down Internet tattlers. In June, a Russian analog to WikiLeaks called Lubyanskaya Pravda published a series of documents it claimed to be top-secret FSB files detailing the agency's operations in the former Soviet Union and conflicts with other Russian security forces.

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2028283,00.html

Wikileaks did release one cache of information about Russia in 2017, but it wasn't particularly hard-hitting, and the uncharitable could see it as a face-saving exercise to show "balance" after the antics of 2016: https://www.wired.com/story/wikileaks-spy-files-russia/

[SergeStorms]

24. Is he a "journalist"?

In my opinion, no. If I get a message from someone else, cut and paste, or just resend the entire packet as my own work, does that make ME a journalist? It seems like that's all Assange does. He writes no original work.