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Senior CIA officials during the Trump administration have discussed the kidnapping and even the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a US report citing former officials.
Talks about Assange’s kidnapping or murder took place in 2017, Yahoo News reported, as the fugitive Australian activist entered his fifth year of refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy. Then CIA Director Mike Pompeo and his senior officials were furious at WikiLeaks’ release of “Vault 7,” a CIA hacking tool set, a breach the agency deemed to be. the biggest data loss in its history.
Pompeo and CIA executives “were completely out of touch with reality because they were so embarrassed by Vault 7,” Yahoo said, citing a former Trump national security official. “They saw blood.”
Some senior CIA and Trump administration officials have gone so far as to ask for “sketches” or “options” to kill Assange. “There didn’t seem to be any borders,” said a former senior counterterrorism official.
The CIA declined to comment.
The kidnapping or murder of a civilian accused of publishing leaked documents unrelated to terrorism is said to have sparked global outrage.
Pompeo raised his eyebrows in 2017 by calling WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service.” The Yahoo report said this was an important designation because it involved a green light for a more aggressive approach to the pro-transparency group by CIA agents, who could treat it like a spy organization. enemy.
Barry Pollack, Assange’s US attorney, did not respond to a request for comment, but told Yahoo News: “As a US citizen, I find it absolutely scandalous that our government is considering removing or removing murder someone without any legal process just because they published truthful information.
“I hope and expect the UK courts to take this information into account and this will further strengthen his decision not to extradite to the United States,” he added.
Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy since 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault. He surrendered in 2019 and is now in prison in London, from where he is fighting extradition to the United States.
US prosecutors charged him under the Espionage Act with seeking to help Chelsea Manning hack into a military computer network to obtain classified documents, with attempting to help the former analyst of the US military and conspiring to obtain and publish classified material in violation of espionage law.
The use of the espionage law in this case has been heavily criticized by human rights groups who have stressed that it opens the door to its use against investigative journalists in general, including much of the job is to obtain and publish information that governments would prefer to keep secret. .
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