BREAKING:
US Senate Intelligence Committee Calls on Wikileaks Founder Julian
Assange to Testify –Wikileaks Considering Offer
8
August, 2018
Julian
Assange is the ONE MAN who knows who supplied the Podesta-Clinton
emails to Wikileaks.
It
took the US Senate Intelligence Committee a year-and-a-half to call
him in for questioning.
The
US Congress is not a serious about the “Russia collusion” story.
BREAKING: US Senate Intelligence Committee calls editor @JulianAssange to testify. Letter delivered via US embassy in London. WikiLeaks' legal team say they are "considering the offer but testimony must conform to a high ethical standard". Also: https://t.co/pPf0GTjTlp pic.twitter.com/TrDKkCKVBx— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 8, 2018
MORE—
Wikileaks is considering the offer.
BREAKING: US Senate Intelligence Committee calls editor @JulianAssange to testify. Letter delivered via US embassy in London. WikiLeaks' legal team say they are "considering the offer but the conditions must conform to a high ethical standard". Also: https://t.co/pPf0GTjTlppic.twitter.com/gQIUstbGbq— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 8, 2018
Julian
Assange has been asked to testify before the US Senate Intelligence
Committee as part of their Russia investigation, according to a
letter signed by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA)
posted by the official WikiLeaks Twitter account.
The
letter, delivered to Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London,
reads in part "As part of the inquiry, the Committee requests
that you make yourself available for a closed interview with
bipartisan Committee staff at a mutually agreeable time and
location."
Wikileaks'
says their legal team is "considering the offer but testimony
must conform to a high ethical standard," after which the
whistleblower organization added a tweet linking to a list of 10
Democratic Senators who demanded in late June that Assange's asylum
be revoked in violation of international law:
WikiLeaks
also tweeted a link to a Human
Rights Watch article:
"UK Should Reject Extraditing Julian Assange to US," which
reads in part:
It has been six years since Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, fled to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to seek asylum from possible extradition to the United States to face indictment under the US Espionage Act.
At the time, Assange, an Australian national, was wanted by Sweden for questioning over sexual offense allegations. Assange had also broken the terms of his UK bail. Since then, he has become even more controversial, having published US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and internal emails from Democratic Party officials.
While some admire and others despise Assange, no one should be prosecuted under the antiquated Espionage Act for publishing leaked government documents. That 1917 statute was designed to punish people who leaked secrets to a foreign government, not to the media, and allows no defense or mitigation of punishment on the basis that public interest served by some leaks may outweigh any harm to national security.
The US grand jury investigation of Assange under the Espionage Act was apparently based on his publishing the leaks for which Chelsea Manning, a former US army soldier, was convicted. Her sentence was commuted. -HRW.org
Assange
has been holed up in the embassy since 2012 for jumping UK bail on a
Swedish arrest warrant for an alleged rape. In May, Swedish
prosecutors decided to discontinue their investigation into the
claims, which Assange denies and has never been formally chaged
with.
“Chief
Prosecutor Marianne Ny has today decided to discontinue the
preliminary investigation regarding suspected rape concerning Julian
Assange,” the prosecutor's office said in a statement, as quoted by
Reuters.
Last
August, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher travelled to London with
journalist Charles Johnson for a meeting with Assange, after which
Rohrabacher said the WikiLeaks founder offered "firsthand"
information proving that the Trump campaign did not collude with
Russia, and which would refute the Russian hacking theory.
After
Trump denied knowledge of the potential deal, Rohrabacher raged at
Trump's Chief of Staff, John Kelly, for constructing a "wall"
around President Trump by "people who do not want to expose this
fraud."
And
in January of 2017, Julian Assange's legal team
approached Clinton-linked D.C.
lobbyist Adam Waldman to reach out and see if anyone in the Trump
administration would negotiate with the WikiLeaks founder - only
to have James Comey kill the deal.
Waldman,
who acted as an intermediary from 2009 - 2011 between Russian
oligarch Oleg Deripaska and the FBI, worked for Assange pro bono.
Assange's bargaining chip was a massive trove of CIA technical
documents known as "Vault 7," which detailed the
agency's massive cyber-warfare arsenal.
After
Assange's team made contact, Waldman
reached out to Bruce Ohr -
a DOJ official who would later be demoted in December, 2017 for
failing to disclose secret meetings with Fusion GPS founder Glenn
Simpson. Bruce's wife, Nellie
Ohr was
hired by Fusion GPS as part of an ongoing anti-Trump effort. Fusion
also produced the 35-page "Steele Dossier," written by
former MI6 spy Christopher Steele.
Waldman
and Ohr would meet in person on Feb. 3, 2017 in Washington,
while Waldman and Assange met three times in London.
After
Assange made clear that he would be open to redactions at most to
protect the names of exposed officials, Ohr
took Assange's offer up the chain of command at the DOJ -
which by and large held Assange in contempt.
Although the intelligence community reviled Assange for the damage his past releases caused, officials “understood any visibility into his thinking, any opportunity to negotiate any redactions, was in the national security interest and worth taking,” says a senior official involved at the time. -The Hill
After
Assange's request was run up the flag pole, Senator
Warner was issued a "stand-down" order by Comey.
“He
told me he had just talked with Comey and that, while the government
was appreciative of my efforts, my
instructions were to stand down, to end the discussions with
Assange,”
Waldman told The
Hill
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