Charging Assange reflects dramatic shift in U.S. approach
WASHINGTON — The decision to seek the extradition of Julian Assange marked a dramatic new approach to the founder of WikiLeaks by the U.S. government, a shift that was signaled in the early days of the Trump administration.
President Barack Obama’s Justice Department had extensive internal debates about whether to charge Assange amid concerns the case might not hold up in court and would be viewed as an attack on journalism by an administration already taking heat for leak prosecutions.
But senior Trump administration officials seemed to make it clear early on that they held a different view, dialing up the rhetoric on the antisecrecy organization shortly after it made damaging disclosures about the CIA’s cyberespionage tools.
“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” former CIA Director Mike Pompeo said in April 2017 in his first public speech as head of the agency.
“Assange and his ilk,” Pompeo said, seek “personal selfaggrandizement through the destruction of Western values.”
A week after the CIA director’s speech, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the arrest of Assange was a priority, part of a broader Justice Department crackdown on leakers.
“We’ve already begun to step up our efforts, and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail,” he said.
Pompeo, now secretary of state, declined Friday to discuss the issue, citing the nowactive legal pursuit of Assange following his removal a day earlier by British authorities from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.