The WikiLeaks founder told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that ‘the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and assassinate me within the Ecuadorian embassy in London and authorized going after my European colleagues.’
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is standing by his assertion that the U.S. Deep State sought to assassinate him while he was detained.
🇪🇺JULIAN ASSANGE: THE CIA TARGETED MY WIFE AND SON
"By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA's infiltration of French political parties; its spying on French and German leaders.
CIA director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.
Assange, 53, was in Strasbourg, France today making his first public appearance after being released in June from London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he had been confined for five years.
Speaking to representatives of 46 countries at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the Australian journalist reiterated that Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s CIA director, planned on killing him.
“It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and assassinate me within the Ecuadorian embassy in London and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information,” Assange said.
“My wife and my infant son were also targeted,” he continued. “A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife, and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my 6-month-old son’s nappy. This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former U.S intelligence officials speaking to the U.S. press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.”
After founding WikiLeaks in the mid 2000s, Assange came under intense scrutiny from Western governments after he helped expose war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. He sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the U.K. beginning in 2012.
In total, Assange spent 14 years of his life as a political prisoner until he struck a plea deal this summer with the U.S. government, which had charged him with 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act. He says that he chose to make the deal as the likelihood he would ever receive justice was nearly impossible.
“The CIA’s targeting of myself, my family, and my associates through aggressive, extrajudicial, and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organizations engage in transnational repression,” Assange said Tuesday. “I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pleaded guilty to journalism.”
Reports of the CIA’s plan to take Assange out surfaced in 2021, when Yahoo News revealed that intelligence agents had stated that Pompeo had been looking into possible methods of assassinating Assange following his release of “Vault 7” in 2017, which the agency described as “the largest data loss in CIA history.”
Last year, an uncomfortable Pompeo told libertarian journalist John Stossel that it “would have been illegal” for him to draw up plans to kill Assange, who he said is simply “trying to save his tuchus.”
In November 2023, Tucker Carlson announced on X that he had visited Assange at Belmarsh. A photo he posted to the platform showed Carlson walking with Assange’s wife Stella, who was at the event in Strasbourg today.
Among other notable moments in WikiLeaks history is its releasing of emails from high-ranking American political actors, including longtime Clinton associate John Podesta. Podesta’s bizarrely worded emails about “President Obama,” “hot dogs,” and “cheese pizza” are believed by some to be coded messages about Washington elites engaging in pedophilia and human trafficking. Other Podesta emails indicate he had an extensive plan to liberalize core teachings of the Catholic Church under the auspices of a “Catholic Spring.”
In August 2016, Assange implied that one of his sources was slain Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich, who was found dead on the streets of Washington, D.C. in 2016 at 4:20 a.m. after being shot in the back. Some contend that the 27-year-old Rich, who was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was murdered for leaking emails about how the party rigged the presidential primary in favor of Hillary Clinton. Rich’s family – perhaps under pressure from clandestine forces to remain quiet – have stated that such accusations are untrue.
Assange and his supporters have repeatedly maintained he has done nothing wrong, stating that he is a journalist and that the public has a right to know what their corrupt leaders are doing. Governments have maintained that the data he published is top secret and that his actions did and does endanger lives.
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President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order banning the federal government from taking any action to restrict Americans free speech rights.
The order ensures “that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
It also ensures “that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen” and “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”
Meta earlier this month ended its practice of censoring posts on Facebook, Instagram and Threads after CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration pressured the company to remove posts related to COVID-19, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections – including suppressing the New York Post’s explosive story on Hunter Biden’s laptop – and other matters.
“We started building social media to give people a voice,” Zuckerberg said in announcing the decision. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”
Twitter, now X, also removed posts under pressure from the Biden administration before Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk bought the social media platform in 2022.
Trump’s executive order also instructs the U.S. Attorney General to investigate past cases of government censorship.
“The Attorney General, in consultation with the heads of executive departments and agencies, shall investigate the activities of the Federal Government over the last 4 years that are inconsistent with the purposes and policies of this order and prepare a report to be submitted to the President, through the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken based on the findings of the report,” the order states.
Dan McCaleb is the executive editor of The Center Square. He welcomes your comments. Contact Dan at [email protected].
President Donald Trump on Monday signed scores of executive orders, including one to withdraw from the World Health Organization.
WHO, based in Geneva, Switzerland, serves as the United Nation’s health agency and is responsible global public health.
In his order, Trump said he notified the UN about the proposed withdrawal in 2020 “due to the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.”
“In addition, the WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments,” according to the proclamation. “China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300% of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90% less to the WHO.”
Trump said that the U.S. had long been forced to overpay for WHO during a Monday evening news conference.
“We were paying $500 million. It seemed a little unfair to me,” he said. “China pays $39 million and we pay $500 million and China’s a bigger country.”
The U.S. has been a part of WHO since 1948, the year the organization was founded. The U.S. withdrawal makes it the only major world power not a member of the 194-country health organization.
Trump previously called WHO “a puppet of China.”
It will take a year for Trump’s WHO departure to become official.
