The US Considered Kidnapping and Even Assassinating Julian Assange

Next month, British prosecutors, on behalf of the US government, will argue before a British High Court that a judge’s move to block the extradition of Australian journalist Julian Assange should be overturned. It will mark the latest in the United States’ legal attack against the WikiLeaks founder. Yet even as the High Court gets ready to hear arguments that will help decide whether Assange will stand trial in the United States, a fuller and darker picture has emerged of the US government’s extralegal campaign against Assange.

A bombshell investigation by Yahoo News, based on interviews with over thirty former US officials, gives the most in-depth picture to date of the CIA’s war on WikiLeaks. And it’s truly disturbing. The tactics weighed by the CIA under Mike Pompeo — including kidnapping and assassinating — were so extreme they even alarmed members of the National Security Council and White House lawyers, hardly Assange supporters.

Some became so concerned about the legality of what the CIA was proposing, they alerted congressional oversight committees. According to Michael Isikoff, one of the three reporters who worked on the Yahoo News story, the arguments over whether to kidnap Assange “were one of the more contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency, and it was all done in secret. The public had no idea this was going on.” Pompeo has publicly responded to the allegations by asserting that those who spoke to Yahoo should be prosecuted for exposing CIA activities. But he conceded that “pieces of it are true.”