Assange a scoundrel who raped America: Pompeo

The former secretary of state says he’ll be ‘delighted’ to see Julian Assange in a US prison, revealing the WikiLeaks founder made him ‘as mad as I have ever been in my life’.

ADAM CREIGHTON - 25 January 2023

1/2

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, a likely Republican contender for president in 2024, has slammed Julian Assange as a “scoundrel” who “raped America”, revealing he would be “delighted” when the Australian founder of WikiLeaks was “thrown into an American federal Penitentiary”.

In his latest book published on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT), Mr Pompeo said he lobbied the Ecuadorean embassy in London as America’s top diploma “hard … to kick Assange out of his pathetic accommodations inside … and they finally capitulated on April 11th, 2019”, after which the US “piled on 17 more charges”.

The US is seeking to extradite Mr Assange, 51, accusing him of crimes under the 1917 Espionage Act related to WikiLeaks’ publication in 2010 of vast troves of classified material related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, humiliating Washington by revealing a higher casualty count and other embarrassing deliberations.

Mr Pompeo, in Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, widely seen as laying the groundwork for a presidential bid, wrote he was “as mad as I have ever been in my life over the exposure of some of the CIA’s most sensitive espionage tools”, mocking the idea Mr Assange was a journalist but rather “a useful idiot for Russia to exploit”.

“I wanted the Russians to know I was on a mission to crush the nominally independent hacking groups they sponsored and used as their pawns”.

Mr Assange has been imprisoned at Belmarsh in the UK since his removal from the Ecuadorean embassy in 2019, where he had lived since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden (where he was required for questioning on accusations of rape) and the US.

The revelations in the book highlight the challenge the Australian government, which is separately seeking the US’s help to acquire nuclear powered submarines as part of the AUKUS security pact, will face in seeking to convince the Biden administration to end its pursuit of Mr Assange.

Anthony Albanese in November said he had personally raised the issue with the US government since becoming Prime Minister. “My position is clear and has been made clear to the U.S. administration: That it is time that this matter be brought to a close,” he told parliament then.

Gabriel Shipton, Mr Assange’s brother based in Melbourne, said Mr Pompeo’s “blatant political interference in Julian‘s prosecution should be more than enough for the Australian government to launch an immediate intervention to bring Julian home”.

“Pompeo’s blatant disregard for the rule of law is just another sign of how rotten the case against Julian is,” he told The Australian.

(continued)

>>18221258

2/2

Jennifer Robinson, a counsel and friend of Mr Assange since 2010, said Mr Pompeo’s leadership aspirations “presented a grave concern to every journalist in the US and around the world.”

“He clearly doesn’t understand the public interest role played by whistle blowers and journalists in democracies and his allegations of the harm caused by Wikileaks publications are not supported by the US government’s own evidence in the extradition proceedings in the UK,” she told The Australian.

A British Judge in January 2021 ruled Mr Assange was a suicide risk if extradited to the US, a verdict later overturned and decision given the green light by the British home secretary Priti Patel in June last year.

Mr Assange is now awaiting the result of a final appeals in the UK courts, and separately to the European Court of Human Rights.

“If you believe that there should be zero government secrets – absolutely none – then Assange and Snowden are heroes,” Mr Pompeo wrote, referring to Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence official who leaked classified material before absconding to Moscow.

“But if you, like me, believe that classified information must be protected to keep our nation and the men and women who serve it safe, then they’re monsters,” he added in his latest book, adding that Assange had forced the defence department to “shell out billions” on new security systems.

The revelation came as the new Republican majority in the US congress plans an investigation into potential overreach by the US intelligence services, dubbed a new ‘Church committee’ harking back to a similar congressional committee established in the 1970s.

Former president Donald Trump, reflecting a political divisions in the GOP, reportedly considered granting Mr Assange a pardon. Nothing Assange did was illegal in Britain or Australia.

Mr Pompeo’s book also attracted controversy in the US for mocking the “disproportionate global uproar” of the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in 2018.

“Just as the media spent years trying to drive a wedge between me and President Trump, they spent the ensuing weeks trying to fracture America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia,” he wrote.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/julian-assange-a-scoundrel-who-raped-america-says-mike-pompeo-in-new-book-never-give-an-inch/news-story/16579207592a7ba40321c8a8238c74a1