Assange Focus on Trump’s Motives Ensnares Comey, Rohrabacher
Assange Called a Threat to People Who ‘Put Their Lives at Risk’
(Bloomberg) -- Julian Assange was swept up in President Donald Trump’s campaign against embarrassing leaks, his lawyer told a London court, as the WikiLeaks founder kicked off his fight against his extradition to the U.S.
The decision to pursue Assange, which only occurred after Trump was elected, was driven by the president’s desire to stifle damaging White House leaks, said Edward Fitzgerald, Assange’s lawyer. He cited former FBI Director James Comey, who described a conversation about jailing journalists.
“The prosecution became a political imperative,” Fitzgerald said on the first day of the London trial. Assange “was a symbol of all that Trump condemned.”
The 48-year-old faces a maximum prison term of 175 years in the U.S. for charges that he conspired to obtain and disclose classified documents passed to him by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. The documents, including 90,000 Afghanistan war-related activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related reports and 250,000 State Department cables, were published by WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011.
The hearing, the first part of a month-long trial, is taking place at an east London court where a noisy crowd of hundreds of supporters had to be warned to stay quiet, because Assange said he was struggling to concentrate.
Fitzgerald doubled down on allegations that he made last week that Trump was prepared to offer the WikiLeaks founder a pardon if he “played ball” and denied Russia’s involvement in Democratic National Committee leaks during the 2016 election.
Former-U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher “wanted us to believe they were acting on behalf of the president,” Fitzgerald said Monday.
Rohrabacher “presented it as a win-win solution,” that would benefit Trump politically and “put a stop to” Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, he said.
During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks published a series of DNC emails damaging to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton that U.S. intelligence believes were hacked by Russia as part of its effort to influence the election.
The White House denied last week that a pardon had ever been offered to Assange.
“The president barely knows Dana Rohrabacher other than he’s an ex-congressman,” Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement. Rohrabacher also disputed Assange’s verion of events.
James Lewis, a lawyer for the U.S., told the judge that Assange’s case has little to do with freedom of the press. He urged the court instead to look at the potential harm from WikiLeaks’ largely unredacted leaks.
“This is not a case involving any charges of publications of disclosure of war crimes or matters such as that,” Lewis said. “It’s limited solely to the disclosure of sources where there is obvious harm.”
For the most part, Assange has let his attorney do the talking. Still, he interrupted proceedings to complain about the noise outside the courtroom even if he sympathized with the protesters’ motives.
“I understand the public support and that they must be disgusted,” Assange said, before the judge told him to sit down again.
Fitzgerald said, however, that it’s very unlikely that Assange will testify.
Assange has attracted a broad coterie of supporters including the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis as well as members of the French Yellow Vest movement.
Assange has been in London’s notorious Belmarsh prison since he was evicted in April from the Ecuadorian embassy where he had been given refuge for several years after skipping bail to avoid questioning in a Swedish sexual-assault case. That case was dropped in November after Swedish prosecutors said the allegations had been weakened as the memories of witnesses faded.
Lewis tried to take the court back a decade to when WikiLeaks’ publication of the Manning materials made headlines worldwide. But Lewis focused on the sources -- journalists, dissidents and human rights activists, who were often named in the documents.
The leaks left hundreds at risk, some of whom had to be relocated to the U.S. for their protection and others who “disappeared” and couldn’t be located, he said. The classified information that Assange and Manning leaked was “useful to an enemy of the United States,” Lewis said.
Another set of hearings is also scheduled in May and a decision on Assange’s fate may not be issued until June.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ellen Milligan in London at emilligan11@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Jonathan Browning
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