LONDON — Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who released reams of secret documents that embarrassed the United States government, was arrested by the British police on Thursday at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he had lived since 2012, after Ecuador withdrew the asylum it had granted him.
The Metropolitan Police said that Mr. Assange had been detained partly in connection with an extradition warrant filed by the authorities in the United States, raising the possibility that Mr. Assange, 47, could be sent there for trial on charges related to the publication of the documents.
President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador said on Twitter that his country had decided to stop sheltering Mr. Assange after “his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols,” a decision that cleared the way for the British authorities to detain him.
The relationship between Mr. Assange and Ecuador has been a rocky one, even as it offered him refuge and even citizenship, and WikiLeaks said last Friday that Ecuador “already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest” and predicted that Mr. Assange would be expelled from the embassy “within ‘hours to days.’ ”
Video footage showed a bearded Mr. Assange being taken down the steps of the red brick embassy in the wealthy area of Knightsbridge in central London by several plainclothes police officers and put into a gray police truck that was waiting to take him away.
The United States Justice Department has charged Mr. Assange, 47, in relation to the publication of classified documents, a fact that prosecutors accidentally made public in November.
Barry J. Pollack, a lawyer for Mr. Assange, accused the United States of conducting what he said was “an unprecedented effort by the United States seeking to extradite a foreign journalist to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information.”
Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, said on Thursday that he was aware of the reports about Mr. Assange’s arrest but referred all inquiries to the British authorities.
But Mr. Assange’s initial arrest on Thursday arose from something much more innocuous: He faces a charge in a British court of jumping bail, and the Metropolitan Police said in a statement that Mr. Assange had been arrested by officers at the embassy on a warrant issued by Westminster Magistrates’ Court in 2012, for failing to surrender to the court.
Mr. Assange is also suspected of aiding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by releasing material stolen from the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. In July, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking those computers, and the indictment contends that at least one of them was in contact with WikiLeaks.
Mr. Assange’s arrest also opens a new avenue for United States counterintelligence investigations into Russia’s efforts to interfere with the presidential election.
Attorney General William Barr has said that Robert S. Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating that interference, found no evidence that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russian efforts.
But indictments filed by the special counsel have indicated that Mr. Assange may be in a unique position to know about any possible intersection of the simultaneous efforts by Russia and the Trump campaign to damage the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
An indictment filed by the special counsel’s office in January said that a top Trump campaign official had dispatched Mr. Trump’s friend Roger Stone to get information from WikiLeaks about the potential disclosure of hacked Democratic Party emails.
Democratic Party officials had already publicly accused Russia of hacking the party’s computers and working through WikiLeaks to disseminate the stolen materials.
Mr. Assange took refuge in the embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced questions about sexual assault allegations. He has insisted that the accusations against him are false, and has said that the Swedish authorities intend to extradite him to the United States.
Sweden has rescinded its arrest warrant for Mr. Assange, but prosecutors have stressed that the case has not been closed and could resume.
Ecuador gave Mr. Assange asylum in 2012, but he has been an irritant in its relations with Britain, the United States and other countries. Mr. Moreno, who became the country’s president in 2017, had looked for a face-saving way to get him out of the arrangement.
Mr. Moreno, in a video statement, said that Mr. Assange had exhausted the patience of his hosts, outlining of litany of grievances: the installation of electronic interference equipment, the blocking of security cameras, and attacks on guards.
“Finally two days ago, WikiLeaks, the organization of Mr. Assange, threatened the government of Ecuador,” Mr. Moreno said, an apparent reference to allegations from the organization that Mr. Assange had been subject to a spying operation. “My government has nothing to fear and doesn’t act under threat.”
In his video, Mr. Moreno singled out the recent release by WikiLeaks of information about the Vatican as evidence that Mr. Assange had continued to work with WikiLeaks to violate “the rule of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states.”
Alan Duncan, the minister responsible for Europe and the Americas at Britain’s Foreign Office, said in a statement that the arrest had followed “extensive dialogue” between the two countries.
Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager who has since been convicted of financial crimes, reportedly offered in 2017 to help Ecuador hand Mr. Assange over to American authorities, but the deal was never struck.
In December, 2017, Ecuador gave Mr. Assange citizenship, and was preparing to appoint him to a diplomatic post in Russia, but the British government made clear that if he left the embassy, he would not have diplomatic immunity.
The Ecuadorean government said in March last year that it had cut off Mr. Assange’s internet access, saying that he had violated an agreement to stop commenting on, or trying to influence, the politics of other countries. The government also imposed other restrictions on him, limiting his visitors and requiring him to clean his bathroom and look after his cat.
He sued the Ecuadorean government in October, claiming that it was violating his rights.
Mr. Assange, who was born in Australia, created WikiLeaks as a vehicle for people to publish secret materials anonymously. It gained enormous attention in 2010, releasing troves of classified United States documents and videos about the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and confidential cables sent among diplomats.
The files documented the killing of civilians and journalists and the abuse of detainees by forces of the United States and other countries, as well as by private contractors, and it aired officials’ unvarnished, often unflattering views of allies and of American actions. It also revealed the identities of people working with coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, which United States officials said put their lives at risk.
An Army private, Bradley Manning — now known as Chelsea Manning — was convicted of leaking that collection of files and was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but President Barack Obama commuted the sentence after Ms. Manning had served almost seven years.
During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails stolen from the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. United States investigators have said that the systems were hacked by Russian agents.
Mr. Assange made no secret of his intent to damage Mrs. Clinton, but he has insisted that he did not get the emails from Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/world/europe/julian-assange-wikileaks-ecuador-embassy.html
2019-04-11 11:47:25Z
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