The Wall Street Journal is reporting the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and is confident it can get him extradited to the U.S. to face charges in court.
Over the past year, U.S. prosecutors have discussed several types of charges they could potentially bring against Mr. Assange, the people said. Mr. Assange has lived in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since receiving political asylum from the South American country in 2012.
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Ecuador’s relationship with Mr. Assange has deteriorated sharply since last year’s election of President Lenin Moreno, who has described him as a “stone in our shoe” and said his continued presence at the embassy is unsustainable.
An indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller that portrayed WikiLeaks as a tool of Russian intelligence for releasing thousands of hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign has made it more difficult for Mr. Assange to mount a defense as a journalist ...
Prosecutors have considered publicly indicting Mr. Assange to try to trigger his removal from the embassy, the people said, because a detailed explanation of the evidence against Mr. Assange could give Ecuadorean authorities a reason to turn him over.
The exact charges Justice Department might pursue remain unclear, but they may involve the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the disclosure of national defense-related information.
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A lawyer for Mr. Assange, Barry Pollack, said he hadn’t heard a prosecution was in the works.
“We have heard nothing from authorities suggesting that a criminal case against Mr. Assange is imminent,” Mr. Pollack said. “Prosecuting someone for publishing truthful information would set a terrible and dangerous precedent.”
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President Trump has sent conflicting messages about Mr. Assange, saying “I love WikiLeaks” during the 2016 campaign and praising the group after its disclosures of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails.
Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone told an associate earlier this year he was working to get Mr. Assange a blanket pardon from Mr. Trump, according to text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. He wrote editorials and publicly advocated for such a pardon, though he told the Journal that he had never discussed his efforts with the president.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, however, said last year when he was CIA director that WikiLeaks is akin to a foreign “hostile intelligence service” and a U.S. adversary. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Mr. Assange’s arrest was a “priority.”
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Mr. Mueller obtained an indictment earlier this year against a dozen Russian officers accused of hacking into Democrats’ computer networks and staging the release of the documents, including through WikiLeaks, during the 2016 campaign.
After a series of criminal cases against Russian and other foreign intelligence officers, U.S. officials have grown more comfortable with disclosing the sensitive material required for such prosecutions, people familiar with the matter said. Prosecutors would need to rely on such evidence if they wanted to portray Mr. Assange as an agent of a foreign government.
U.S. Is Optimistic It Will Prosecute Assange (WSJ) *Note: Most WSJ articles appear behind a paywall