United States v. Journalism: Julian Assange likely to be prohibited from attending European Court of Human Rights hearings

The Wikileaks founder’s remaining legal options to avoid extradition to the US narrow as he continues his detention at London’s Belmarsh Prison

It is very unlikely that Julian Assange will be permitted to physically attend hearings at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, in the event that his legal team is able to successfully bring his case to this body.

Lawyers for the Wikileaks founder submitted an appeal to the ECHR last December.

“The U.K. authorities’ case against bail has always been that he is ‘a significant flight risk’ and a reminder of his seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy,” Tim Dawson of the International Federation of Journalists, told Truthout. “I can’t see that they are going to allow anything similar to arise.”

Kevin Gosztola, an independent journalist who’s written a book on the Assange case, reminded the publication that the appeals process taking place within the British court system would need to be exhausted before the case could theoretically proceed to the ECHR.

“A fear among the Assange legal team is that the [British] High Court of Justice may issue a final decision on the extradition and then the authorities could whisk him away to an airplane,” Gosztola added. “He could be in transit to the U.S. before his attorneys are notified of the outcome of the appeal and can appeal to the ECHR.”

High Court Judge Sir Jonathan Swift rejected Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US on June 6.

In light of this new development, I am once again running the timeline on Wikileaks and Julian Assange first published by this page in January 2022. What follows is an attempt to chronicle the history of both with a comprehensive single-source account of these two household names many actually know very little about:

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October 4, 2006 – The Wikileaks.org domain name is registered.

December 26, 2006 – Wikileaks publishes its first leak: an order signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a leader of Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union, to assassinate other government officials.

July 12, 2007 – Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh are killed by a US airstrike in Iraq. According to Reuters Baghdad Bureau Chief Dean Yates, the US military confiscated Noor-Eldeen’s two cameras so that nobody would see what he had been photographing. Later that evening, a US military spokesperson releases a statement which quotes a US lieutenant as saying: “Nine insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight. One insurgent was wounded and two civilians were killed during the firefight. The two civilians were reported as employees for the Reuters news service. There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.” The insinuation that a “firefight” had taken place is relayed by Reuters, as well as other news outlets, because video of the incident is not shown to reporters and is classified.

July 15, 2007 – Cameras belonging to slain Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen are returned. Found on one of the cameras is a photograph of a US soldier timestamped some three hours after Noor-Eldeen’s death. Ten days later, Reuters Baghdad Bureau Chief Dean Yates meets with two US generals for an off-the-record meeting in which he is shown approximately three minutes of video depicting “suspicious” behavior by the individuals on the ground that day in Baghdad, just before they were killed by the US.

August 31, 2007 – The Guardian, crediting Wikileaks as the source of the information, publishes a report detailing the extensive corruption of Daniel Arap Moi, who had served as president of Kenya from 1978 to 2002. The 110-page report by international risk consultancy Kroll chronicles how relatives and associates of Moi allegedly used a variety of strategies, including the formation of shell companies and secret trusts, to move more than a billion pounds in government funds into accounts in nearly 30 countries. The report was commissioned by the Kenyan government and, according to the Guardian, Kroll would not confirm or deny the authenticity of the document. The Kenyan government did however confirm that it received the report in April 2004, noting that it found it to be incomplete and inaccurate. 

November 7, 2007 – Wikileaks publishes the Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) standard operating procedures (SOP), the military’s manual for running the Guantanamo Bay prison.

September 17, 2008 – Wikileaks publishes data from Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s personal email account. The emails – obtained by Wikileaks from a group of hackers affiliated with the group Anonymous – exposes the fact that Palin had used her private yahoo.com email address to conduct official state business. Among the published emails are exchanges with several Alaskan officials, including Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell; Amy McCorkell, whom Palin appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse; a draft letter to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; a discussion of nominations to the state court of appeals; and correspondence about the Alaska Department of Public Safety. Photos of the governor’s family are also published.

November 1, 2008 – Wikileaks publishes The Cry of Blood, a Kenya National Commission on Human Rights report detailing the killing or disappearance of more than 500 young men by the Kenyan Police since mid-2007. According to Wikileaks, the report had been submitted to Kenyan authorities as well as the United Nations Committee Against Torture, but was never made publicly available. The report includes the identifies of the individuals who were executed and/or who are still missing, as well as medical forensic evidence implicating the nation’s police, morgue records, and post-mortem examination reports. According to the report, these acts were perpetrated against members of the Mungiki in an effort to make the public believe that members of this group were themselves responsible. Wikileaks says that it published the report because “because the Kenya press will not discuss this evidence of crimes committed by the Kenya Police for political reasons – the victims are mainly alleged members of the Mungiki sect which because of sustained political propaganda is regarded by many Kenyans as a terrorist cult. When the crimes of the Kenya Police are widely known, there will be pressure to commit the Kenya Police Commissioner and other high ranking Kenyans to the International Criminal Court. They have been able to avoid justice and enjoy impunity in Kenya. Until now.”

February 7, 2009 – Wikileaks publishes 6,780 previously unreleased Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. Although the reports – analysis of legislative policy issues – are not classified, their public release is essentially made at the discretion of congressional members. According to Wikileaks, the documents were captured by a source via the congressional intranet.         

October 2009 – Chelsea Manning deploys to Iraq, serving as an intelligence analyst at Forward Operating Base Hammer, near Baghdad, where she is granted access to Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) as well as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), two networks used by US officials to transmit classified documents electronically.

October 4, 2009 – Wikileaks publishes Joint Services Publication 440, a 2,389-page document serving as the UK military’s instruction manual for, among other things, “dealing with leaks, investigative journalists.”    

November 25, 2009 – Wikileaks publishes the transcripts of more than 570,000 pager messages sent on September 11, 2001 to private sector and unclassified pagers.

February 18, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes what becomes known as the Reykjavik 13 cable, which describes meetings between US embassy chief Sam Watson and members of the Icelandic government, together with British Ambassador Ian Whiting. The talks are centered on the Icesave dispute between Iceland, the Netherlands, and the UK, which occurred when Icelandic bank Landsbanki was placed in receivership in October 2008, affecting hundreds of thousands of retail depositors in the latter two countries. According to the cable, Foreign Affairs Permanent Secretary Einar Gunnarsson and Political Advisor Kristjan Guy Burgess try to make their case for why the US should help Iceland get the issue on the International Money Fund (IMF) agenda. The pair also suggest that all of the parties involved might benefit if a new repayment agreement was reached by the three nations. What generates the most headlines is the suggestion by Gunnarsson and Burgess that Iceland is being bullied by two larger and more powerful countries and that the US “position of neutrality was tantamount to watching the bullying take place.”

March 15, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes a 32-page US counterintelligence investigation detailing the various ways the Pentagon had planned to deal with the publisher. According to the report, because Wikileaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers,” one of those tactics recommended “the identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site.”  

April 5, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes a classified US military video entitled Collateral Murder, which depicts US forces indiscriminately killing more than a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had filed Freedom of Information Act requests and had been attempting to obtain the video since the July 12, 2007 incident occurred.  The US government had previously investigated the attack, before concluding that the military had acted in accordance with the Pentagon’s “Rules of Engagement”. The video Wikileaks publishes shows that the carnage of that day was also coupled with casual commentary like:  

“Look at those dead bastards.”

“Nice.”

And:

“Good shoot’n.”

“Thank you.”

In the video, Chmagh is fired on by US forces once again after attempting to rise to his feet for about three minutes.          

May 26, 2010 – Chelsea Manning is arrested at Forward Operating Base Hammer outside Baghdad. Several days later, she is transferred to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. The development comes several weeks after Manning divulged to Adrian Lamo that she had provided Wikileaks with video of the deadly July 12, 2007 Baghdad helicopter attack as well as hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables. Lamo, a former hacker himself, contacted military officials after Manning boasted of what she had done via instant messenger. During the course of their chats, Manning also confessed to giving Wikileaks a video of a May 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan which killed more than 140 people, and a classified military document which categorizes Wikileaks as a security threat, as well as some 260,000 classified diplomatic cables. News of the arrest as well as Lamo’s involvement was first reported by Wired’s Threat Level blog.

June 16, 2010 – Wikileaks announces that it is planning to publish a military video of a deadly May 2009 US airstrike in Garani, a village in Afghanistan. According to the Afghan government, at least 140 civilians, including more than 90 children, were killed in the attack.

July 25, 2010 – Wikileaks, along with three media partners – The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel – begin publishing the first of 91,731 classified military documents that would become the Afghan War Logs. The documents, covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009, offer a picture of the war that is a lot different from the rosier one offered publicly by US officials. Some of the key findings first published by the New York Times follow below:   

“• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.”

July 29, 2010 – Chelsea Manning is moved from Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, and is designated as a prisoner with Prevention of Injury (POI) status, which means that she is forced to sleep naked at night, without sheets, on a mattress with a built-in pillow.

August 11, 2010 – Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, flies to Stockholm to give a lecture at the Christian Association of Social Democrats, an appearance partly arranged by a woman known as “Miss A,” who arranges for Assange to stay at her apartment while she’s away. She returns to the apartment a day early and the two have sex. Miss A later tells police that the sex was consensual but that Assange was forceful and refused to use a condom, claims that Assange has always denied. Several days later, Assange has sex with another woman, identified in court documents as “Miss W”.

August 19, 2010 – Miss A and Miss W, who had known one another prior to their encounters with Julian Assange, connect via phone to share concerns about their experiences with the Wikileaks founder.

August 20, 2010 – Miss A and Miss W visit a police station to inquire if it might be possible to compel Julian Assange to take an STD test. The pair speak to a police officer who happens to be an acquaintance of Miss A and, contrary to standard protocol for such circumstances, the meeting is not recorded. During the questioning, police announce that Assange is to be arrested and questioned. It is alleged that when Miss W hears this, she refuses to provide any additional testimony and refuses to sign paperwork about the testimony she’d already given. Because Sweden’s public prosecution laws do not require consent of the victim, police proceed to issue an arrest warrant anyway, with Swedish prosecutors leaking the statements of both women to the Expressen tabloid, a Swedish newspaper. Court documents show that while Miss W is at the police station, she sends a text saying that she “did not want to put any charges on JA [Julian Assange] but that the police were keen on getting a grip on him.” Furthermore, according to these documents, Miss W also told a friend that she felt that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her,” and that “it was the police who made up the charges.”

August 20, 2010 – The Swedish prosecutor’s office issues an arrest warrant for Julian Assange stemming from an allegation of rape by one woman as well as an allegation of molestation by another. The latter covers a broad range of offenses under Swedish law.

August 21, 2010 – Miss A receives a call from police authorities seeking additional information about her encounter with Julian Assange. She provides a statement over the phone allegedly leading the police to believe that she may have a used condom from the previous week, which the police subsequently retrieve as evidence.

August 21, 2010 – An arrest warrant for Julian Assange is withdrawn by Swedish authorities, after the chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, finds that “there is no longer reason to believe that Mr. Assange has committed rape,” according to a statement made by her office. A spokesperson for Finne said that the case had initially been reviewed by a different prosecutor. The prosecutor’s office also announces that a separate molestation allegation against Assange remains under investigation. The publisher vehemently denies all of the accusations against him, referring to them as “dirty tricks” made as payback for his disclosures. The US immediately rejects any implication that it was involved in the allegations made against Assange, with Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell calling such insinuations as “absurd.”   

August 31, 2010 – Julian Assange is questioned by police in Stockholm regarding the allegations of molestation made against him, accusations he adamantly denies.

September 1, 2010 – Marianne Ny, the director of public prosecutions in Sweden, reopens the rape investigation against Julian Assange. In announcing her decision, Ny says that despite what was decided by a lower official several weeks prior, “considering information available at present, my judgment is that the classification of the crime is rape.”       

October 18, 2010 – Julian Assange is denied Swedish residency. The publisher had submitted an application in August, hoping to take advantage of the country’s laws protecting whistleblowers.

October 22, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes 391,832 classified documents covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. The mass disclosure becomes known as the Iraq War Logs. Some of the key findings from this latest batch of documents follow below:

• The official tally of civilian fatalities was undercounted by approximately 15,000 people.

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape, and murder by Iraq’s military and police.

• US forces were given a video showing a dozen Iraqi soldiers executing a prisoner with his hands bound.

• According to one of the logs, a US medical officer discovered “bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and neck” on the body of a man Iraqi officials had claimed died by suicide.

• In another incident, a US Apache helicopter gunship executed two men on the ground who had been trying to surrender.

November 18, 2010 – Stockholm District Court approves a request by Swedish authorities to detain Julian Assange in connection with allegations of sexual molestation, unlawful coercion, and rape, and international arrest warrants are issued. Marianne Ny, the director of public prosecutions in Sweden, confirms to the New York Times that two arrests warrants, one applicable within the European Union as well as an international one via Interpol, have been issued. Assange’s legal team notes that Assange is willing to be questioned by Ny’s prosecution team in the UK, either at Scotland Yard or at the Swedish embassy.

November 28, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes 251,287 US State Department cables, dating back to 1966.

December 1, 2010 – Following pressure from the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, particularly Senator and committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, Amazon drops Wikileaks from its servers.

December 2, 2010 – Real estate mogul and The Apprentice host Donald Trump calls Wikileaks “disgraceful” and says “I think there should be, like, death penalty or something” during an exchange with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade.

December 3, 2010 – Due to disruptions to its servers and what Wikileaks called “a mass distributed denial of service attack,” Julian Assange announces that “over 100,000 people” are in possession of the entire archive of 251,287 cables “in encrypted form.”

“If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically,” Assange tells The Guardian, noting that the individuals who have these encrypted files would be provided with the key to decode them, ensuring that even if Wikileaks were to be shut down, the documents would still be shared with the public.

December 4, 2010 – PayPal freezes Wikileaks’ account because, according to the online payment site, it was being used for “illegal” activity.

December 6, 2010 – Attorney General Eric Holder says that the US Justice Department has “a very serious, active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature” into WikiLeaks.

December 6, 2010 – PostFinance, the banking arm of the Swiss post office, freezes Julian Assange’s accounts, affecting both a defense fund as well as personal assets worth approximately 31,000 euros. The Associated Press cites a spokesperson for the bank who offers a public assurance that Assange would get that money back. According to a statement by PostFinance, the account was closed because Assange had given the bank false information regarding his place of residence. “(Mr) Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance. For this reason, PostFinance is entitled to close his account,” the statement noted. Wikileaks has previously advertised the account to “donate directly to the Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks Staff Defence Fund.”

December 7, 2010 – Julian Assange surrenders to British authorities in London in connection with allegations of unlawful coercion, sexual molestation and rape, stemming from accusations made by two Swedish women. The publisher is determined by the judge to be a flight risk on account of his “nomadic” lifestyle and financial resources, and is denied bail.

December 16, 2010 – Julian Assange is freed on $315,000 bail after spending nine days in London’s Wandsworth Prison. Per the conditions of his release, Assange will now be required to spend every night at Ellingham Hall, an estate in eastern England owned by Vaughan Smith, the founder of a journalists’ club in London.  

January 18, 2011 – An internal government review of the impact the publication of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables had on national security reveals that what government officials told the public was intentionally misleading in an effort to help build a case against Wikileaks. Reuters, citing a congressional official briefed on the review, said that the Obama administration’s public statements to the contrary were made in the hopes of strengthening legal efforts to shut down the Wikileaks website. “We were told [the impact of WikiLeaks revelations] was embarrassing but not damaging,” the official is quoted as saying. The article goes on to cite two US intelligence officials who say the opposite: that they’re aware of specific cases where damage caused by Wikileaks had been assessed as being rather serious. They are, however, unable to offer any evidence for these claims and do not say what these cases relate to.

February 24, 2011 – A British court rules that Julian Assange should be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault, a decision Assange attacks as nothing more than a “rubber-stamping process.”

April 24, 2011 – The New York Times publishes the Guantanamo Bay files, a trove of 759 “detainee assessment” dossiers written between 2002 and 2009, one for all but 20 of the military base’s prisoners, which were first obtained by Wikileaks. The documents detail guidelines for interrogating prisoners as well as justification for keeping certain inmates at the base, while releasing others. Some of the most notable findings revealed by these documents follow below.   

• The documents reveal information about the many inmates caught up in the US military’s expansive post-9/11 dragnet. Among them is Mohammed Sadiq, an 89-year-old Afghan suffering from dementia, major depressive disorder, and osteoarthritis, who was taken to Guantanamo after “suspicious documents” were found in his home. Within weeks US investigators determined that Sadiq had no affiliation with al-Qaeda, or any other terror organization, and returned the man to Afghanistan several months later.

• According to the documents, 14-year-old Naqib Ullah spent a year locked up at Guantanamo Bay and was released after US officials admitted that he’d been “a kidnap victim and a forced conscript” for the Taliban.

• The US government had designated the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence service, as a terrorist organization.

• Nearly 100 Guantanamo inmates were listed as having had depressive or psychotic illnesses, with many going on hunger strikes or attempting suicide.

• US authorities held a number of British nationals at the prison, even though they knew these individuals had no connection to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or any other terror organization.

• A significant amount of “intelligence” extracted from some of the inmates was the result of torture. The files detail how some of the prisoners have been so badly tortured that they could never be successfully tried in the US court system.

• The documents detail completely arbitrary reasons for the detention of many Guantanamo prisoners. According to one of the files, one individual was captured “because he was a mullah, who led prayers at Manu mosque in Kandahar province, Afghanistan … which placed him in a position to have special knowledge of the Taliban.”

• The documents detail how many countries – including China, Russia, Tajikistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria, and Tunisia – sent intelligence officials to question Guantanamo inmates.

August 31, 2011 – A trove of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables – the archive Wikileaks has spent the last nine months using to publish documents in partnership with several outlets – is made available online, without redaction to protect sources. According to Wikileaks, the data breach is the result of secret encryption passwords to the entire, unredacted Cablegate archive being published in Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, a book by Guardian reporters David Leigh and Luke Harding. Wikileaks said that it had contacted the US State Department on August 25 to warn officials of a potential breach. The publisher noted the following in an editorial published on its website the following day: “Over time WikiLeaks has been building up, and publishing, the complete Cablegate “library”–the most significant political document ever published. The mammoth task of reading and lightly redacting what amounts to 3,000 volumes or 284 million words of global political history is shared by WikiLeaks and its partners. That careful work has been compromised as a result of the recklessness of the Guardian.”

November 2, 2011 – The British High Court rules against Julian Assange, with judges Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Ouseley ruling that the European arrest warrant against the Wikileaks founder is “proportionate”.

December 1, 2011 – Wikileaks publishes The Spy Files, 287 documents detailing the internal operations of some 160 intelligence contractors all over the world. The documents shine a light on intrusive and illegal mass surveillance capabilities now being deployed by dozens of countries without the knowledge of their citizens.

February 27, 2012 – Wikileaks publishes the first 200 of an estimated five million emails it’s obtained from the servers of Stratfor, the US-based intelligence company. The data – passed to Wikileaks by Anonymous, the activist hacking collective – describes the inner workings of the firm, as well as “privileged information about the US government’s attacks against Julian Assange and Wikileaks and Stratfor’s own attempts to subvert Wikileaks,” the publisher notes.  

May 30, 2012 – The UK Supreme Court rules via a five-to-two vote that Julian Assange should be extradited to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations. The ruling settles the legal question of whether the Swedish prosecutor who’d made the extradition request was a competent “judicial authority” under the terms of the European extradition treaty. Assange’s legal team, nevertheless, secures an immediate stay of at least two weeks before British officials can begin the extradition process.  

June 14, 2012 – The UK Supreme Court rejects Julian Assange’s final request for the court to reconsider a prior ruling that he be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault. Furthermore, the court also determines that Assange must be extradited by midnight on July 7. 

June 19, 2012 – Julian Assange walks into the Ecuadorean embassy in London and asks for political asylum, citing the UN declaration of human rights, as well as his fear that extradition to Sweden could be swiftly followed by extradition to the US, where Assange says he would be at risk for facing the death penalty. A statement released by the embassy declares that Assange will remain at the embassy while his application for asylum is processed.

July 5, 2012 – Wikileaks publishes the Syria Files, consisting of more than 2.4 million emails from more than 680 Syrian politicians, ministries, and companies. The emails date back to August 2006. “It helps us not merely to criticize one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it,” Julian Assange notes in a statement released by Wikileaks. The emails are published in coordination with the following seven publications: Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), ARD (Germany), The Associated Press (United States), L’Espresso (Italy), Owni (France) and Publico.es (Spain).

August 16, 2012 – The government of Ecuador grants asylum to Julian Assange, according to an announcement made by the country’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño. Nevertheless, British authorities insist that this development does not affect the UK’s legal obligation to extradite Assange to Sweden, with British Foreign Minister William Hague announcing that the UK will not allow Assange safe passage to Ecuador. Swedish authorities are reportedly unable to provide assurance to Ecuador that Assange would not be extradited to the US after arriving in Sweden and decline Ecuador’s offer to question Assange with regards to the sexual offences he’d been accused of. According to Patiño, UK officials had also threatened to force their way into the Ecuadorian embassy. It’s reported that the British government also threatened to lift the embassy’s diplomatic status in an effort to fulfil its obligation of extraditing Assange to Sweden.

“Under our law, with Mr Assange having exhausted all options of appeal, the British authorities are under a binding obligation to extradite him to Sweden. We must carry out that obligation and of course we fully intend to do so. The Ecuadorian Government’s decision this afternoon does not change that in any way. Nor does it change the current circumstances in any way. We remain committed to a diplomatic solution that allows us to carry out our obligations as a nation under the Extradition Act,” Foreign Minister Hague declares in an announcement. “We will not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the UK, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so. The UK does not accept the principle of diplomatic asylum.”

September 17, 2012 – Forensic evidence reveals that a condom provided to authorities by one of the women Swedish prosecutors say has accused Julian Assange of sexual assault, does not contain Assange’s DNA. The development comes courtesy of a 100-page document seen by Assange’s legal team. In it, it’s reportedly noted that two different forensic laboratories were unable to find any DNA belonging to the Wikileaks founder. It is alleged that DNA belonging to Assange is found on another condom belonging to the other woman.

November 29, 2012 – Ana Alban, Ecuador’s ambassador to the UK, says that Julian Assange has a chronic lung infection “which could get worse at any moment.” This development comes just a few weeks after Ecuadorean ministers reported that Assange had “visibly lost weight” and that his health was “beginning to be jeopardized.”

February 28, 2013 – Chelsea Manning pleads guilty to 10 charges in connection with the classified materials she’d sent to Wikileaks. The Army private also pleads not guilty to 12 other charges, including “aiding the enemy,” which implies that she knowingly aided al-Qaeda and, in a separate count, that she knowingly made US intelligence accessible to the enemy. “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information… this could spark a domestic debate over the role of the military and our foreign policy in general,” Manning said in a statement she read during a court hearing at Fort Meade.

April 11, 2013 – Wikileaks publishes “The Kissinger Cables,” a trove of more than 1.7 million US State Department cables dating from 1973 to 1976. One of the cables includes a conversation in which Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, says “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” On its website, Wikileaks provides its readers with a search engine for the documents, which had all been previously declassified and released.

July 30, 2013 – Chelsea Manning is found not guilty of “aiding the enemy,” but is nevertheless convicted of six counts of violating the Espionage Act, five counts of stealing government property, as well as a single count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Each charge carries a term of as much as 10 years. Manning faces up to 136 years in prison as a result of the convictions, although many legal experts suspect she’ll be sentenced to far less time.

July 31, 2013 – Brigadier general Robert Carr, the senior counterintelligence officer tasked with leading the Pentagon’s review into the consequences of the Wikileaks disclosures, tells the Chelsea Manning sentencing hearing that the investigation was unable to find a single instance of someone being killed as a result of the documents leaked by Manning. The investigation was conducted by the Information Review Task Force on behalf of the Defense Department.

August 21, 2013 – Chelsea Manning is sentenced to 35 years in prison. She’ll be eligible for parole in approximately seven years. In addition to the prison term, the judge, Col. Denise R. Lind, also says that Manning would be dishonorably discharged and that she would have to forfeit her pay.   

November 25, 2013 – The US Department of Justice (DoJ) concludes that it will not bring charges against Julian Assange. The decision is reached by the Obama administration after government lawyers conclude that it would be impossible to charge the Wikileaks founder for publishing classified documents without also charging major US newspapers, who’ve all done the same. According to published reports, the DoJ describes this dilemma simply as its “New York Times problem.” Wikileaks as well as Assange’s legal team remains skeptical nevertheless, with the organization’s spokesperson, Kristinn Hrafnnson, noting that they will continue to doubt the DoJ’s sincerity “short of an open, official, formal confirmation that the U.S. government is not going to prosecute WikiLeaks.”

July 29, 2014 – Wikileaks publishes a sweeping gagging order issued by the criminal division of the Supreme Court of Victoria in Australia to block the media from reporting about the bribery scandal concerning the Australian central bank’s subsidiaries. The order is a superinjunction, which calls for the order itself to be secret. “With this order, the worst in living memory, the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public,” Julian Assange notes in a statement accompanying publication of the leak. “This is not simply a question of the Australian government failing to give this international corruption case the public scrutiny it is due. Foreign minister Julie Bishop must explain why she is threatening every Australian with imprisonment in an attempt to cover up an embarrassing corruption scandal involving the Australian government. The concept of ‘national security’ is not meant to serve as a blanket phrase to cover up serious corruption allegations involving government officials, in Australia or elsewhere. It is in the public interest for the press to be able to report on this case.”

March 13, 2015 – With the statute of limitations on three of the four charges of sexual assault against Julian Assange set to expire in August, Swedish prosecutors agree to question the Wikileaks founder at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It is a request Assange’s lawyer accepts and welcomes. Marianne Ny, the director of public prosecutions in Sweden, says in a statement that prosecutors had hesitated on questioning Assange in London because doing so in the embassy “would lower the quality of the interview.” According to the Swedish prosecutor’s official request, both the Ecuadorian and the British authorities would have to approve the request before an interview with Assange, a process that Assange’s lawyer, Per Samuelson, told the New York Times could “take some time.”  

March 25, 2015 – Wikileaks publishes the Investment Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

April 16, 2015 – Wikileaks publishes a trove of emails and documents stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment by hackers the prior year. When the hack occurred, it damaged computers at Sony, causing the movie studio to temporarily shut down. The files had already been made public but are now available via a searchable archive on Wikileaks’s website. The Obama administration had previously stated that North Korea was behind the attack. Wikileaks notes in a press release accompanying the publication of the database that the cache reveals “ties to the White House (there are almost 100 US government e-mail addresses in the archive), an ability to impact laws and policies, and connections to the US military-industrial complex.”

May 17, 2015 – Wikileaks publishes an 18-page report compiled by Navy whistleblower William McNeilly, who warns about the “shockingly extreme conditions that our [Britain’s] nuclear weapons system is in” claiming that the UK’s “nuclear weapons are a target that’s wide open to attack.” Among the allegations McNeilly makes in his report is that he was able to access secure areas without proper security checks, and that the HMS Vanguard, one of Britain’s nuclear submarines, is in extremely poor condition. The whistleblower also writes about a conversation in which a senior officer alerted him to the fact that the submarine had been involved in a covered-up collision with a French submarine.

June 19, 2015 – Wikileaks begins publishing the Saudi Cables, comprising more than half a million documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry containing secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world.

August 11, 2015 – Sweden offers to begin negotiations with Ecuador so that its prosecutors can be permitted to enter the latter’s embassy to interview Julian Assange. The concession comes just days before the statute of limitations on the publisher’s sexual assault charges is due to expire. It was reported that Ecuador accepted Sweden’s offer several days after it was initially made. According to a report by The Guardian, Sweden’s justice ministry rejected Ecuador’s proposal to meet this week because its officials were on holiday.

August 13, 2015 – Swedish prosecutors drop their investigation into three allegations of molestation and unlawful coercion against Julian Assange, due to the fact that the five-year statute of limitations to investigate such accusations, made in 2010, is set to expire. The Swedish Prosecution Authority says that it will continue its investigation of the more serious fourth allegation, of rape, against the Wikileaks founder. Because they’ve been unable to question Assange prior to the expiration of the statute, they could not formally file charges against him.

“From the beginning I offered simple solutions,” Assange says in a statement. “Come to the embassy to take my statement or promise not to send me to the United States. This Swedish official refused both. She even refused a written statement … This is beyond incompetence.”

Karin Rosander, director of communications for the Swedish prosecution authority, tells the New York Times that an assistant prosecutor, Ingrid Isgren, had traveled to London on June 16 and 17, but never made it to the embassy because Swedish authorities had yet to finalize the right to question Assange.

October 9, 2015 – Wikileaks publishes the full intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the international trade deal currently in the works between 12 countries representing more than 40% of global GDP. According to the published text, the treaty appears to grant nations the power to curtail legal proceedings if the theft of information is “detrimental to a party’s economic interests, international relations, or national defense or national security,” among several other key provisions.

October 12, 2015 – Following three years of constant surveillance, at a cost of more than 11 million pounds, London’s Metropolitan Police announces that it is ending its 24-hour presence outside of Ecuador’s embassy. Instead, Scotland Yard announces that it will opt to “deploy a number of overt and covert tactics to arrest him.”   

February 5, 2016 – A United Nations (UN) panel rules that Julian Assange has been “arbitrarily detained” by UK and Swedish authorities since his arrest in 2010. The declaration, made by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, called for both British and Swedish authorities to respect Assange’s freedom and also noted that he should be eligible to receive compensation for his ordeal.

June 12, 2016 – Julian Assange tells ITV that Wikileaks plans to release more emails sent by Hillary Clinton in the months ahead. Earlier in the year, the State Department had released the last batch of the 30,068 emails sent using Secretary Clinton’s private email server.

June 14, 2016 – Thousands of files, including opposition research on Donald Trump, are stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the breach, identifies two separate hacker groups it says are responsible for the leak, and, without evidence, determines that both groups are working for the Russian government. According to the firm, these two groups – dubbed by Crowdstrike as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear – were responsible, respectively, for monitoring the DNC’s chat and email communications, and targeting the committee’s opposition research files. Crowdstrike says it believes that the former works for the Federal Security Service (FSB), while the latter works for Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU).  

June 15, 2016 – Gawker publishes an opposition research report on Donald Trump, compiled by a DNC strategist, and forwarded to the publication by the hacker Guccifer 2.0. Gawker reports that the hacker claims to have taken “about 100 Gb of data including financial reports, donors’ lists, election programs, action plans against Republicans, personal mails, etc.” from the DNC. According to the outlet, the hacker also alleges that “the main part” of the thousands of files he/she has extracted is in the custody of Wikileaks.

July 22, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes a trove of 19,252 emails from the DNC, providing insight into the party’s internal tactics to ensure that Secretary Hillary Clinton locked up the Democratic nomination, and not Senator Bernie Sanders. Some of the key findings from the data dump follow below:  

• One party official wrote an email to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda on May 5 wondering if it might prove useful to look at Sanders’ faith (or lack thereof, as this official saw it). “It might may [sic] no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief,” DNC CFO Brad Marshall stated. “Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” Marshall later writes to The Intercept to deny that this quote was about Senator Sanders, although it is unclear who else the message could have possibly been about.

• In a May 21 email, Mark Paustenbach, a committee communications official, writes to a colleague about potentially urging their friends in the media to write that the senator’s campaign is “a mess”.

• An email exchange pondering whether or not to reach out to CNN to correct a story which features Sanders saying that, as president, he would remove Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as the committee’s chairwoman, is met with ridicule from the congresswoman. “This is a silly story,” Wasserman-Schultz wrote. “He isn’t going to be president.”

• Personal information, including for instance, the Social Security of Tom Steyer, the billionaire founder of the Next Gen Climate Action Committee Super PAC, is disclosed.

• Off-the-record correspondence with a number of mainstream outlets, including the Washington Post, Politico, NBC and the Wall Street Journal, featuring private complaints about unfavorable coverage, is published.

• CNN’s Maria Cardona cleared a draft of her May 18 op-ed, “Why Sanders must take the high road,” with the DNC prior to publication. According to correspondence made public by Wikileaks, Cardona sent the committee an email that morning with the subject line “URGENT – DRAFT CNN OPED ON NV,” which contained the line “I want to make sure it is not to heavy handed. Please let me know asap! Thanks!!”

Wasserman-Schultz resigns as DNC chairwoman two days after the emails are published. Almost immediately, the Clinton camp announces that the congresswoman will serve as honorary chair of the campaign’s 50-state program to help elect Democrats around the country. 

July 29, 2016 – Julian Assange tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Wikileaks is in possession of more documents related to the Hillary Clinton campaign that the publisher plans to release.  

August 8, 2016 – Roger Stone boasts to a local Republican Party group in Florida that he had “actually communicated with Julian Assange.” To this day, there is no evidence to support this claim. According to private messages obtained by the Intercept, Wikileaks referred to Stone the very next day as a “bullshitter” who is “Trying to a) imply that he knows anything b) that he contributed to our hard work.”

August 12, 2016 – Guccifer 2.0 releases files stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). While the leak does not include any emails or other communications, the committee’s shared passwords for various news services as well as a federal courts public access system are released. The data dump also discloses congressional contact lists, along with personal cellphone numbers and private email addresses of Democratic House members. As usual, the US intelligence community says, without evidence, that it has a high degree of confidence that the Russian government is responsible for the breach.

August 2016 – Roger Stone and Guccifer 2.0 begin communicating via Twitter. The exchange Stone discloses is brief and features little more than Guccifer 2.0 analyzing the contents of a DCCC voter turnout report. According to the chat logs disclosed by Stone, Guccifer 2.0 describes the difference between a “soft democrat” and a “hard democrat,” noting that “basically how it works is there are people who will vote party line no matter what and there are folks who will actually make a decision. The basic premise of winning an election is turnout your base…”

“Pretty standard” was Stone’s response to this fairly obvious assessment of American electoral politics. It’s unknown if the pair continued their communications elsewhere. 

September 13, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes access to another batch of DNC emails.

September 16, 2016 – Sweden’s Court of Appeal rules that the arrest warrant for Julian Assange in connection with the rape allegation against him will not be dropped.

“After reviewing the existing investigative material and what the parties have stated, the Court of Appeal finds that Julian Assange is still suspected on probable cause of rape,” the three-judge panel in Stockholm states in its ruling. “The Court of Appeal also shares the assessment of the District Court that there is still a risk that Julian Assange will flee.”

September 20, 2016 – Wikileaks contacts Donald Trump, Jr. on this day via a Twitter direct message, according to an email obtained by the Wall Street Journal. The president’s son would later confirm the correspondence by tweeting the contents of his communications with the publisher. A breakdown of what the two parties spoke about follows below:

• Wikileaks asked Trump Jr for comment on putintrump.org, a recently launched website highlighting ties between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump Jr. forwarded this to senior campaign officials, wondering “Do you know the people mentioned and what the conspiracy they are looking for could be?”

• Trump Jr. is asked to “comment on/push” a quote by Hillary Clinton suggesting that the US should “just drone” Assange.

• Requests for both Donald Trump and his son to share the publication’s news stories on Twitter.

• A suggestion that Trump Jr. try to get his followers to dig through the Podesta email dump in search of incriminating information about Clinton.

• A suggestion that Donald Trump not concede the election if he loses in an effort to draw attention to the country’s highly problematic electoral system, specifically “media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption etc.”

• A suggestion that Trump Jr. share information on his Trump Tower meeting with them.

• A suggestion that Donald Trump ask Australia to appoint Assange as its ambassador to the US.

• Wikileaks asks Trump Jr to leak a copy of his father’s tax returns. Trump Jr ignores the request. The individual who’d sent the message from the Wikileaks account reasoned to Trump Jr. that doing so would prevent them from being published by a more “biased source” like the New York Times or MSNBC. The account also notes that if Wikileaks publishes the tax returns, “it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality” because it “won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russian’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.”

September 23, 2016 – Chelsea Manning is disciplined with two weeks of solitary confinement as a result of her suicide attempt while imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

October 2-6, 2016 – Roger Stone tweets numerous times about Wikileaks’ impending publication of additional Hillary Clinton emails and documents. Many interpret these tweets as “advance knowledge” of what Wikileaks would ultimately publish. In reality, there is no evidence of any coordination between Stone and the publisher; Stone’s promises of another data dump by Wikileaks, quite simply, follows several publicly available interviews from earlier in the year in which Assange had promised to reveal more information about the Clinton campaign.

October 7, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes thousands of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Included in the trove are the transcripts of closed-door speeches Clinton gave to various Wall Street firms after leaving the State Department. The Clinton campaign initially declines to confirm the authenticity of the emails and Podesta accuses Russia of being the source of the hack. The emails shine a light on numerous Clinton inconsistencies, including her stances on trade, and banking regulation, among other issues. According to the emails, Clinton – who opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership on the campaign trail, reversing her earlier position – told an audience in 2013 that her “dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” In another speech in 2013, Clinton told members of the National Multi-Housing Council that it’s important to have “both a public and a private position” in politics. “I mean, politics is like sausage being made,” Clinton said, according to the transcript. “It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” The trove also reveals that in an April 2013 speech to Morgan Stanley, Clinton expressed her support for the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which would reduce corporate tax rates while raising the Social Security age. The former secretary of state also noted that the pressure on public officials to divest assets in order to serve has become “very onerous and unnecessary.” In a speech made at a Goldman Sachs event in 2013, Clinton acknowledged that a no-fly zone in Syria, which she still publicly supports, would have killed “a lot of Syrians.”

“Earlier today, the US government removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy,” Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin notes in a statement, without providing any evidence to support this claim.

It’s been reported that Clinton made as much as $225,000 per speech and has made approximately $22 million since resigning as secretary of state. The excerpts were revealed in an email that Tony Carrk, the Clinton campaign’s research director, had sent to Podesta. In the email, Caark had highlighted the aforementioned quotes as being potentially damaging if they were ever made public. 

October 12, 2016 – Donald Trump Jr. exchanges direct messages on Twitter with the Wikileaks account once again. A record of the conversation is given to congressional investigators by Trump Jr.’s lawyers and is then obtained by the Atlantic. According to the chat logs, two days after his father declares “I love WikiLeaks!” the publication’s account sends Trump Jr. a message: “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications.” Furthermore, the account also urges him to suggest to his father to tweet the link to wlsearch.tk, a search tool for exploring the trove of John Podesta emails available on the publisher’s site. Trump Jr. does not reply but 15 minutes later, his father tweets “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!” to his followers. Trump Jr. would tweet the link to the search tool two days later.

October 13, 2016 – Wikileaks releases a statement once again denying ever communicating with Roger Stone, who then sends the publisher’s account a direct message on Twitter in an exchange disclosed by the Atlantic: “Since I was all over national TV, cable and print defending wikileaks and assange against the claim that you are Russian agents and debunking the false charges of sexual assault as trumped up bs you may want to rexamine the strategy of attacking me- cordially R.” The WikiLeaks account responds with the following message: “We appreciate that. However, the false claims of association are being used by the democrats to undermine the impact of our publications. Don’t go there if you don’t want us to correct you.”

October 28, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes an email thread in which Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is shown to have been advised by the campaign’s IT staffers on March 19 to change his email password in response to what turned out to have been a phishing email targeting his account. According to this thread, a campaign staffer categorized the request sent to Podesta to change his email password as “legitimate” and advised him to go through Google’s procedures to change it. A security expert tells CNN that 108 emails affiliated with the Clinton campaign were targeted and that 20 of the links that were sent were clicked. Numerous mainstream outlets report, without evidence, that the email sent to Podesta is linked to a group of Russian hackers known as “fancy bear.” This is then somehow cited as evidence that the Russian government was behind the attack.

November 14, 2016 – Ingrid Isgren, Sweden’s deputy chief prosecutor, begins interviewing Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, in connection with the rape accusation levied against him six years earlier by a woman in Stockholm. The questioning is scheduled to take place during the course of the next few days, and will be conducted by an Ecuadorian prosecutor reading from a list of questions submitted by the Swedish prosecution authority. According to the agreement, Isgren will be permitted to ask Assange to clarify his responses, but will not be able to ask additional questions. Per Samuelson, Assange’s lawyer, noted that he was not permitted to participate in the meeting.

November 25, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes the Yemen Files, a collection of more than 500 documents from the US embassy in Yemen. The files, covering the period from the start of the war in 2009 to March 2015, paint an explicit picture of a US-led conflict rarely reported on by Western media. According to Wikileaks, the files offer “offer documentary evidence of the US arming, training and funding of Yemeni forces in the years building up to the war. The documents reveal, among other things, procurement of many different weapon types: aircraft, vessels, vehicles, proposals for maritime border security control and Yemeni procurement of US biometric systems.”

November 28, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes more than 500,000 diplomatic cables sent in 1979, during the administration of Jimmy Carter. “If any year could be said to be the ‘year zero’ of our modern era, 1979 is it,” Julian Assange notes in a statement. “In 1979 it seemed as if the blood would never stop. Dozens of countries saw assassinations, coups, revolts, bombings, political kidnappings and wars of liberation.” The documents had been previously declassified and made public but were made available in a more accessible format on the Wikileaks website.

December 22, 2016 – Crowdstrike, the company that was hired by the DNC to investigate who hacked its servers earlier in the year, says that it has uncovered proof that Russia’s military intelligence agency was the entity responsible for the intrusion. The Washington Post report relaying this claim notes that Crowdstrike was able to arrive at this conclusion by linking “malware used in the DNC intrusion to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its battle against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine from late 2014 through 2016.” The report cites Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, who says that his firm has “high confidence” that it was the GRU, a unit the company had earlier dubbed “Fancy Bear.”  

January 17, 2017 – President Barack Obama commutes Chelsea Manning’s prison term, clearing the way for her release on May 17. 

February 16, 2017 – Wikileaks publishes documents which show that in the seven months leading up to France’s 2012 presidential election, all of the country’s political parties were targeted by infiltration by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) human (“HUMINT”) and (“SIGINT”) spies. According to Wikileaks, the disclosure is being published as context for the website’s forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series.

March 7, 2017 – Wikileaks begins publishing what it calls “Vault 7,” a massive trove of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents detailing the full scope of the agency’s hacking arsenal. Included in the disclosure is the agency’s range of spying powers against products such as Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Windows, as well as Samsung’s televisions, which the CIA is capable of turning into covert microphones. According to the documents, by the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division essentially functioned as the agency’s own NSA, creating more than 1,000 hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. The leak also reveals that the CIA uses the US consulate in Frankfurt as a covert hacking base covering Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In announcing this latest disclosure, Wikileaks notes that it “has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in “Year Zero” for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in “Vault 7” part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.”

March 24, 2017 – Crowdstrike revises and retracts its previously stated conclusions regarding the 2016 DNC server hack following a Voice of America (VOA) report suggesting that Crowdstrike misrepresented data published by a British think tank. Late last year, the Washington Post cited the International Institute for Strategic Studies in writing that “Ukrainian artillery forces lost more than 50% of their weapons in the two years of conflict and more than 80% of the D-30 howitzers…” According to the VOA, the think tank has disavowed the Crowdstrike report and says that its organization had never been contacted by the company. Crowdstrike would ultimately walk back this part of its report, noting losses of 15% to 20%. When contacted by VOA, the Institute would not comment on Crowdstrike’s conclusions about the DNC hack. Crowdstrike nevertheless defends the central premise of its December report, which is that Fancy Bear penetrated a D-30 targeting app developed by a Ukrainian military officer with malware.

April 13, 2017 – CIA Director Mike Pompeo says that “it’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” during remarks made at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.  

April 20, 2017 – Attorney General Jeff Sessions says that arresting Julian Assange is now a “priority” for the US, with Sessions noting at a press conference in Texas: “We are going to step up our effort and already are stepping up our efforts on all leaks. This is a matter that’s gone beyond anything I’m aware of. We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks and some of them are quite serious.” Later that same day, officials familiar with the matter tell CNN that US authorities have prepared charges in order to seek the arrest of the Wikileaks founder.

May 19, 2017 – Marianne Ny, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, announces that the Swedish government has opted to drop its investigation into an allegation of rape against Julian Assange. According to Ny, this development comes as the result of exhausting all possibilities to properly pursue the charges. Ny notes that she would consider reopening the investigation if Assange “makes himself available” to Swedish authorities. The Metropolitan police noted that Assange is still subject to immediate arrest by British authorities in the event that he were to take a step outside of the embassy. In a statement, Ecuadorean foreign minister, Guillaume Long said: “Given that the European arrest warrant no longer holds, Ecuador will now be intensifying its diplomatic efforts with the U.K. so that Julian Assange can gain safe passage, in order to enjoy his asylum in Ecuador.”

September 17, 2017 – Wikileaks publishes “Sspy Files Russia,” documents detailing how the Kremlin spies on internet and cellphone users. According to the documents, a St. Petersburg-based technology firm called Peter-Service helped the government with its System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM).   

December 5, 2017 – Crowdstrike President Shawn Henry testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. According to a released transcript of the hearing, Henry admits that his firm has no evidence that Russian entities were the ones who hacked the DNC server, noting “we did not have concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated.” Henry also goes on to say that “there are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.” Later in the hearing, Henry states that his firm has a high degree of confidence that the hacks were perpetrated by the Russian government, based purely on the fact that the software and methods the hackers used were “consistent with a nation-state adversary and associated with Russian intelligence.”   

December 8, 2017 – CNN airs a report alleging that in September 2016 Wikileaks had offered the Trump campaign access to the DNC emails before they were published. The entire story is predicated on an email someone named Michael J. Erickson had sent to Donald Trump Jr. on September 4, offering access to the archive. Several hours after the story goes viral and is “independently confirmed” by multiple outlets, the Washington Post obtains a copy of this email and reveals that the message had actually been sent to Trump Jr. on September 14, after Wikileaks had already published the archive for the public to view. Erickson, it turns out, was just a random individual encouraging Trump Jr. to look at content that was already available online. CNN blames the error on the fact that multiple sources somehow misread the date on the email, a message the network had not itself seen.   

January 11, 2018 – Ecuador’s government grants citizenship to Julian Assange, a development which comes just hours after UK authorities rejected Ecuador’s request to grant Assange diplomatic immunity.

February 13, 2018 – Westminster Magistrates’ Court Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot upholds an arrest warrant for Julian Assange, rejecting his legal team’s argument that it was not in the public interest to continue to pursue the Wikileaks publisher for skipping bail. She also pushes back on the claim that the time he’d already spent inside the Ecuadorean embassy has been a sufficient punishment, arguing that Assange is technically free to leave at any time.

March 28, 2018 – Julian Assange’s access to the internet is suspended by officials at the Ecuadorean embassy due to the fact that Assange had breached “a written commitment made to the government at the end of 2017 not to issue messages that might interfere with other states.” The development, according to Ecuador, comes as a result of Assange putting “at risk the good relations [Ecuador] maintains with the United Kingdom, with the other states of the European Union, and with other nations”.

June 22, 2018 – Wikileaks publishes a database identifying more than 9,000 current and former US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees. The information is comprised of publicly available information gathered using LinkedIn. In a statement accompanying the publication of the archive, Wikileaks notes that this content “is an important public resource for understanding ICE programs and increasing accountability, especially in light of the extreme actions taken by ICE lately, such as the separation of children and parents at the US border.”  

July 13, 2018 – In an indictment, Special Counsel Robert Mueller lists 12 Russian individuals he says worked for Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU). According to the indictment, these individuals were members of two specific groups within the GRU: Units 26165 and 74455. The special counsel charges the defendants with Conspiracy to Commit an Offense Against the United States, Aggravated Identity Theft and Conspiracy to Launder Money, and alleges that they were able to hack the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which then allowed them to gain access to the DNC’s system. According to the indictment, these hackers had gained access to more than 30 computers used by members of the Clinton campaign. Furthermore, it is alleged that the defendants then used a fake persona, known as Guccifer 2.0, to publish the hacked content via DCLeaks, as well as Wikileaks, referred to in court filings as “Organization 1.” The government has yet to produce any tangible evidence to support these claims.   

September 27, 2018 – Julian Assange steps down as editor-in-chief of Wikileaks due to the fact that he’s remained at the Ecuadorean embassy without internet access since March. The site announces that Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson has been named as his replacement. Hrafnsson served as the organization’s spokesperson from 2010 to 2016.

October 14, 2018 – Officials at the Ecuadorean embassy partly restore Julian Assange’s internet access, after suspending it in March.

October 15, 2018 – The Ecuadorean embassy provides Julian Assange with a set of house rules, which include cleaning his bathroom and adequately looking after his cat. According to a memo published by Ecuadorean website Codigo Vidrio, Assange is also prohibited from commenting publicly about political issues, or “interfering in the internal affairs of other states.” The memo also states that failure to comply with these new requests “could lead to the termination of the diplomatic asylum granted by the Ecuadorian state,” it added. According to the new rules, Assange is also mandated to obtain approval for all visitors from diplomatic staff three days in advance.

October 16, 2018 – House Committee on Foreign Affairs Ranking Member Eliot Engel and Chair Emeritus Ileana Ros-Lehtinen send a letter to Lenin Moreno, Ecuador’s president, in an effort to pressure him into ending Ecuador’s asylum for Julian Assange. Dangling things “from economic cooperation to counternarcotics assistance to the possible return of a United States Agency for International Development mission to Ecuador,” the members note “that it will be very difficult for the United States to advance our bilateral relationship until Mr. Assange is handed over to the proper authorities.”

October 19, 2018 – Julian Assange takes legal action against the government of Ecuador (specifically its foreign minister, José Valencia), accusing it of violating his “fundamental rights and freedoms.”

Furthermore, Assange’s legal team also questions the legality of the Ecuadorean government’s “special protocol” for the Wikileaks publisher, which his lawyers say consists of requiring everyone who visits Assange at the embassy to disclose data such as the serial numbers and codes of their cellphones and tablets, information which is then shared with other government agencies. This protocol also grants the embassy the right to seize the property of either Assange or any of his visitors and deliver it to British authorities. According to Wikileaks, Assange was denied a visitation from the general counsel of Human Rights Watch, Dinah PoKempner.

November 15, 2018 – The US Department of Justice (DoJ) inadvertently reveals in a court filing that it has charged Julian Assange via a sealed indictment. At this time, the specific charges are unknown. The disclosure is the result of DoJ prosecutors unintentionally using language from Assange’s sealed charges in a document relating to an entirely different case.

November 27, 2018 – Without citing any evidence for its claim, the Guardian reports that Paul Manafort met secretly with Julian Assange on three separate occasions inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Manafort denies ever meeting Assange and the Wikileaks founder describes the story as a “hoax”. The article maintains that, contrary to embassy protocol, Manafort’s multiple visits were never logged. The report also doesn’t explain how its source knows that Manafort was wearing “sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt,” when not one of the multiple intelligence agencies surveilling the embassy ever noticed the chairman of Donald Trump’s campaign entering and exiting the building. The article is ridiculed and dismissed by most outlets as an obvious falsehood but remains on the Guardian’s site to this day.

December 3, 2018 – Citing three people familiar with the talks, the New York Times reports that in May 2017, Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort traveled to Ecuador to meet President Lenin Moreno for talks concerning a potential deal which would see China investing in Ecuador’s power system. Such an agreement would’ve resulted in a commission for Manafort. According to the article, the discussions swiftly turned to Julian Assange with Moreno suggesting that Ecuador would expel Assange from its London embassy in exchange for debt relief from the US. The report notes that there is no evidence that Manafort was working with or briefing the Trump administration on these discussions. 

December 6, 2018 – President Lenin Moreno announces that Ecuador has received written assurances from the British government that UK authorities would not extradite Julian Assange to any country where he would potentially face the death penalty. According to Moreno, the guarantee is enough for Assange to leave his country’s embassy, although he did note that British authorities would require Assange to serve a brief jail term for breaching bail conditions.

February 21, 2019 – Australia, where Julian Assange is from, announces that the Wikileaks founder was granted a new passport the previous September. The publisher’s previous passport had expired, with one of his lawyers applying for a new one on Assange’s behalf in 2018.

March 8, 2019 – Chelsea Manning is incarcerated for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Wikileaks, with US District Judge Claude Hilton sending the former Army Private to jail for civil contempt of court. Manning was subpoenaed but refused to comply with the order, telling the Washington Post: “I object strenuously to this subpoena, and to the grand jury process in general. We’ve seen this power abused countless times to target political speech. I have nothing to contribute to this case and I resent being forced to endanger myself by participating in this predatory practice.” Manning’s refusal to testify comes even after she was granted immunity for her testimony by prosecutors. She appeared before the grand jury but answered every question by reiterating that her constitutional rights had been violated.

March 11, 2019 – The International Monetary Fund (IMF) approves a $4.2 billion, three-year loan for Ecuador, part of a broader package intended to support the nation’s economic reform program. 

April 2, 2019 – In a speech to the Ecuadorian Broadcasting Association, President Lenin Moreno alleges that Julian Assange has “repeatedly violated” the terms of his asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, while also noting that Assange shouldn’t be intervening in the affairs of other countries. While Moreno stops short of blaming Assange for leaking private photos of the president’s family, Ecuador’s government says the Wikileaks founder is the individual responsible. “If President Moreno wants to illegally terminate a refugee publisher’s asylum to cover up an offshore corruption scandal, history will not be kind,” WikiLeaks said in a statement describing the fact that it reported on the Ina Papers, a scandal that accused Moreno of corruptly benefitting from an offshore account in Panama. The publisher believes that this too could potentially serve as one of the factors that will ultimately determine Assange’s ability to remain at the embassy. 

April 11, 2019 – Julian Assange is arrested by British authorities after they are “invited into the embassy by the ambassador, following the Ecuadorean government’s withdrawal of asylum.” President Lenin Moreno, via a video posted to Twitter, said that his government had revoked Assange’s asylum status as a result of his “discourteous and aggressive behavior,” also noting that he believed the publisher was still working with Wikileaks and was “therefore involved in interfering in international affairs of other states.” He is arrested for jumping bail and, on the same day, is also charged by the US Department of Justice. According to the unsealed indictment, the US government alleges that Assange engaged in “a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning” to help the former analyst in “cracking a password” in an effort to gain access to classified documents. If convicted on this charge, which Assange disputes, it’s reported that Assange could face up to five years in prison. He also faces 12 months in a British prison for the bail violation.

April 11, 2019 – President Trump tells reporters in the Oval Office that he knows “nothing about Wikileaks” when asked if he still “loves” the website, as he’d previously stated in 2016. “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing and I know there is something having to do with Julian Assange. I’ve been seeing what’s happened with Assange,” the president says in the hours following Assange’s arrest.

May 1, 2019 – Julian Assange is sentenced to 50 weeks in jail for breaching his bail conditions by entering the Ecuadorean embassy and seeking asylum in 2012.

May 9, 2019 – Chelsea Manning is released following 62 days in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury against Wikileaks, after the term of the grand jury expired. The former Army Private was set free but was nevertheless served with yet another subpoena ordering her to appear before another grand jury, perhaps as soon as May 16.

May 13, 2019 – Swedish prosecutors announce that they plan to reopen their investigation into the rape allegation against Julian Assange. Eva-Marie Persson, the deputy director of public prosecutions, said that the decision was made on account of the fact that the circumstances now allow for Assange to be extradited to Sweden. “It is my assessment that a new questioning of Assange is required,” Persson noted.

May 16, 2019 – Chelsea Manning is sent back to jail for her refusal to comply with a second subpoena to appear before a grand jury investigating Wikileaks. The judge, Anthony J. Trenga of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, rules that Manning is to remain in custody until she agrees to testify, or until the grand jury’s term expires in 18 months. Manning will also face a $500 fine for each day she remains in jail after 30 days, as well as a $1,000 fine for each day after 60 days. “I would rather starve than change my principles in this regard,” Manning tells Judge Trenga during the hearing.

May 23, 2019 – The US government announces 18 new criminal charges under the Espionage Act against Julian Assange, for publishing classified information through Wikileaks. The charges include one count of conspiracy to receive national defense information, seven counts of obtaining national defense information, and nine counts of disclosing national defense information. If convicted, Assange could face a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.

September 26, 2019 – Spanish newspaper El Pais reports that Undercover Global (UG), the Spain-based defense and private security company charged with protecting the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was spying on Julian Assange on behalf of the US government. According to the publication, UG owner David Morales handed over audio and video of the Wikileaks publisher meeting with his lawyers, among others, to the CIA. The company retrieved that data by installing cameras and hidden microphones all over the embassy, including in a women’s bathroom where Assange would sometimes takes meetings in an effort to avoid potential surveillance. El Pais says that Morales is currently being investigated by Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, as a result of this allegation. According to the report, Morales asked his employees – given his company’s security contract with Senain, Ecuador’s intelligence services – to keep his arrangement with the US a secret. In April, three UG employees contacted Spanish police to alert them of the surveillance their company was conducting of Assange. One of the employees relayed that Morales had told staff members that he had agreed to assist the US with surveillance of Assange in exchange for US intelligence providing UG with lucrative “contracts all over the world.”

October 23, 2019 – Wikileaks publishes a previously leaked engineering assessment of the alleged April 7, 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, that was omitted from the final Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report. The assessment does not support the findings of the final report, an analysis constructed to fit the West’s desired narrative, that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attacked his own people with chemical weapons. Wikileaks also publishes a statement made by a panel that listened to testimony and reviewed evidence from an OPCW whistleblower. WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnsson, who took part in the panel, noted the following: “The panel was presented with evidence that casts doubt on the integrity of the OPCW. Although the whistleblower was not ready to step forward and/or present documents to the public, WikiLeaks believes it is now of utmost interest for the public to see everything that was collected by the Fact Finding Mission on Douma and all scientific reports written in relation to the investigation.”  

November 15, 2019 – Roger Stone is found guilty of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and tampering with a witness. The conviction reveals that Stone claimed to have a backchannel to Wikileaks that ultimately was found to be nonexistent. The witness tampering charge is related to Stone’s attempts to try to get comedian Randy Credico, whom Stone told the House Intelligence Committee was his connection to reach Julian Assange during the campaign, to lie to Congress. In announcing Stone’s conviction, the Department of Justice states the following: “On September 26, 2017, in testimony to the Committee, Stone made a number of false statements relating to the identity of a person he had referred to in August 2016 as his “back-channel” or “intermediary” to the head of WikiLeaks; whether he had asked that person to do anything on his behalf; whether he had written communications with that person; whether he discussed that person with anyone involved with the Trump campaign; and whether he had written communications with third parties about the head of WikiLeaks. On October 13, 2017, Stone sent the House Intelligence Committee a letter falsely stating that the person he had referenced in August 2016 was an individual named Randy Credico. Stone then engaged in witness tampering by urging Credico either to corroborate this false account, or to tell the Committee that he could not remember the relevant events, or to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before the Committee. Credico ultimately invoked his Fifth Amendment right in response to a Committee subpoena.”

November 19, 2019 – Swedish prosecutors opt to drop their investigation into the rape allegation against Julian Assange. Eva-Marie Persson, the deputy director of public prosecutions, is quoted as saying that this decision was reached due to the fact that “the evidence was weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question.” Persson noted that “memories fade for natural reasons,” before also noting that the “injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events.”

November 23, 2019 – Wikileaks publishes an email a member of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) fact-finding mission to Syria sent to his superiors. According to Wikileaks, “The author of the e-mail was a member of that team and claims the redacted preliminary version of the report, misrepresents the facts he and his colleagues discovered on the ground. The e-mail is dated 22nd of June. It is addressed to Robert Fairweather, Chief of Cabinet, and forwarded to his deputy Aamir Shouket and members of the fact-finding mission to Douma. He says this misrepresentation was achieved by selective omission, introducing a bias which undermines the credibility of the report.” According to the email, the report’s conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to determine the presence of “chlorine, or another reactive chlorine-containing chemical” is misleading due to the fact that the substance detected could have been due to any number of chemicals – even chemicals as simple as a household chlorine-based bleach – containing a reactive chlorine atom. Singling out chlorine gas is therefore, according to the email, disingenuous. The redacted report also distorts the original’s report writing about the likelihood of the gas having emanated from cylinders dropped from aircraft. According to the author of the email, the original version emphasized that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that this had happened. The redacted report also omitted the fact that the OPCW’s members had discussed the fact that symptoms displayed by individuals in the aftermath of the attack, in the videos broadcast around the world, were inconsistent with what witnesses reporting seeing that day. Finally, according to Wikileaks, “yet another point of contention is the placement and condition of the cylinders reported to have contained the chemical agent. It has been alleged that their condition may not be consistent with having been dropped from the air, compared to damage in the immediate surrounding area. This was discussed in an unreleased engineering report from OPCW that was leaked and Wikileaks published in October 2019 and indicates it is unlikely the cylinders were air-dropped.” 

December 14, 2019 – Wikileaks publishes a memorandum written by one of the scientists sent to investigate the alleged April 2018 Douma attack. Sent two weeks following the publication of the OPCW’s final report, the memo notes that around 20 inspectors have expressed concerns regarding the group’s publicly stated conclusions, alleging that these conclusions are inconsistent with data gathered by the fact-finding mission. According to the author of this correspondence, only a single member of this team had contributed to the final version of the report. Wikileaks notes that it is “also releasing the original preliminary report for the first time along with the redacted version (that was released by the OPCW) for comparison. Additionally, we are publishing a detailed comparison of the original interim report with the redacted interim report and the final report along with relevant comments from a member of the original fact finding mission.”

December 27, 2019 – Wikileaks publishes an email Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW, sent in February to members of the fact-finding mission, in which he requests for an engineering report from Ian Henderson to be removed from the OPCW’s secure registry: “Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive]… And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.” Wikileaks writes that: “The main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma and two cylinders that were found on the site of the alleged attack, was that they were more likely manually placed there than dropped from a plane or helicopter from considerable heights. His findings were omitted from the official final OPCW report on the Douma incident.” According to another document released today by Wikileaks, minutes from a June 6, 2018 meeting between OPCW members and a group of toxicology experts reveals that the meeting’s key “take-away message” was that symptoms observed among the individuals that day in Douma were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine. Also published is an email exchange from July 2018 in which it is recommended that the eight OPCW inspectors sent to Douma as part of the fact-finding mission (except for one individual, a paramedic) should be excluded from contributing to the report.

February 20, 2020 – Dana Rohrabacher, the former Republican congressman, offered a pardon for Julian Assange from President Trump, on behalf of the commander-in-chief, in exchange for a public statement from Assange that Russia had nothing to do with the 2016 email hack of the DNC, a lawyer for Assange states in a Westminster Magistrates’ Court hearing. Assange’s defense team tells the court that Rohrabacher presented Assange with the offer at the embassy on August 16, 2017. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser rules that the statement detailing the offer by Assange attorney Jennifer Robinson, who was in the room when Rohrabacher made it, was admissible. The White House denied ever having a discussion with Rohrabacher on this matter. Rohrabacher denied that he approached Assange with an offer from the president but did say that he promised the Wikileaks founder he’d approach Trump about one if Assange could deliver the statement Rohrabacher was seeking. 

February 24, 2020 – Julian Assange’s legal team plans to introduce evidence that Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, while acting as US ambassador to Germany, promised Ecuadorean officials that the US government would not pursue the death penalty against Assange if the embassy allowed British officials to enter the premises and arrest the Wikileaks founder.

March 11, 2020 – Chelsea Manning is hospitalized following a suicide attempt at a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia.  

March 12, 2020 – Judge Anthony J. Trenga of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, announced that the grand jury investigating Wikileaks has disbanded and orders that Chelsea Manning be released from jail. The former Army Private is still however facing $256,000 in fines accrued during her confinement.

March 25, 2020 – Julian Assange is denied bail by the Westminster Magistrates Court following a request by his legal team that he should be released due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Edward Fitzgerald, one of Assange’s lawyers, tells the court that Assange is particularly vulnerable due to the four respiratory tract infections he’d suffered while at the embassy, among other chronic health conditions. Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejects these arguments, noting that Assange remains a potential flight risk.

April 11, 2020 – It is revealed that Julian Assange fathered two children, Max and Gabriel, with one of his lawyers, Stella Moris, during his stay in London’s Ecuadorean embassy. Moris made the announcement via court documents, as well as a video posted by Wikileaks. She noted that the pair met in 2011 when she joined his defense team as a legal researcher. “Over time Julian and I developed a strong intellectual and emotional bond. He became my best friend and I became his,” she wrote to the court. “I make this statement now only because our lives are on the brink and I fear that Julian could die,” Moris’s statement further noted.

September 22, 2020 – Julian Assange is likely to attempt suicide if he is extradited to the US to face espionage charges, according to Michael Kopelman. A professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, Kopelman testifies during an extradition hearing that Assange suffers from depression, has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, and had “an intense suicidal preoccupation.” The professor, who’d visited Assange at Belmarsh Prison approximately 20 times, said that the Wikileaks founder also suffers from “auditory hallucinations.”

November 26, 2020 – Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner, asks President Trump to pardon the Wikileaks founder via a tweet in which she asks the president to “please bring him home for Christmas.”

January 4, 2021 – British District Judge Vanessa Baraitser rules that Julian Assange should not be extradited to the US due to his deteriorating mental health, resulting from years of isolation and incarceration. “The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes despairing man, who is genuinely fearful about his future. I find that the mental condition of Mr Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America,” she concludes. “I am satisfied that the risk that Mr Assange will commit suicide is a substantial one,” the judge noted as she considered the prospective conditions of a maximum-security US prison. The US government instantly declares that it plans to appeal the court’s decision. Baraitser nevertheless rejects arguments by Assange’s legal team that he wouldn’t receive a fair trial in the US or that the US was pursuing Assange for political reasons and denies Assange’s request for release from Belmarsh, the London maximum-security prison. The judge also notes that Assange’s work had gone beyond the point of investigative journalism.   

January 4, 2021 – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador offers political asylum to Julian Assange.   

June 26, 2021 – Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a key witness in the US Department of Justice’s (DoJ) extradition case against Julian Assange, admits to Icelandic outlet Stundin that he had falsified his testimony against the Wikileaks founder. Thordarson, who had volunteered for Wikileaks in 2010, was granted immunity from prosecution in May 2019 by the US government. After it had emerged that Thordarson had embezzled more than $50,000 from the organization, the diagnosed sociopath and convicted pedophile contacted the US Embassy in Iceland and offered his services as an informant. Stundin notes that a private jet for Thordarson landed in Reykjavik 48 hours later. According to the publication, Thordarson admitted to fabricating the claims he’d made against Assange. Among these lies is Thordarson’s admission that Assange never asked or instructed him to hack the phone recordings of MPs. Thordarson also admits that one of the key components of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court judgment – “It is alleged that Mr. Assange and Teenager [Thordarson] failed a joint attempt to decrypt a file stolen from a “NATO country 1” bank” – was based on a lie. Thordarson now admits that this actually refers to an encrypted file that was leaked by insiders at Landsbanki that was disseminated to many individuals online. As Stundin notes, “nothing supports the claim that this file was even “stolen” per se…” These acknowledgements, among other admissions, while invalidating a significant portion of the DoJ’s case against Assange, are completely ignored by mainstream media outlets.

September 26, 2021 – Yahoo News reports that the CIA considered a variety of possibilities for how to deal with Julian Assange, including plotting to kidnap the publisher from the Ecuadorean embassy. Citing a former senior counterintelligence official, the report also notes that conversations about assassinating Assange also occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration. According to the article, which cites more than 30 sources, these discussions were spurred by Wikileaks’ “Vault 7” disclosures, which publicized the CIA’s classified hacking capabilities. The plans were never approved following pushback from White House lawyers. According to the report, top intelligence officials lobbied the Obama administration to redefine Wikileaks, as well as journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, as “information brokers.” This was pursued, according to the article, to facilitate a path towards prosecution of those publishing unfavorable content about the US government. Citing the First Amendment, the White House rejected this request. There were also tentative plans to thwart a Russian attempt to extract Assange out of the embassy and secretly fly him out of the country.

November 11, 2021 – Belmarsh Prison grants Julian Assange and his partner, Stella Moris, the permission to marry.  

November 17, 2021 – Documents provided exclusively to The Grayzone detail all of the ways in which the Australian government was made aware of, and ignored, the physical and psychological suffering endured by Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, inside London’s Belmarsh Prison.

December 10, 2021 – A British court rules that Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, overturning a ruling made in January by British District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assange’s legal team swiftly announces that it plans to appeal the decision to Britain’s Supreme Court. The ruling is centered on assurances given to the court by the US government that Assange would not be held under the harshest maximum-security conditions, such as solitary confinement at a facility like the ADX “Supermax” facility in Colorado. Documents outlining the US extradition request however, are not written in stone, with the US government specifying that it would reserve the right to go back on this promise if Assange were to commit any number of unspecified acts once in US custody. One of the assurances also specified that, if convicted, Assange could apply to serve his prison sentence in Australia.   

January 24, 2022 – The UK High Court permits Julian Assange the opportunity to appeal the ruling that he can be extradited to the US to the British Supreme Court. The Wikileaks founder’s defense team had asked the court to certify three points of law of general public importance in order to move forward with the appeal. In the decision announced today, the High Court certified just one point of law. According to the pronouncement released by the court, this is centered on determining under “what circumstances can an appellate court receive assurances from a requesting state [the US] which were not before the court of first instance in extradition proceedings.”

March 14, 2022 – Julian Assange is denied permission to appeal his ongoing extradition to the UK Supreme Court. The case will now be formally sent to British Home Secretary Priti Patel.

June 17, 2022 – Priti Patel signs the extradition order to send Julian Assange to the US.

July 1, 2022 – Julian Assange appeals his extradition case to the High Court in London.

November 28, 2022 – The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País release a letter urging the Biden administration to stop the extradition process for Julian Assange and drop the 18 charges pending against him.

June 6, 2023 – High Court Judge Sir Jonathan Swift rejects Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US.

August 14, 2023 – The Sydney Morning Herald reports that US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy has floated the possibility of a plea deal between Julian Assange and the US government. Such an agreement – which would necessitate the Wikileaks founder traveling to the US to enter a guilty plea – would see Assange sentenced to a reduced prison term that would be served in Australia. Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, calls this a “non-starter.”