According to an explosive new report, the CIA under Donald Trump considered kidnapping or assassinating Julian Assange. These discussions reached “the highest levels” of the Trump administration.
As a legal justification, the Trump administration moved to designate WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” — and when they brought that label to Congress, only one Democrat voted against it.
The criminal case against Assange was already a clear-cut example of the bipartisan war on whistleblowers. But these new revelations show how far the government will go to silence dissent — with terrifying ramifications for the freedom of the press in the U.S. and abroad.
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In early 2017, WikiLeaks began publishing documents from a massive cache of files it claimed had been obtained from a secret CIA hacking division. The agency responded by escalating its war on WikiLeaks, with last-resort options such as kidnapping Assange from the U.K. or even assassinating him now suddenly on the table, according to new reporting from Yahoo News.
To provide legal cover for the CIA’s increasingly extreme tactics, the Trump administration designated WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service,” the culmination of efforts beginning under President Barack Obama to place Assange outside the legal protections afforded to journalists.
No matter what you think of WikiLeaks or Assange, this is a brazen attack on press freedom. Targeting him for assassination sends a terrifying message to whistleblowers and journalists everywhere.
Unprecedented prosecutions of whistleblowers and the journalists who worked with them occurred under both the Obama and Trump administrations. And with the U.S. government’s prosecution of Assange continuing under President Joe Biden, it’s clear that the war on whistleblowers is far from over.
