In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the US is interested in arresting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The online publishing outfit–known for disclosing secret US government documents, and most recently, the internal emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta–is “an important focus” of the FBI, Comey told the Committee.
Asked why Assange has yet to be arrested, Comey said bluntly: “He hasn’t been apprehended because he’s inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.”
The WikiLeaks founder has been confined to the embassy since 2012, after the government of Ecuador granted him asylum. Assange has claimed that pending rape allegations against him in Sweden are a smokescreen to have him extradited to the US, where he would face charges related to the 2010 release of secret US State Department cables and Pentagon war logs.
Whether or not the US Justice Department is preparing to indict Assange for the releases has been an open question for years, with a grand jury empanneled at a federal court in Alexandria, Va.
The Washington Post reported last month that the case against WikiLeaks, which was not formally closed under President Obama, was being looked into anew, and that a memo was being circulated by prosecutors laying out potential charges against Assange.
Any criminal pursuit, however, could be tricky given that information published by the group has also been published by any number of US news outlets, thus any criminal proceedings against WikiLeaks could conceivably be leveled against the New York Times and Washington Post.
During Wednesday’s hearing with Director Comey, those prosecutorial challenges were laid bare.
“The American journalist who is seeking this information differs from Assange and WikiLeaks how?” asked Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), noting that US publishers aren’t required to discern the legality of leaks by members of the intelligence community.
“It crosses a line when it moves from being about trying to educate a public, and instead just becomes about intelligence porn, frankly,” Comey claimed.
“American journalists do not do that,” he added. “They will almost always call us before they publish classified information…WikiLeaks involves no such considerations whatsoever.”
During the campaign, President Trump praised WikiLeaks as the organization was publishing damaging information about his opponent, Hillary Clinton. But last month, when asked about potential criminal charges against Assange, Trump said it would be: “Okay with me.”
CIA Director Mike Pompeo described WikiLeaks in April as a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
