Ecuador’s leading diplomat said Thursday that the US has refused to recognize the existence of an American criminal investigation into Wikileaks, after the South American country granted Julian Assange asylum and asked Washington about his case.
Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño also said that he and his American counterparts are not continuing to discuss the matter because the State Department said “Julian Assange should be addressed bilaterally between London and Quito.”
“Two years ago we requested information from the US as to whether there were any pending trials and charges,” Patiño told The Sentinel through an interpreter on Thursday morning at the National Press Club in Washington. “The information we received was that they could not give us that information.”
“There is a case. Everybody knows that,” he added. “It’s under seal but everybody knows it’s there.” Patiño is in Washington for a meeting of the Organization of American States.
By the time of publication, the State Department declined to comment when asked, by email, to respond to Patiño’s statements, and whether the US could expect its allies to have constructive dialogue with Ecuador over Assange when American officials aren’t being forthright about their interest in him.
When Assange first sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, in June 2012, American officials repeatedly stated they had no desire to indict Wikileaks’ leading man, and said that his legal woes solely related to allegations that he sexually assaulted women in Sweden.
“He says he fears the authorities in Sweden will eventually hand him over to the United States where, in his view, he would face persecution and long-term imprisonment,” Reuters reported in August 2012. “The United States says it is not involved in the matter.”
Both Ecuador and Assange have said that the journalist would return to Stockholm to face Swedish authorities for questioning, if he received assurances that he would not, subsequently, be extradited to the United States.
Assange has not been charged with committing any criminal offenses in Sweden.
The lack of assurances, Patiño said in 2012, led Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa to grant Assange asylum in August 2012.
Last week, Swedish prosecutors finally agreed to interrogate Assange at the Ecuadoran embassy in London, as the statute of limitations on the alleged sex crimes runs out in August. A Stockholm-based attorney who represents Assange called the decision a “victory” and told The Guardian that Assange’s team has “been asking for this to happen for over four years.”
The Australian national’s legal team is also appealing the warrant that Swedish authorities issued for his arrest. Last week, a supreme court judge in Stockholm ordered prosecutors to issue an opinion on Assange’s appeal and “the investigatory procedure and the principle of proportionality,” The Guardian also noted. Additionally, the paper remarked, a lawyer representing a complainant in the case said that her client “changed her mind on questioning Assange in London.”
On Thursday, Patiño said at the National Press Club that Quito is “pleased” by the decision, “but it also notes that it has taken a long time.”
“There is precedent in Swedish litigation. But nonetheless–despite the insistence of Assange’s attorneys and the government of Ecuador–just last week, the Swedes said that they’ll take his statement. Why now? Why not before? Justice is only justice when it’s timely,” he stated, questioning what might have happened if the statute of limitations had been 25 years. “This is evidence of a fundamental failing in judicial proceedings,” Patiño also alleged. He noted that the outcome of the affair also still depends on Swedish Supreme Court rulings, but said that there is “the light at the end of the tunnel.”
But should Assange’s saga in Sweden come to an end—an affair that he has not approached with sufficient gravity, some prominent former Wikileaks volunteers have claimed—he would almost still certainly be the subject of a massive investigation being carried out by a gaggle of US prosecutors.
In court documents filed earlier this month, a federal judge in Washington said that “the Department of Justice and FBI’s multi-subject investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information published on WikiLeaks…is ‘still active and ongoing’ and remains in the investigative stage.”
As The Sentinel noted in January, a lawyer for Google told the Washington Post that the US Attorney in Alexandria—the prosecutor heading up a criminal probe of Wikileaks—said federal officials want to conduct grand jury hearings in secret, in part, because “notice and the resulting publicity was a disaster for them” early on in the case.
Many of those affiliated with Wikileaks when it published hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables and raw classified documentation of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been caught up in this investigation. The public has caught glimpses of this dragnet. In June 2013, for example, Google revealed the existence of federal agents’ orders for sensitive data belonging to two Icelandic freedom of information activists, Smári McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason. The August 2011 order called for metadata about the pair’s user names, chat logs, and IP addresses. A search warrant was executed in October 2011 against Google for the content and metadata of Snorrason’s email. McCarthy also said he was approached by plainclothes FBI agents in May 2012 late at night at the Archives-Navy Memorial Metro stop in Washington, DC, during a business trip. “It was very disconcerting,” he told a Sentinel author who, in 2013, was writing a story on the matter for The Nation. “It was clear from the fact that they found me there and then that they had been following me, possibly for as much as five days, waiting for me to be alone.”
Some details of this lengthy, wide-reaching federal criminal investigation of Wikileaks have been publicly known for years—long before August 2012, when Ecuadoran and US diplomats held bilateral talks on Assange’s case.
In January 2011, it was revealed that the Justice Department had subpoenaed Twitter for non-public information belonging to Assange, ex-Wikileaks volunteer and Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and activists Jacob Appelbaum, a US citizen, and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch national.
The request, Wired noted, was filed under seal in “the same jurisdiction where, according to previous press reports, a federal grand jury is investigating possible charges against Assange.”
