WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is set to be questioned by a Swedish lawyer in his London asylum. This means the grounds for the existing warrant against him will no longer apply, but he still won’t be safe from arrest.
The email affair that dogged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the recent US election played a large part in the triumph of her Republican opponent Donald Trump. The scandal can be traced to a six-storey apartment building in the exclusive London district of Knightsbridge, the raised ground floor of which houses the Ecuadorian embassy, Deutsche Welle reported.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has spent the past four years here in asylum. For months, the disclosure website put pressure on Hillary Clinton by feeding a constant flow of information into the public domain. In mid-October, the Ecuadorian Embassy cut its guest’s access to the Internet, presumably at the US request.
However, WikiLeaks does not consist of Julian Assange alone. The revelations continued.
On the day of the election, Assange declared that neither he nor WikiLeaks had any interest in influencing the result in any way, especially as both Trump and Clinton were extremely hostile to whistleblowers. But he said WikiLeaks’ job was to publish material if it was authentic and of news value.
This, he said, was undoubtedly the case with the documents from the Clinton camp.
The 45-year-old Australian claimed that WikiLeaks would have loved to have published documents about Trump and his team as well, had they been sent any.
Right now, though, Julian Assange’s agenda is dominated by something else entirely. On Monday, Stockholm’s chief prosecutor, Ingrid Isgren, accompanied by a Swedish police officer, will walk down Basil Street, past the solidarity vigil being organized by Assange’s supporters and into the Ecuadorian Embassy.
There, Isgren will question Julian Assange about the rape accusation that has dogged him for the past six years, despite the fact that no charges have been brought.
CAPTION:
Bronze sculptures of whistleblowers Snowden, Assange and Manning in Perugia, Italy.
http://www.dw.com/en/assange-legal-drama-enters-new-phase/a-36378413
