ASSANGE EXTRADITION: Did Sen. Warner and Comey Crush Assange Immunity Deal?
February 22, 2020
The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director
James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove
Russia was not involved in the DNC leak, as Ray McGovern explains.
In light of news that Julian Assanges lawyers have raised an alleged pardon
offer by Donald Trump to the WikiLeaks publisher in exchange for clearing
Russia of any involvement in WikiLeaks publication of Democratic Party
emails, we republish this article by Ray McGovern, which first appeared on
June 27, 2018. It provides light on another angle in which Assange was being
offered limited immunity in exchange for Assange testimony showing Russia
was not his source on the emails, which was then crushed by a former FBI
director and a U.S. Senator. It also shows that Assanges prosecution is
political, a point his attorneys are expected to make at next weeks formal
extradition hearing. The U.S.-British extradition treaty excludes political
crimes.
By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News
An explosive report by investigative journalist John Solomon on the opinion
page of [June 25, 2108s] edition of The Hill sheds a bright light on how
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and then-FBI Director James Comey collaborated to
prevent WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from discussing technical evidence
ruling out certain parties [read Russia] in the controversial leak of
Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.
A deal that was being discussed last year (2017) between Assange and U.S.
government officials would have given Assange limited immunity to allow
him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been exiled for
six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit through redactions
some classified CIA information he might release in the future, according
to Solomon, who cited interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents
turned over to Senate investigators. Solomon even provided a copy of the
draft immunity deal with Assange.
But Comeys intervention to stop the negotiations with Assange ultimately
ruined the deal, Solomon says, quoting multiple sources. With the
prospective agreement thrown into serious doubt, Assange unleashed a series
of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare capabilities
for a long time to come. These were the Vault 7 releases, which led then
CIA Director Mike Pompeo to call WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence service.
Solomons report provides reasons why Official Washington has now put so
much pressure on Ecuador to keep Assange incommunicado in its embassy in
London.
Assange: Came close to a deal with the U.S. (Photo credit: New Media Days /
Peter Erichsen)
The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with
Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to provide technical
evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases,
Solomon quotes WikiLeaks intermediary with the government as saying. It
would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia
was not WikiLeaks source of the DNC emails.
If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it
would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly
sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least
attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak.
The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if Assange
provided evidence that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks of DNC
documents.
Missteps and Stand Down
In mid-February 2017, in a remarkable display of naiveté, Adam Waldman,
Assanges pro bono attorney who acted as the intermediary in the talks,
asked Warner if the Senate Intelligence Committee staff would like any
contact with Assange to ask about Russia or other issues. Waldman was
apparently oblivious to Sen. Warners stoking of Russia-gate.
Warner contacted Comey and, invoking his name, instructed Waldman to stand
down and end the discussions with Assange, Waldman told Solomon. The
stand down instruction did happen, according to another of Solomons
sources with good access to Warner. However, Waldmans counterpart attorney
David Laufman, an accomplished federal prosecutor picked by the Justice
Departent to work the government side of the CIA-Assange fledgling deal,
told Waldman, Thats B.S. Youre not standing down, and neither am I.
But the damage had been done. When word of the original stand-down order
reached WikiLeaks, trust evaporated, putting an end to two months of what
Waldman called constructive, principled discussions that included the
Department of Justice.
The two sides had come within inches of sealing the deal. Writing to
Laufman on March 28, 2017, Waldman gave him Assanges offer to discuss risk
mitigation approaches relating to CIA documents in WikiLeaks possession or
control, such as the redaction of Agency personnel in hostile
jurisdictions, in return for an acceptable immunity and safe passage
agreement.
On March 31, 2017, though, WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure
up to that point from what it called Vault 7 a treasure trove of CIA
cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool Marble
Framework, which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who
hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving
so-called tell-tale signs like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents
also showed that the Marble tool had been employed in 2016.
Misfeasance or Malfeasance
Comey: Ordered an end to talks with Assange.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes among our
members two former Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, has
repeatedly called attention to its conclusion that the DNC emails were
leaked not hacked by Russia or anyone else (and, later, our suspicion
that someone may have been playing Marbles, so to speak).
In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what
former FBI Director Comey at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably
failed to do when the so-called Russian hack of the DNC was first
reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings with supporting data.
Two month later, VIPS published the results of follow-up experiments
conducted to test the conclusions reached in July.
Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to
the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover who
intruded into the DNC computers? (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain and
others were calling the Russian hack no less than an act of war.) A 7th
grader can now figure that out.
Asked on January 10, 2017 by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard
Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have
helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey replied: Our forensics folks
would always prefer to get access to the original device or server thats
involved, so its the best evidence.
At that point, Burr and Warner let Comey down easy. Hence, it should come as
no surprise that, according to one of John Solomons sources, Sen. Warner
(who is co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) kept Sen. Burr
apprised of his intervention into the negotiation with Assange, leading to
its collapse.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army
Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years
and prepared and briefed, one-on-one, the Presidents Daily Brief from 1981
to 1985.
