Assange - Round-Up of News Items

A round-up of news items related to Julian Assange collected over recent weeks.

Snowden Declares 'End of Case Against Julian Assange' After Newspaper Reveals Lies by Witness

upstart writes:

Key Witness in Assange Case Admits to Lies in indictment

A major witness in the United States' Department of Justice case against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution.

[...] In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs. His new claim is that he had in fact received some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained. He claims he never checked the contents of the files or even if they contained audio recordings as his third party source suggested. He further admits the claim, that Assange had instructed or asked him to access computers in order to find any such recordings, is false.

[...] Thordarson admits to Stundin that this actually refers to a well publicised event in which an encrypted file was leaked from an Icelandic bank and assumed to contain information about defaulted loans provided by the Icelandic Landsbanki. The bank went under in the fall of 2008, along with almost all other financial institutions in Iceland, and plunged the country into a severe economic crisis. The file was at this time, in summer of 2010, shared by many online who attempted to decrypt it for the public interest purpose of revealing what precipitated the financial crisis. Nothing supports the claim that this file was even "stolen" per se, as it was assumed to have been distributed by whistleblowers from inside the failed bank.

[...] Stundin also cites Ogmundur Jonasson, then-minister of interior of Iceland, who says US authorities were going out of their way to get Assange.

They were trying to use things here [in Iceland] and use people in our country to spin a web, a cobweb that would catch Julian Assange.

The Stundin reporting is well worth a read regarding many other aspects of the alleged case against Assange.

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