MOSCOW — The closure of the case of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over the use of private emails for correspondence on state issues as the state secretary should serve as a precedent for dropping charges against WikiLeaks since no threat to the national security was posed by its revelations, the website founder Julian Assange said.
Assange has been residing at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 out of fear of being extradited to Sweden where he has been accused of sexual assault and rape. The whistleblower denies the allegations, claiming they are a ruse organized by Washington to further extradite him to the United States to try him for leaking thousands of top-secret military documents and embassy cables detailing Washington’s war crimes in Iraq.
“Our DC lawyers are delivering a letter tomorrow to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to explain why it is that the now six-year-long national security and criminal investigation, being run by the DOJ against the WikiLeaks — the reason I have political asylum — has not been closed. Because the DOJ through its actions seems to be setting a new standard by closing the Hillary Clinton case,” Assange said Monday while talking to CNN.
The Clinton case went on only for a year and was closed as FBI Director James Comey last month said they could not establish there was an intent to damage the US national security, something WikiLeaks had also never tried to do, according to Assange.
“Now in our case there’s no allegation we have done anything — WikiLeaks is an organization — except publish information for the public. That’s the only allegation. And so there’s a problem here: Hillary Clinton’s case has been dropped, the WikiLeaks case continues,” Assange said. “Not a single person has been physically harmed by our publications, so you don’t have intent, you don’t have any serious harm, so why is it that the ‘pending law enforcement proceedings’ against WikiLeaks continue?”