London: US-based lawyers for Julian Assange are suing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the CIA for covertly monitoring the WikiLeaks founder and his visitors when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange spent seven years in the Knightsbridge embassy in an attempt to evade extradition to Sweden where he faced charges of sexual assault.
Assange is being held in HMG Belmarsh Prison where he is appealing his extradition to the United States.Credit:AP
During those years he entertained guests – many of them celebrities – and also met with his lawyers and journalists. He fathered two sons with his now wife Stella, which he managed to keep secret from the rest of the world.
The extradition hearing underway in British courts has heard sensational evidence that a Spanish firm Undercover Global was hired by the CIA – which was headed by Mike Pompeo at the time – to covertly monitor Assange inside the embassy.
Legal proceedings in Spanish courts against the head of that firm, David Morales, heard testimony in 2020 that Assange’s visitors unknowingly had the data on their phones copied when they were required to hand over their belongings to Morales’ staff.
At a press conference in New York on Monday, Assange’s US lawyers said the suit alleges that unbeknown to even the Ecuadorians, who granted Assange aslyum, the data on their phones and other electronic devices were copied and handed over to the CIA.
“Think of what we store in our phones and in our computers: birthdays, bank information, dates of birth. All of this was recorded then given over to the Central Intelligence Agency,” attorney Robert Boyle told journalists.
“The violations … were particularly egregious,” he alleged.
Assange’s lawyers argue that more than 100 US citizens, including journalists who visited Assange during his years in the embassy, had their constitutional rights violated.
Presidential hopeful Mike Pompeo and the CIA are being sued for covertly monitoring the WikiLeaks founder and his visitors.Credit:
“It’s very outrageous conduct,” Richard Roth, whose firm Roth Law Firm is representing the group that brought the lawsuit which was filed in the United States southern district of New York’s District Court.
The plaintiffs are US attorneys Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Deborah Hrbek, German-based US journalist John Goetz and the UK-based American journalist Charles Glass.
Roth said the suit was being brought against the CIA, Pompeo, Undercover Global and its boss David Morales under the fourth amendment which he said applied to US citizens regardless of which country they were in at that time.
The fourth amendment protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures carried out by the government.
Roth said they were suing potential presidential contender Pompeo as a personal citizen, citing a precedent that allows for lawsuits to be brought against former directors of the CIA in their personal capacity.
He predicted the case would take about 12 months.
Assange is being held in HMG Belmarsh Prison where he is appealing his extradition to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act relating to the theft and publication of hundreds of thousands of secret cables.
Critics of Assange’s incarceration, including Labor MPs in the Australian government, say that an Australian citizen should not be extradited from a third country to another third country.
There has been separate and subsequent reporting by YahooNews! claiming that the Trump Administration floated the idea of killing and kidnapping Assange.
However, the suit focuses only on the spying carried out against US citizens who visited Assange in the embassy.
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