Report: U.S. Pushed Ecuador to Cut Assange’s Internet
Ecuador did it. No, John Kerry did it. No, actually Ecuador did do it. WAIT. The U.S. really did push Ecuador to do it. I can’t keep up.
Holy cow, this story keeps going back and forth. I’m getting whiplash. First, Wikileaks said Ecuador cut Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s internet access at its embassy in London. Then the anti-secrecy website said sources claimed Secretary of State John Kerry did it. Today the Ecuadorian government said it cut the internet to stop the website from influencing the presidential election since Wikileaks has been publishing Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails.
Now NBC reports that the U.S. did have a hand in the internet outage “after U.S. officials conveyed their conclusion that Assange is a willing participant in a Russian intelligence operation to undermine the U.S. presidential election.”
U.S. intelligence officials believe Assange knows he is getting the information from Russian intelligence, though they do not believe he is involved in helping plan the hacking, officials told NBC.
“The general view is he is a willing participant in the Russian scheme but not an active plotter in it. They just realized they could use him,” said a senior intelligence official.
It turns out that Ecuador has grown “frustrated with Assange and his presence at the embassy.” The government stated:
“The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate,” Ecuador said in a statement.
“Accordingly, Ecuador has exercised its sovereign right to temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom.”
The embassy agreed to give Assange asylum in 2012 at its London embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape charges.
The snafu occurred over the weekend after the site published three Goldman Sachs interviews from Hillary. Wikileaks confirmed Assange lost internet at the embassy, but when media outlets asked for a comment, the Ecuadorians refused to say anything.
On Tuesday, Wikileaks said that multiple sources claimed that Secretary of State John Kerry asked the Ecuadorian government to cut off Assange’s internet while he helped the Colombian government negotiate a peace deal with FARC. The State Department quickly denied the accusations:
“While our concerns about WikiLeaks are longstanding, any suggestion that Secretary Kerry or the State Department were involved in shutting down WikiLeaks is false,” [State Department spokesman John] Kirby said. “Reports that Secretary Kerry had conversations with Ecuadorian officials about this are simply untrue. Period.”
However, the Ecuadorian officials said on Monday:
Ecuador ratifica vigencia de asilo concedido a Julian Assange pic.twitter.com/CWvzFnNbpH
— Cancillería Ecuador (@CancilleriaEc) October 17, 2016
Translation: “Faced with speculation of the last hours, the government of Ecuador reaffirms the validity of granted asylum to Julian Assange four years ago. We reaffirm that the protection of the Ecuadorian state will continue while the circumstances that led to the granting of the asylum remain.”
I don’t see anyone resolving this anytime soon. Despite all this, Wikileaks continues to dump Podesta emails on a daily basis.
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Comments
Not so hard to figure out. Occam’s razor.
Things are back under control again; four pallets of shrink wrapped currency arrived safely in Quito Monday morning.
Maybe the “pallet of shrink-wrapped cash” should be a new standardized monetary unit — the “Obama.” As in, “the deficit was increased by 4 Obamas today.”
No, for all you clueless, the embassy butler did it with a lead pipe in the library.
I suspect the fact that especially the blatantly pro-Dem NBC and other media outlets are simply trying their best to turn the story from content to personality. That way they can say they’ve covered the “Wikileaks” story while mostly making it about Assange and Ecuador.
Nice island you’ve got off the coast… it’d be a shame if something happened to it.
Blaming Russia again? I thought Anon claimed credit for the podesta hack because someone found podesta’s ICloud ID in a wikileaks dump.
Another dem lie?
If they report it, barely, then that is enough.
Because to them, this is a non-story.
When Assange was pouring out emails and dirt on Bush……LOVE STORY!
Now….he will be lucky if he doesn’t end up in a duffel bag, or “disappeared.”
Normally I would neither care about this issue nor would I tend to believe anything Wikileaks put out. However, in the new world within which we live where the mainstream media is so obscenely Left-leaning as to make it more propaganda and less journalism, it would appear that Wikileaks is the only source left to which we can turn in order to find out what is really happening.
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It is a horrifically sad commentary when you have a country where so many have died to ensure that we have freedom of speech and the press and yet the press still decides to become propaganda outlets of one party choosing to lie ad nauseum in order to get their party into office. To think that we must rely upon Wikileaks to obtain true indications of what is occurring is a tragic statement as to how far we have fallen.
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The US government manipulating the Ecuadoran government to turn off Assange’s internet serves only to confirm how much Assange is upsetting the propaganda arm of our mainstream media.