Julian Assange Timeline

This timeline of events related to the case of Julian Assange sheds light on why so many feel Assange was railroaded

What happened to Julian Assange offers insight into how vulnerable independent media is in this country. A look at the timeline of events that led to his loss of freedom sheds light on the lack of evidence the United States had and helps to explain why Barack Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, refrained from prosecuting Julian Assange. So let’s take a look at the timeline of events.

July 1971: Assange is born in Townsville, Australia, to parents involved in theatre. As a teenager, he gains a reputation as a computer programmer, and in 1995 is fined for computer hacking but avoids prison on the condition he does not offend again.

October 2006: Establishes WikiLeaks, creating an internet-based “dead letter drop” for leakers of classified or sensitive information and a place for newsworthy information to be released and made available to publications around the world. WikiLeaks becomes an award-winning multi-national media organization and associated library.

2006–2010: WikiLeaks serves as an internet-based portal for leakers and whistleblowers to share information they believe is in the public interest and a source for reporters from both independent media and corporate media. Media outlets around the world use this as a resource.

DURING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

April 5, 2010: WikiLeaks releases a leaked video entitled “Collateral Murder,” showing footage shot from a U.S. helicopter while conducting an air strike that killed civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff.

May 27, 2010: Chelsea Manning is arrested for violations associated with WikiLeaks.

July 25, 2010: WikiLeaks releases over 91,000 documents, mostly secret U.S. military reports about the Afghanistan war.

August 2010: Julian Assange visits Sweden. During his visit, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women. He was questioned, the case was initially closed, and he alleges he was told he could leave the country. (See page below for details of the assault charges.)

September 2010: According to Swedish authorities, Assange was questioned by police, and while the investigation was still underway, he left Sweden for the United Kingdom. Swedish prosecutors say Assange fled after his lawyers were alerted their client was to be arrested the same day. Assange later claimed he was “set up,” suggesting the accusations were part of a U.S. conspiracy to destroy WikiLeaks. His lawyer, Mark Stephens, called the alleged victims “honey pots”. (A honeypot or honey trap is espionage language used to describe an operational practice involving the use of a covert agent (usually female) to create a sexual or romantic relationship to compromise a (usually male) target.)

October 2010: WikiLeaks releases 400,000 classified military files chronicling the Iraq war. The next month, it will release thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, including candid views of foreign leaders and blunt assessments of security threats.

November 2010: Attorney General Eric Holder announces “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks.

November 18, 2010: A Swedish court reopens the August rape allegation case and orders Assange’s arrest for the rape allegations. A warrant for his arrest was first issued in August, but it was dropped within 24 hours when prosecutors said the accusations against him lacked substance. The case has now been reopened. He was arrested in England but released on bail.

December 2010: Julian Assange is chosen by readers of Time Magazine to be the Readers’ Choice for TIME’s Person of the Year 2010

December 8, 2010: Julian Assange gives himself up to British police and is taken to an extradition hearing. He is remanded into custody pending another hearing.

December 16, 2010: Assange is granted bail by the High Court and is freed after his supporters pay £240,000 in cash and sureties.

February 2011: London’s Westminster Magistrates Court orders Assange’s extradition to Sweden. He appeals.

June 14, 2012: The British Supreme Court rejects Assange’s final appeal and five days later he takes refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London and seeks political asylum. Ecuador grants in August 2012.

June 25, 2012: Julian Assange writes a letter to the Ecuadorian President, Rafael Correa, providing supporting information for his application for asylum.

August 2012: Ecuador grants Assange asylum.

November 2013: The Obama Department of Justice declines to pursue charges against Assange for publishing classified documents due to what officials described as the “New York Times” problem: how could the government prosecute Assange without prosecuting news organizations that also published classified material? Le Monde, El País, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times and others had published a wide array of articles based on what they received from WikiLeaks.

July 27, 2016: On the campaign trail, Trump, referring to Hillary Clinton’s email, publicly announces, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”.

July 27, 2016: According to a comprehensive indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which the DOJ released on April 18, 2019, Russian government hackers launched an attack against the email accounts of staff members in Clinton’s personal office. According to the investigative report, Russia hacked the emails and, at some point, made them available to WikiLeaks.

October 2016: WikiLeaks releases a trove of Hillary Clinton emails. Others publish Clinton’s emails as well.

November 2016: Julian Assange is again (also happened in 2010) the number one choice in a Time Magazine online poll of who readers think should be TIME’s Person of the Year in 2016.

November 2016: Trump declares, “I love Wikileaks.”

January 17, 2017: Before leaving office, President Obama commutes Chelsea Manning’s sentence to 7 years. Originally arrested on May 27, 2010, she was sentenced to serve 35 years for violating the Espionage Act, stealing government property, violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and multiple counts of disobeying orders. Chelsea Manning will go home in a few months.

DURING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

January 20, 2017: Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.

April 13, 2017: Mike Pompeo, who was in charge of the CIA at the time, called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service frequently assisted by state actors like Russia.”

May 17, 2017: Chelsea Manning is released from Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary after her sentence was commuted by Barack Obama.

May 19, 2017: Swedish prosecutors discontinue their investigation of Assange, saying it is impossible to proceed while Assange is in the Ecuadorean embassy. Although the statute of limitations for the crimes they were investigating does not run out until 2020, the Swedish authorities drop the charges.

December 12, 2017: Julian Assange is granted Ecuadorian citizenship. The Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa called the measure “one more ring of protection” for Assange, who had been holed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 in an effort to avoid a Swedish arrest warrant on rape allegations—aa charge he always denied. Sweden dropped the charges in May 2017, but Assange remained the subject of a UK arrest warrant.

March 6, 2018: After Trump comes into office, the grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia (Alexandria) indicts Julian Assange on one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion or hacking. The alleged conspiracy is based on a conversation Assange had with Manning via text on or about March 8, 2010, allegedly offering to help Manning find a password. There is neither evidence nor a charge of actual hacking. To expand the statute of limitations for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) from the normal five years to the necessary eight in this case, given the indictment’s date of March 2018, the Justice Department is charging Assange under a statute that labels his alleged hacking an “act of terrorism.”

April 2018: A civil lawsuit was filed by the Democratic National Committee against the Russian Federation, the Trump Campaign, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and others alleging they conspired to hack into the DNC email system and publish embarrassing information that allegedly contributed to Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

February 2019: Chelsea Manning was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in a US government case against Julian Assange. Manning refuses to testify.

March 2019: Ecuador, the country that granted Assange political asylum and refuge in its embassy, receives a $4.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, to which the U.S. is the largest contributor.

March 22, 2019: Attorney General William Barr receives the Mueller Investigation report, officially titled “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election.” The investigation makes no claim that Julian Assange hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails, as was reported by a host of reporters. Some claim that Russia carried out the only hacking that the investigation found at Trump’s request.

April 2019: Former Ecuadoran Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ricardo Patiño, publicly claims that Ecuador agreed with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence to expel Assange from the Ecuadoran embassy in London in exchange for a “miserable loan from the International Monetary Fund.”

April 11, 2019: Assange is dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy and arrested by London’s Metropolitan Police after Ecuador revokes his political asylum for several reasons, including not cleaning up after his cat. He’s arrested for skipping bail back in 2012 and found guilty of breaching the Bail Act.

April 11, 2019: Two hours after his arrest, the Metropolitan Police announced that Assange was “further arrested” on behalf of the United States. Even though the Obama Administration abandoned the effort in 2013, the Trump DOJ alleges Assange assisted an army private in attempting to hack the Defense Department.

May 1, 2019: He is sentenced to 50 weeks in prison by a British court for skipping bail back in June 2012. He completes the sentence but remains jailed pending U.S. extradition hearings. (The US does not formally ask for extradition until June 11, 2019.)

May 13, 2019: Swedish prosecutors reopen the investigation they closed in 2017 and say they will seek Assange’s extradition to Sweden.

May 23, 2019: The United States Justice Department announces 17 new charges lodged against Assange, including an unprecedented charge of publishing classified material. In a superseding indictment, a grand jury in Alexandria, VA, accused Assange of inducing Chelsea Manning to send him classified documents. The 17 counts were tacked on to the single count for which he was indicted on March 6, 2018.

June 11, 2019: The U.S. Justice Department formally asks Britain to extradite Assange to the United States to face charges that he conspired to hack U.S. government computers and violated an espionage law.

July 2019: US District Judge John G. Koeltl issues an 81-page opinion upholding Assange’s 1st Amendment rights and characterizing WikiLeaks as an “international news organization.”. The judge accepted the DNC’s allegations that Assange “solicited stolen documents” and then “coordinated” to “publish the stolen documents at times helpful to the Trump Campaign.”

The ruling relied principally on the Pentagon Papers decision, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), and Bartnicki v. Vopper, 632 US 514 (2001), which held the publication of a stolen recording by a defendant who knew or had reason to know the recording was obtained illegally was protected by the First Amendment.

Nov. 19, 2019: Swedish prosecutors drop their rape investigation, saying the evidence is not strong enough to bring charges, in part because of the passage of time.

Feb. 21, 2020: A London court begins the first part of extradition hearings, which are adjourned after a week. The hearings are supposed to resume in May but are delayed until September because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jan. 4, 2021: UK Judge Vanessa Baraitser concludes it would be “oppressive” to extradite him to the United States because of his frail mental health, saying there was a real risk he would take his own life.

DURING THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION

February 9, 2021: The Biden Justice Department announces its intent to seek the extradition of Julian Assange from the United Kingdom to face hacking conspiracy charges in the United States.

June 2021: A key witness in the Department of Justice case against Julian Assange admits to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against Assange.

September 29, 2021: Michael Isikoff, Zach Dorfman, and Sean D. Naylor published an investigative report on Yahoo News that revealed a conversation between senior CIA officials and the Trump administration exploring the idea of murdering Assange and going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to kill him.

Oct 27, 2021: Julian Assange has a stroke while in custody on the first day of the two-day hearing.

Oct 27 & 28, 2021: In a two-day hearing in London Court, the United States appeals the January decision by Judge Vanessa Braitser refusing to extradite Assange

March 14, 2022: Assange denied permission to appeal against a U.S. extradition request.

March 23, 2022: Julian Assange marries longtime partner Stella Moris in Belmarsh Prison

June 17, 2022: The Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, Priti Patel, who was appointed Secretary of State for the Home Department in July 2019, approved the U.S. government’s request to extradite Julian Assange. Assange’s legal team will appeal the decision.

May 2023: Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the U.S. government should cease efforts to prosecute Assange, saying, “Enough is enough” and that he is concerned about Assange’s mental health.

February 2024: British High Court judges rule Assange can appeal his extradition to the United States based on arguments about whether he will receive free-speech protections or be at a disadvantage because he is not a U.S. citizen. Assange’s lawyers launch a final legal bid to stop his extradition at the High Court, a higher judicial authority for England and Wales.

May 2024: The High Court rules Assange can bring a new appeal against extradition to the US.

June 19, 2024: Assange signs a plea agreement with the United States and the High Court grants him bail. The plea agreement is a promise exchanged for a promise. A promise to plead guilty in exchange for a promise of freedom. Bail is granted to allow Assange to travel to finalize the plea agreement in U.S. jurisdiction.

June 24, 2024: Assange pleads guilty to a single felony count of conspiring to unlawfully obtain classified information and is sentenced to time served. Assange is released from prison on bail and boards a flight to a US territory in the Pacific to formalize the plea deal. The U.S.

June 25, 2024: Julian Assange formally pleads guilty to one count of breaching the Espionage Act and, in return, is allowed to walk free and return to his home in Australia.

June 26, 2024: Julian Assange now at home in Australia

This timeline was posted on the LA Progressive along with a fuller explanation. Click here to read that articl

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