January 1, Report: Trump administration considered kidnapping, assassinating Julian Assange

A report from Yahoo News claims that the Trump administration considered kidnapping and even possibly assassinating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2017.

Some senior officials “at the highest levels” requested “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him, according to a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”

Though US intelligence officials had been monitoring Assange for years, the plans to take extreme measures against him came amid the “embarrassment” of WikiLeaks’ publication of CIA hacking tools known as “Vault 7,” in what the organization called “the largest data loss in CIA history.”

“There was an inappropriate level of attention to Assange given the embarrassment, not the threat he posed in context,” one former official said. “We should never act out of a desire for revenge.”

Former President Donald Trump denied the plans.

“It’s totally false, it never happened,” Trump told Yahoo News. “In fact, I think he’s been treated very badly.”

Source:

Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks

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