The US justice system will not cooperate with the National Court to clarify the espionage to which Julian Assange was subjected by a Spanish company during his stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London until a New York court concludes its investigation into the participation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the events.
After four years without a response to any of the letters rogatory (request for judicial assistance) sent to the US by judges José de la Mata and Santiago Pedraz, instructors of the case since 2019, the North American authorities are thus responding to an ultimatum received from their Spanish counterparts.
The prolonged silence on the requests of the Investigative Court number 5 has caused the General Subdirectorate of International Legal Cooperation, an agency dependent on the Ministry of Justice, on December 12, at the request of the prosecutor Carlos Bautista, to demand from the US authorities “an express pronouncement” on whether the judicial assistance in force between both countries will be denied.
María de las Heras García, Spain’s liaison magistrate in the United States, has announced the refusal of the American justice system to respond to requests for assistance until New York judge John G. Koeltl concludes his investigation into the alleged involvement of the CIA in spying on the founder of Wikileaks, as revealed by an investigation by Morning Express.
“The Department of Justice is unable to execute these requests at this time because doing so would interfere with the ongoing U.S. litigation,” said the written response from Courtney E. Lee, an official in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. The first requests for judicial assistance were made several years before the filing of the aforementioned litigation, but they were not answered then either.
In August 2021, lawyers Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Carles Glass, both national security specialists, filed a lawsuit in New York against Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA, and David Morales, former Spanish military officer and owner of the Spanish company Uc Global, SL. The four plaintiffs were victims of spying on Assange when they visited him at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, as were hundreds of others.
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The lawsuit provided evidence revealed by this newspaper showing how numerous American citizens, as well as the lawyers and doctors of the Australian activist, were monitored and recorded by the workers of the Spanish company. Their mobile phones were opened and their IMEI, the codes that identify each device, were photographed. Reports were drawn up on each visit and classified on the company’s central server in Jerez de la Frontera.
CIA Director William J. Burns has used the National Security Act of 1947 and the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1940 as a shield to prevent him from providing any information to the New York judge in charge of the case “because it could cause serious damage to the security of the United States.”
The US’s obstacles to collaborating with the Spanish investigation were evident from the beginning of the judicial investigation in the National Court, a case opened weeks after the revelations of this newspaper and after the arrest of Morales. To the first request for judicial assistance processed by Judge De la Mata, the first investigator of the case, the US Prosecutor’s Office responded, in September 2020, requesting “the sources” that he had used for his investigations. The main sources are several protected witnesses who testified in court under that condition.
IP addresses and protected witnesses
De la Mata had requested that the IP addresses (unique identifier of a device connected to the Internet) from which the server that UC Global, SL had at its headquarters had been accessed from that country be provided. All the video and audio recordings captured by the cameras of the embassy where Assange was held for seven years were stored on that server. “Conclusive statements are not enough, we need real facts and the sources of the facts,” said the letter from the US Federal Prosecutor’s Office sent to De las Heras, the Spanish liaison judge.
Since then, silence and lack of response have been the tone of the US Administration to the letters rogatory sent by the judge. Thus, the statements of witnesses such as Pompeo, the former head of the CIA during the Donald Trump government; William Evanina, former head of Counterintelligence, the information gathered by the Senate Intelligence Committee that investigated the case and the statements of the American victims, among other proceedings for which collaboration was unsuccessfully requested, have remained unfulfilled.
Assange, 52, was released on June 25 after signing a deal with the U.S. Justice Department in which he pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act and accepted a five-year prison sentence already served in London’s Belmarsh jail. This ended a long 12-year prison sentence.
Yonvestigacion@elpais
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