This Is the End? The US Goes After Assange

The pressure on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was tightening from every direction in mid-December 2010, and his lawyer was now saying the United States had quietly moved to the next stage.

Mark Stephens told David Frost on Al-Jazeera television that he had heard from Swedish authorities that a "secretly empaneled" grand jury was meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, to consider charges over the release of American diplomatic cables. US Attorney General Eric Holder had already confirmed that he had authorized "significant steps" in response to the leak, without elaborating. If true, the grand jury meant Washington was preparing a criminal case, not merely issuing condemnations.

The legal vise was only one jaw of the trap. Within days, WikiLeaks had been cut off from its money: PayPal froze its donation account, Visa and Mastercard suspended payment processing, Amazon dropped the site from its servers after political pressure, and the Swiss bank PostFinance closed Assange's personal account. The organization that had published a quarter-million cables was being unbanked in real time.

Meanwhile Assange himself sat in a British jail. Arrested in London on December 7 on a Swedish warrant seeking him for questioning over allegations of sexual assault, he denied the accusations and called them politically motivated. A magistrate granted him bail on December 14; prosecutors challenged it, and the High Court re-granted bail on December 16 after nine days in custody.

Assange's camp framed all of it as one coordinated campaign: the Swedish case as pretext, the financial blockade as extrajudicial punishment, and the Virginia grand jury as the destination. Whether history would call it justice or persecution was, by then, the most argued question on the internet.