A group of journalists and lawyers has sued the CIA and former CIA chief Mike Pompeo for allegedly spying on them. That happened, according to the plaintiffs, during visits to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Under Pompeo, later Secretary of State under Donald Trump, the CIA allegedly violated the privacy rights of American journalists and lawyers. They must hand over their mobile phones and laptops during their visits to the Ecuadorian embassy. Data from their phones and computers were then allegedly copied by a security company hired by Ecuador and passed on to intelligence. That violates the US Constitution, said Richard Roth, the attorney representing the plaintiffs. Among them are investigative journalist John Goetz (including ARD) and author and journalist Charles Glass (including The New York Times Review of Books).
The US Department of Justice wants to try the 51-year-old Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, for, among other things, publishing military secret documents and espionage, for which he can be sentenced to a maximum of 175 years in prison. The Australian is said to have caused the death of informants from the American armed forces by leaking confidential documents, according to the US. Assange hid in London for a long time in the embassy of Ecuador, where he received his lawyers and journalists and had two children with his former lawyer Stella Morris.
In 2019 he had to leave the embassy. He has since been held in a London prison. The British government agreed to his extradition to the US earlier this year. Assange has appealed to the Supreme Court in London to prevent that.
The CIA, which declined to comment on the lawsuit filed in New York, is not allowed by law to collect intelligence about US citizens. A fair trial in the US is no longer possible, according to lawyer Roth. He believes that the extradition request should be withdrawn.
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