[rad-green] Did Senator Warner and former FBI Director Comey Crush Assange Immunity Deal?

*https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/22/did-sen-warner-and-comey-collude-on-russia-gate/
<https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/22/did-sen-warner-and-comey-collude-on-russia-gate/>*

Consortium News          February 22, 2020

ASSANGE EXTRADITION: Did Sen. Warner and Comey Crush Assange Immunity Deal?

The U.S. was in talks for a deal with Julian Assange but then FBI Director
James Comey ordered an end to negotiations after Assange offered to prove
Russia was not involved in the DNC leak.

*In light of news that Julian Assange’s lawyers have raised an alleged
pardon offer by Donald Trump to the WikiLeaks publisher in exchange for
clearing Russia of any involvement in WikiLeaks’  publication of Democratic
Party emails, we republish this article by Ray McGovern, which first
appeared on June 27, 2018. It provides light on another angle in which
Assange was being offered “limited” immunity in exchange for Assange
testimony showing Russia was not his source on the emails, which was then
crushed by a former FBI director and a U.S. Senator. It also shows that
Assange’s prosecution is political, a point his attorneys are expected to
make at next week’s formal extradition hearing.  The U.S.-British
extradition treaty excludes political crimes. *

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

An explosive report
<http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/394036-How-Comey-intervened-to-kill-Wikileaks-immunity-deal>
 by investigative journalist John Solomon on the opinion page of [June 25,
2108’s] edition of *The Hill* sheds a bright light on how Sen. Mark Warner
(D-VA) and then-FBI Director James Comey collaborated to prevent *WikiLeaks*
 editor Julian Assange from discussing “technical evidence ruling out
certain parties [read Russia]” in the controversial leak of Democratic
Party emails to *WikiLeaks* during the 2016 election.

A deal that was being discussed last year (2017) between Assange and U.S.
government officials would have given Assange “limited immunity” to allow
him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been exiled for
six years. In exchange, Assange would agree to limit through redactions
“some classified CIA information he might release in the future,” according
to Solomon, who cited “interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents
turned over to Senate investigators.” Solomon even provided a copy
<http://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/394049-coming-up-tuesdays-rising-how-the-doj-almost-offered-an-immunity-deal-to-julian>
 of the draft immunity deal with Assange.

But Comey’s intervention to stop the negotiations with Assange ultimately
ruined the deal, Solomon says, quoting “multiple sources.” With the
prospective agreement thrown into serious doubt, Assange “unleashed a
series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare
capabilities for a long time to come.” These were the Vault 7 releases,
which led then CIA Director Mike Pompeo to call *WikiLeaks* “a hostile
intelligence service.”

Solomon’s report provides reasons why Official Washington has now put so
much pressure on Ecuador to keep Assange incommunicado in its embassy in
London.
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/julianassangeincopenhagen.jpg>

Assange: Came close to a deal with the U.S. (Photo credit: New Media Days /
Peter Erichsen)

The report does not say what led Comey to intervene to ruin the talks with
Assange. But it came after Assange had offered to  “provide technical
evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases,”
Solomon quotes *WikiLeaks*‘ intermediary with the government as saying.  It
would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia
was not *WikiLeaks*‘ source of the DNC emails.

If that was the reason Comey and Warner ruined the talks, as is likely, it
would reveal a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly
sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least
attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak.

The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if Assange
provided evidence that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks of DNC
documents.

*Missteps and Stand Down*

In mid-February 2017, in a remarkable display of naiveté, Adam Waldman,
Assange’s pro bono attorney who acted as the intermediary in the talks,
asked Warner if the Senate Intelligence Committee staff would like any
contact with Assange to ask about Russia or other issues. Waldman
was apparently oblivious to Sen. Warner’s stoking of Russia-gate.

Warner contacted Comey and, invoking his name, instructed Waldman to “stand
down and end the discussions with Assange,” Waldman told Solomon.  The
“stand down” instruction “did happen,” according to another of Solomon’s
sources with good access to Warner.  However, Waldman’s counterpart
attorney David Laufman*, *an accomplished federal prosecutor picked by the
Justice Departent to work the government side of the CIA-Assange fledgling
deal, told Waldman, “That’s B.S.  You’re not standing down, and neither am
I.”

But the damage had been done.  When word of the original stand-down order
reached WikiLeaks, trust evaporated, putting an end to two months of what
Waldman called “constructive, principled discussions that included the
Department of Justice.”

The two sides had come within inches of sealing the deal.  Writing to
Laufman on March 28, 2017, Waldman gave him Assange’s offer to discuss
“risk mitigation approaches relating to CIA documents in WikiLeaks’
possession or control, such as the redaction of Agency personnel in hostile
jurisdictions,” in return for “an acceptable immunity and safe passage
agreement.”

On March 31, 2017, though, *WikiLeaks* released the most damaging
disclosure up to that point from what it called “Vault 7” — a treasure
trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files.  This disclosure featured
the tool “Marble Framework,” which enabled the CIA to hack into computers,
disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by
leaving so-called tell-tale signs — like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA
documents also showed that the “Marble” tool had been employed in 2016.

*Misfeasance or Malfeasance*
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/comey2.jpg>

Comey: Ordered an end to talks with Assange.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which includes among our
members two former Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, has
repeatedly called attention
<https://consortiumnews.com/2018/06/07/still-waiting-for-evidence-of-a-russian-hack/>
to its conclusion that the DNC emails were leaked — not “hacked” by Russia
or anyone else (and, later, our suspicion that someone may have been
playing Marbles, so to speak).

In fact, VIPS and independent forensic investigators, have performed what
former FBI Director Comey — at first inexplicably, now not so inexplicably
— failed to do when the so-called “Russian hack” of the DNC was first
reported. In July 2017 VIPS published its key findings
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/>
 with supporting data.

Two month later, VIPS published the results
<https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/20/more-holes-in-russia-gate-narrative/>
 of follow-up experiments conducted to test the conclusions reached in
July.

Why did then FBI Director Comey fail to insist on getting direct access to
the DNC computers in order to follow best-practice forensics to discover
who intruded into the DNC computers?  (Recall, at the time Sen. John McCain
and others were calling the “Russian hack” no less than an “act of war.”)
A 7th grader can now figure that out.

Asked on January 10, 2017 by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard
Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have
helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey replied
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-director-comey-agency-requested-access-to-dnc-servers/>
:  “Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original
device or server that’s involved, so it’s the best evidence.”

At that point, Burr and Warner let Comey down easy. Hence, it should come
as no surprise that, according to one of John Solomon’s sources, Sen.
Warner (who is co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) kept Sen.
Burr apprised of his intervention into the negotiation with Assange,
leading to its collapse.

*Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  He was an Army
Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for a total of 30
years and prepared and briefed, one-on-one, the President’s Daily Brief
from 1981 to 1985.*

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