Mike Pompeo Denies Trump Administration Planned To Kidnap Or Assassinate Julian Assange: ‘Makes For Pretty Good Fiction’
During an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show, former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denied a report that the Trump administration considered kidnapping or assassinating Julian Assange.
Megyn Kelly asked Pompeo about a Yahoo! News article reporting that in 2017, Trump officials entertained the idea of abducting the Wikileaks founder from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, or possibly assassinating him.
Assange had been granted asylum by Ecuador in 2012 after Sweden sought his extradition from the United Kingdom over allegations of sexual assauly. He remained in the embassy until 2019, when Ecuador turned him over to British authorities.
“Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him,” said the report, which cited conversations with more than 30 U.S. officials.
Kelly asked Pompeo about the claims.
“Makes for pretty good fiction, Megyn,” said Pompeo. “They should write such a novel.”
He added, “Whoever those 30 people who allegedly spoke with one of these reporters, they should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Pompeo called Wikileaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” that is “actively seeking to steal American classified information.”
“You deny the report?” asked Kelly.
“There’s pieces of it that are true,” said Pompeo. “We tried to protect American information from Julian Assange and Wikileaks, absolutely, yes. Did our justice department believe they had a valid claim which would’ve resulted in the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial? Yes. I supported that effort for sure. Did we ever engage in activity that was inconsistent with U.S. law?… We’re not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations. We never acted in a way that was inconsistent with that.”
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