STOCKHOLM — Prosecutors in Sweden said on Friday that they would drop their rape investigation into Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who sought refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London five years ago.
The
announcement represents a victory for Mr. Assange, 45, an Australian,
who became a persistent problem for the Obama administration after he
released classified and embarrassing documents from the United States
and other countries. But the prosecutors’ decision does not mean that
Mr. Assange is in the clear.
“While
today was an important victory and important vidication, the road is
far from over,” Mr. Assange told reporters from the balcony of the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
“The war, the proper war, is just commencing,” he said of his ongoing legal battle.
In
Britain, he still faces a warrant for failing to appear in court, and
the Metropolitan Police in London said on Friday that they would arrest
Mr. Assange, who has maintained his innocence, if he were to try to
leave the embassy.
Moreover, the Justice Department in Washington
was reconsidering last month whether to charge Mr. Assange for his role
in the disclosure of highly classified information. A Justice
Department spokesman declined to comment on whether it planned to take
any action regarding Mr. Assange, and the British government declined to
say whether it had received an extradition request from the United
States.
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As
reporters thronged outside the Ecuadorean Embassy on Friday morning,
Fidel Narváez, an embassy spokesman, said the country’s officials in
London would have no comment because they were awaiting instructions
from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Timeline
Julian Assange: A Legal History
Here are key points in his case since WikiLeaks burst onto the digital scene in 2010.
Marianne
Ny, the chief prosecutor in Sweden, made clear that the authorities
were not pronouncing Mr. Assange innocent. “I can conclude, based on the
evidence, that probable cause for this crime still exists,” she said at
a news conference on Friday, which was a court-ordered deadline for
prosecutors to respond on the case.
Ms.
Ny said that proceeding with the case would require Mr. Assange to be
served notice of the charges against him and for him to be present in a
Swedish court, both of which were impossible.
As
a result, prosecutors said they felt that they had no choice but to
abandon the investigation because they had concluded that Ecuador
would not cooperate, and because all other possibilities had been
exhausted. “My assessment is that the transfer cannot be executed in the
foreseeable future,” Ms. Ny said.
The
investigation could be reopened, she said, if Mr. Assange returned to
Sweden before August 2020, the time limit for prosecution specified by
the statute of limitations.
Mr. Assange was accused of sexual misconduct by two women in 2010
after a trip to Sweden, prompting prosecutors to open the preliminary
investigation. Lesser charges were dropped in August 2015 because the
time limit for prosecution had passed, but prosecutors had continued
investigating an accusation of rape from one of the women.
In
a statement detailing his relationship with his accuser, Mr. Assange
said that the woman had expressed a clear desire “to have sexual
intercourse with me,” and that the two had parted amicably after having
sex several times.
Elisabeth
Massi Fritz, who represents the woman who accused Mr. Assange of rape,
issued a scathing response after the prosecutors abandoned the case.
“A
legal examination is very important for someone who has been raped, as
is the possibility for redress,” she said. “In this case, there have
been many turns and the wait has been very long. My client is shocked
and no decision to shut the case down can get her to change her position
that Assange raped her.”
Per
E. Samuelson, Mr. Assange’s lawyer, said that his client was
“relieved”, that the prosecutors had been trying to save face because
they could not win the case, and that the decision was “a total victory
for him and for me in Sweden.”
“He’s
a free man,” Mr. Samuelson said, although his client was still holed up
at the Ecuadorean Embassy as he spoke. “He can shop at Harrods. He can
take a coffee at a restaurant.”
Mr.
Assange has said that he has been denied due process during his time at
the embassy, and endured “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.” He
has repeatedly cited a determination by the United Nations Working Group
on Arbitrary Detention that the Swedish and British governments had
“arbitrarily detained” him since 2010.
In
a recent letter to the Swedish government, Ecuador criticized the lack
of progress in the investigation, expressing dismay over its sluggish
pace despite the fact that Swedish officials had questioned Mr. Assange
at the embassy at the end of 2016.
The
police in London said that if Mr. Assange were to leave the embassy,
they would still be “obliged” to execute the warrant issued after Mr.
Assange failed to surrender in June 2012.
“Now
that the situation has changed and the Swedish authorities have
discontinued their investigation into that matter, Mr. Assange remains
wanted for a much less serious offense,” the police said in a statement.
In
October 2015, the London police announced that they were ending
round-the-clock surveillance of Mr. Assange, citing the strain on
resources. Until then, officers had kept a 24-hour watch outside the
embassy in the upscale Knightsbridge area, ready to arrest him if he
tried to leave.
The
case of Mr. Assange has frequently been a bizarre spectacle, and the
events on Friday were no exception. Traffic around the Ecuadorean
Embassy was jammed as hundreds of reporters, photographers and video
journalists filled the sidewalk. Mr. Assange never made an appearance,
but a cat that was believed to be his did, and photographers rushed to
capture a glimpse of it when it peered out of the window.
Mr.
Assange and WikiLeaks, whose work he appears to have closely overseen
from the Ecuadorean Embassy, pose a legal and a political dilemma for
the Trump administration.
During
the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly expressed glee and
gratitude over WikiLeaks’ release of confidential emails from the
Democratic National Committee and from the Clinton campaign. Even after
American officials said the emails had been given to the organization by
hackers working for Russian intelligence, Mr. Trump read them aloud at
rallies and declared, “I love WikiLeaks!”
But the Justice Department has been considering the possibility of charging Mr. Assange.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested last month that arresting him
was “a priority” for a crackdown on leaks. In addition, Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, has said that WikiLeaks operates like “a hostile intelligence service” and that Mr. Assange is “a fraud.”
Asked in a recent interview with The Associated Press whether he still supported Mr. Assange, Mr. Trump was equivocal.
“I don’t support or unsupport. It was just information,” he said,
referring to hacked emails that WikiLeaks had published. Of the attorney
general’s plan to have Mr. Assange arrested, the president said, “I am
not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it’s
O.K. with me.”
But,
complicating matters, it may no longer be entirely up to Mr. Trump’s
political appointees whether to go after Mr. Assange. Responsibility for
WikiLeaks could be among the matters transferred to Robert S. Mueller
III, the former F.B.I. director who was appointed this week by Deputy
Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein as special counsel to oversee the
investigation into Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.
Prosecutors have long been exploring the idea
of charging Mr. Assange as a conspirator in the underlying offense of
illegal theft of documents, an idea that dates back to the Obama
administration’s reaction to WikiLeaks’ publication of archives of
military and diplomatic files leaked by Chelsea Manning in 2010.
(Coincidentally, Ms. Manning was released from military custody this week after seven years in prison, after former President Barack Obama’s decision to commute most of her 35-year sentence.)
Ms. Manning insisted that she had acted on her own
and that no one at WikiLeaks had pressured her to send files, and the
investigation appeared to have been dormant for several years. However,
if prosecutors have revived the idea of charging Mr. Assange with
conspiracy in the context of Russia’s alleged theft of Democratic emails
last year, that would now seem to fall within Mr. Mueller’s mandate.
Mr.
Assange has stated that he would be willing to be extradited to the
United States if Ms. Manning were released, but he offered a caveat in
January. “I’ve always been willing to go to the United States,” he said at an online news conference, “provided my rights are respected.”
The
Obama-era Justice Department, which had gone as far as to present some
evidence about WikiLeaks to a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., was
deterred from pursuing the case further because it proved difficult to
distinguish what WikiLeaks had done in publishing the classified
information provided by Ms. Manning from what The New York Times and
many other mainstream news organizations do.
Most
news organizations that cover national security and foreign affairs
regularly publish information from sources that is considered classified
by the United States government. By long-established tradition,
however, only the government officials who provide such information have
been prosecuted, not the journalists who publish it.
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