A State Department spokesman denied Tuesday that the agency was involved in cutting off the WikiLeaks founder’s access to the Internet this week as the controversial website continued to publish internal emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The John Kerry private meeting with Ecuador was made on the sidelines of the negotiations which took place pricipally on Sep 26 in Colombia.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 18, 2016
BREAKING: Multiple US sources tell us John Kerry asked Ecuador to stop Assange from publishing Clinton docs during FARC peace negotiations.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 18, 2016
Mark Toner denied WikiLeaks’ suggestions that Secretary John Kerry pressured the Ecuadorian president to sever Julian Assange’s Internet connection. Assange resides in Ecuador’s London embassy, where he sought asylum in 2010 when faced with Swedish rape charges.
“That’s just not true. He didn’t raise that,” Toner said. “There just was no meeting. They didn’t discuss any of this stuff.”
“Our concerns about WikiLeaks, and in part Mr. Assange, are well known, but we did not have any involvement in either shutting down his Internet” or in influencing the Ecuadorian government to do so, Toner added.
The State Department deputy spokesman said WikiLeaks had committed a crime by releasing thousands of emails taken from the inbox of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair.
“What they’re doing is illegal,” Toner said. “They are stealing information.”
A reporter corrected Toner by noting that WikiLeaks had not stolen anything, but had simply published documents provided by an unknown third party.
But Toner maintained that WikiLeaks was complicit in criminal activity.
“I’m only making the case that this is confidential correspondence, in confidence,” Toner said. “This is information, like medical records, like legal documents … that is information exchanged in confidence between two parties.”
Toner refused to acknowledge the Clinton campaign’s allegations that the Russian government had orchestrated the breach of Podesta’s emails in order to boost Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidency.
“I just can’t speak to that,” he said.
Read the Podesta emails for yourself here.
The Washington Examiner is compiling a list of noteworthy findings here.
