Hillary Clinton wants WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange held accountable.
“The bottom line is that he has to answer for what he has done, at least as it has been charged,” the former secretary of state said Thursday evening at an event with her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
“I do think it’s a little ironic that he may be the only foreigner this administration would welcome to the United States,” she said, joking.
Assange, who had been living in Ecuador’s Embassy in London since 2012, was arrested Thursday in London after Ecuador withdrew his asylum claim.
He was also charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for assisting former Army intelligence specialist Chelsea Manning in cracking a password to a Department of Defense computer in 2010 so she could use another username to access secret government documents, according to an indictment from March 2018 that was unsealed Thursday.
Manning was convicted in 2013 for violating the Espionage Act after she provided thousands of national security documents to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks was also responsible for releasing thousands of emails obtained from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. The U.S. intelligence community determined with “high confidence” in 2017 that WikiLeaks was used to publish information to help elect President Trump, but WikiLeaks has denied that this was the case.
