2. Assange was "charged" with rape. This might be the most frequent falsehood uttered about Assange, even mistakenly by Assange supporters. No rape or any other charges were ever filed by Swedish authorities. The case was dropped three times, but the "rape" smear persists. Stefania Maurizi, a reporter for La Repubblica in Italy, obtained documents that showed British authorities pressured the Swedish chief prosecutor not to come to London to interview him in the embassy.
In a report on the German ZDF TV network last week documents were produced by Melzer showing the rape allegations were "invented" by Swedish police. "Why would a person be subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges ever having been filed?" he recently told the Swiss newspaper Republik. "Just imagine being accused of rape for nine-and-a-half years by an entire state apparatus and by the media without ever being given the chance to defend yourself because no charges had ever been filed."
Many persist in believing that Assange is a "coward" who fled to the Ecuadorian embassy to escape the rape "charges" when he voluntarily went to the police station in Sweden. His fear was being extradited to the U.S. via Sweden.
3. Assange was charged with endangering U.S. informants.
Much was made in the Espionage Act indictment of Assange allegedly revealing the names of U.S. informants and endangering their lives. At the top of the indictment are all the U.S. statutes prosecutors say Assange violated. Nowhere among them is revealing the identity of informants. That's because, though it may be unethical, there is no law against it.
In fact, as Australian mainstream journalist Mark Davis revealed in a talk webcast by CN Live! it was Assange and not his mainstream media partners who worked through the night to redact the names of many informants before the Afghan War Diaries were released in July, 2010.
Davis, who was in the "bunker" at The Guardian in London working on the documents, said it was only when two Guardian journalists in a book published the secret password to the entire trove of documents, endangering informants named in them, that Assange released the full archive to alert those in danger. The Guardian denies this saying WikiLeaks told them the password it used in its book would expire within hours. In any event, there is no evidence that any informant named has been harmed.
4. Assange hacked secret U.S. databases.
Assange was arrested at age 20 for hacking but was released on good behavior. The label "hacker" has followed him ever since even though Assange is not being charged as a "hacker" but for helping Manning hide her identity while accessing classified material she had clearance to access, which Parry said is standard journalistic practice.
5. Assange was charged with interfering with the 2016 U.S. election.
One of the most widely mistaken beliefs is that Assange interfered in the U.S. election with Russian help in order to get Donald Trump elected. All of the U.S. charges against Assange stem from 2010 and have nothing to do with the 2016 election, another mistaken belief.
In the 2017 film Risk, by filmmaker Laura Poitras, Assange is filmed on the phone in early 2016 saying WikiLeaks had obtained emails on Hillary Clinton and "we hope to get something on Trump." As Maurizi has written for Consortium News, WikiLeaks did obtain Trump documents but discovered they had already been published.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, told CN Live! that had WikiLeaks had damaging information on Trump, they certainly would have published it, especially before an election when voters need to be informed about the candidates.
There is zero evidence that WikiLeaks had material on Trump and suppressed it, another widely believed falsehood. Assange favored neither candidate and before the election said the choice between the candidates was like choosing "cholera or gonorrhea."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report alleges that Assange communicated with Russian GRU defense intelligence agents posing as "Guccifer 2.0" to obtain leaked Democratic Party emails. Even if it were true that Guccifer 2.0 was a cover for Russian intelligence, Mueller offers no evidence that Assange would be aware of that.
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