Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo has been served a lawsuit that accuses him and others of spying on journalists who met with WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London (UK) in 2017 and 2018.
The Assange Defense Committee tweeted the video of the moment Pompeo was approached by an attorney representing the journalists. The attorney is greeted by Pompeo before he hands Pompeo the lawsuit papers and walks away.
The tweet wrote: “Pompeo and the CIA SUED for spying on lawyers and journalists at the Ecuadorian embassy.”
The video shows Pompeo standing in front of a green screen appearing to be on a film shoot at an event that some media sources claim was a fundraiser held last week. After receiving the papers, he handed them to an assistant without looking at them.
The lawsuit was filed in August this year by a group of journalists and human rights activists against Mike Pompeo, the CIA, the Spanish security firm UC Global, and the firm’s director David R. Morales Guillen.
The plaintiffs include journalists Charles Glass and John Goetz, human rights activist Margaret Ratner Kunstler, and attorney Deborah Hrbek – all of whom allege that the CIA under Pompeo spied on them when they visited Assange in 2017 and 2018 at the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Assange had been granted asylum.
Pompeo is personally accused in the lawsuit of providing oversight for a criminal conspiracy to violate Fourth Amendment rights of the American lawyers and journalists that now want compensation for being the victims of illegal surveillance by the spy agency and its partner UC Global.
The latter is accused of copying information from the personal devices of the plaintiffs and providing it to the CIA.
The lawsuit states:
Defendant Pompeo was aware of and approved the copying of information contained on Plaintiffs’ mobile electronic devices and the surreptitious audio monitoring of their meetings with Assange.
Pompeo has previously made news for going on camera and admitting that CIA lies, cheats, and steals. He made these remarks at an event at Texas A&M University in April 2019.
Wikileaks founder and publisher Julian Assange has been the target of American military and political establishment since he published confidential information leaked to him from sources within the establishment.
The information published by Wikileaks considered to be most damaging to the American military establishment includes the leaked files, including video footage, by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
The files show the US military committing massacres of civilians in Iraq in 2007 and in Afghanistan in 2009. In the Granai massacre, (Afghanistan), which happened under the Obama administration in 2009, most of the 97 civilians killed by the U.S. airstrike were children.
The U.S. government has been demanding the extradition of Assange to the United States to be tried for espionage. Supporters of Assange have maintained that publishing leaked information is not a crime and the American government’s hunt for Assange is a direct attack on journalism and freedom of speech.