USA refuses to cooperate in investigation into Spanish security company that spied on Assange | USA

The US justice system will not cooperate with Spain’s justice system National audiencea national higher regional court, is to investigate the espionage activities against Julian Assange by a Spanish company during his stay in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; at least not until a New York court has completed its investigation into the CIA’s involvement in the events.

After judges José de la Mata and Santiago Pedraz, who have been in charge of the case since 2019, received no response to their requests for legal assistance to the United States for four years, the US authorities have now responded to an ultimatum from Spanish investigators.

The continued silence prompted the General Department for International Legal Cooperation, an agency under the Ministry of Justice, to send an “explicit statement” to the US authorities on December 12, stating whether the legal assistance existing between the two countries would be refused.

María de las Heras García, Spain’s liaison judge in the United States, then announced that the American judiciary would not respond to requests for legal assistance until New York judge John G. Koeltl had completed his investigation into the CIA’s alleged involvement in spying on the Wikileaks founder, according to an investigation by EL PAÍS.

The Justice Department cannot currently comply with these requests because doing so would interfere with the ongoing U.S. legal process, according to the written response from Courtney E. Lee, an official in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The first requests for legal assistance were made several years before the above-mentioned lawsuit was filed, but even then they were not responded to.

In August 2021, lawyers Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, both national security experts, filed a lawsuit in New York against former CIA director Mike Pompeo and David Morales, a former Spanish military officer and owner of the Spanish company UC Global, SL, which was in charge of security at the Ecuadorian embassy in London when Assange lived there. The four plaintiffs were themselves victims of espionage when they visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, as were hundreds of others.

The lawsuit provided evidence, revealed by this newspaper, showing how numerous American citizens, as well as the Australian activist’s lawyers and doctors, were monitored and recorded by employees of the Spanish company. Their mobile phones were opened and their IMEI, the codes that identify each device, were photographed. Reports were made of each visit and classified on the company’s central server in Jerez de la Frontera, in southern Spain.

CIA Director William J. Burns used the National Security Act of 1947 and the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1940 as a shield to withhold any information from the New York judge hearing the case because doing so could cause “serious harm to the national security of the United States.”

The hurdles that stand in the way of the Spanish investigation were already evident at the beginning of the judicial investigation at the Audiencia Nacional, where proceedings were opened just weeks after EL PAÍS exposed the CIA’s links with the security company and the arrest of Morales. The first request for legal assistance from Judge De la Mata, the first investigator assigned to the case, received a response in September 2020 asking to know “the sources of the facts” used in his investigation. The main sources are several protected witnesses who testified in court under this condition.

IP addresses and protected witnesses

De la Mata had also requested information about the IP addresses of computers or other networked devices that were allegedly connected from American soil to a server belonging to the private security company UC Global at its headquarters in Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain. According to statements by several former employees and emails that are being used as evidence in the investigation, US intelligence services allegedly had access to this central server, which stored all video and audio recordings from the cameras at the embassy where Assange was held for seven years. “Conclusive statements are not enough, we need real facts and the sources of these facts,” says the letter from US federal prosecutors to the Spanish liaison judge De las Heras.

Since then, silence has been the dominant attitude of the US administration towards the Spanish judge’s requests for legal assistance regarding statements by witnesses such as Pompeo or William Evanina, the former head of counterintelligence, or regarding the information collected by the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating the case, or regarding statements by American victims of the espionage and other proceedings.

Assange, 52, was released on June 25 after signing a deal with the U.S. Justice Department in which he pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act and accepted a five-year prison sentence – time he had already spent in London’s Belmarsh Prison.

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