Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

Mike Pompeo and CIA Sued for Illegal Surveillance of Assange's Visitors by Marjorie Cohn Attorneys and journalists whom the CIA spied on when they visited WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London have filed a lawsuit against the CIA, its former director Mike Pompeo, UC Global and its director, David Morales, in U.S. District Court. Assange is in a London prison fighting extradition to the United States. He is charged with violating the Espionage Act for exposing U.S. war crimes and faces 175 years imprisonment. During the seven years he lived in the Ecuadorian Embassy under a grant of asylum, Assange was visited by more than 100 attorneys, journalists and doctors. They included Assange’s criminal defense attorneys in the United States, international human rights lawyers, national security journalists whose sources could be jeopardized if exposed, and physicians and medical professionals. The CIA commissioned Undercover Global (UC Global), a private Spanish security company, to send images from Assange’s visitors’ cellphones and laptops as well as video streamed from their meetings to the CIA. “Unbeknownst to anyone there, they actually put recording devices and cameras in the rooms where Mr. Assange was, which essentially live streamed what he was doing and saying back to Washington,” attorney Richard Roth, who filed the lawsuit, told me and my co-host Michael Smith on Law and Disorder radio. “I think that there was clearly a desire to bring down Julian Assange any way possible.” Defendant Morales announced to his employees that UC Global would be operating “in the big league” and on the “dark side” with the CIA, the complaint says. Former employees of UC Global said the deal included selling information gathered as a result of the illegal surveillance. The four plaintiffs, all U.S. citizens, allege that the defendants violated their Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. They are requesting compensatory and punitive damages, an injunction to prevent the CIA from revealing their private communications, and the purging of CIA files of this information. One of the plaintiffs is Deborah Hrbek, a media attorney who visited Assange several times in the embassy. Speaking at an online news conference, Hrbek noted: Continued (with an important afterword) at https://losthorizons.com/N/208.htm#4