How Comey intervened to kill WikiLeaks' immunity deal

Comey a name that should always be associated with screwing stuff up IMO.. I first heard this story on a radio news segment which "to me" was interesting.. The I came across the rather long article which also has a video that I thought I would post for the hand full (?) of people who might be interested..

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Each played a role in the early days of the Trump administration to try to get Assange to agree to “risk mitigation” — essentially, limiting some classified CIA information he might release in the future.



The effort resulted in the drafting of a limited immunity deal that might have temporarily freed the WikiLeaks founder from a London embassy where he has been exiled for years, according to interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators. Read the draft immunity deal proffer that the Justice Department was considering for Assange here.

But an unexpected intervention by Comey — relayed through Warner — soured the negotiations, multiple sources tell me. Assange eventually unleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare capabilities for a long time to come.

This yarn begins in January 2017 when Assange’s legal team approached Waldman — known for his government connections — to see if the new Trump administration would negotiate with the WikiLeaks founder, holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy. They hoped Waldman, a former Clinton Justice Department official, might navigate the U.S. law enforcement bureaucracy and find the right people to engage.

Waldman had helped Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to assist the FBI from 2009 to 2011 in searching for a retired FBI agent captured in Iran; the FBI rewarded Deripaska by granting him entry to the United States after years of being banned.

thehill.com...