Julian Assange’s Computers, Cell Phones, Documents Will Be Given To United States, Ecuadorian Government Says

The legal troubles for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continued on Sunday, around two weeks after he was sentenced to spend 50 weeks behind bars. Per The Inquisitr, he will be serving his sentence in the United Kingdom. Assange skipped out on his bail following his 2010 arrest in Sweden on rape charges.

But his role in allegedly aiding Russian interference in the 2016 Unites States presidential election may also soon come to light, as all of his computer files and documents might be handed over to United States law enforcement authorities, according to a report Sunday in Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Sweden eventually dropped the rape charges, with Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which had granted him political asylum. By refusing to come out of the embassy, Assange essentially ran out the clock on the charges, as the statute of limitations expired in 2015. But according to a report by The Guardian, Sweden’s top prosecutor now says that on Monday, she will announce whether the investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Assange will be reopened, now that Assange is out of the embassy.

Ecuador revoked Assange’s grant of asylum, allowing U.K. police to drag him out of his quarters at the embassy building and arrest him on April 11, as The Inquisitr reported.

As reported by Lawfare, Assange now faces extradition to the United States after he was indicted on computer crimes charges stemming from a massive leak of classified documents by former Army Private Chelsea Manning in 2010. Assange has said that he will wage a “big fight” against that extradition.

Although he was not indicted in relation to WikiLeaks’ publication of stolen Democratic emails during the 2016 election campaign, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Assange’s role found — according to the Mueller report posted online by The New York Times — that Assange “initiated communications” with “Guccifer 2.0,” an online persona created by Russian intelligence agents responsible for the computer hack that extracted the stolen emails.

In those communications, Assange told the Russian intelligence agents that his WikiLeaks platform could lend the release of the emails “a much higher impact than what you are doing,” as outlined in a quote appearing in the report.

But according to El Paîs, U.S. investigators may soon have access to a much larger cache of information straight from Assange’s own files, which could shed light on the WikiLeaks founder’s contacts with the Russians. On May 20, authorities will enter Assange’s sealed room at the embassy, and extract “all his documents, mobile phones, computer files, computers, memory units, CDs and any other device,” which will then be sent to the U.S. Justice Department, citing a statement issued by the government of Ecuador.