WikiLeaks: Thordarson Admits To Being Lying Informant With FED, Blows US Case Against Assange

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#FreeAssange

https://stundin.is/grein/13627/key-witness-in-assange-case-admits-to-lies-in-indictment/

Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

A maj­or wit­n­ess in the United States’ Depart­ment of Justice ca­se
against Ju­li­an Assange has admitted to fabricat­ing key accusati­ons
in the indict­ment against the Wiki­leaks found­er.

A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case
against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in
the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. The witness, who has a
documented history with sociopathy and has received several
convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial
fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin
where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst
working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise
of immunity from prosecution.

The man in question, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, was recruited by US
authorities to build a case against Assange after misleading them to
believe he was previously a close associate of his. In fact he had
volunteered on a limited basis to raise money for Wikileaks in 2010
but was found to have used that opportunity to embezzle more than
$50,000 from the organization. Julian Assange was visiting
Thordarson’s home country of Iceland around this time due to his work
with Icelandic media and members of parliament in preparing the
Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a press freedom project that
produced a parliamentary resolution supporting whistleblowers and
investigative journalism.

The United States is currently seeking Assange’s extradition from the
United Kingdom in order to try him for espionage relating to the
release of leaked classified documents. If convicted, he could face up
to 175 years in prison. The indictment has sparked fears for press
freedoms in the United States and beyond and prompted strong
statements in support of Assange from Amnesty International, Reporters
without borders, the editorial staff of the Washington Post and many
others.

US officials presented an updated version of an indictment against him
to a Magistrate court in London last summer. The veracity of the
information contained therein is now directly contradicted by the main
witness, whose testimony it is based on.

No instruction from Assange

The court documents refer to Mr Thordarson simply as “Teenager” (a
reference to his youthful appearance rather than true age, he is 28
years old) and Iceland as “NATO Country 1” but make no real effort to
hide the identity of either. They purport to show that Assange
instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in
Iceland.

The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up
and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his
interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time
he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they
could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal
activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to
hack into the computers of members of parliament and record their
conversations.

In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him
to hack or access phone recordings of MPs. His new claim is that he
had in fact received some files from a third party who claimed to have
recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having
any idea what they actually contained. He claims he never checked the
contents of the files or even if they contained audio recordings as
his third party source suggested. He further admits the claim, that
Assange had instructed or asked him to access computers in order to
find any such recordings, is false.

Nonetheless, the tactics employed by US officials appear to have been
successful as can be gleaned from the ruling of Magistrate Court Judge
Vanessa Baraitser on January 4th of this year. Although she ruled
against extradition, she did so purely on humanitarian grounds
relating to Assange’s health concerns, suicide risk and the conditions
he would face in confinement in US prisons. With regards to the actual
accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments
of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from
Iceland which are now seriously called into question.

Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later
reflected in the Magistrate’s judgement, based on Thordarson’s now
admitted lies. One is a reference to Icelandic bank documents. The
Magistrate court judgement reads: “It is alleged that Mr. Assange and
Teenager failed a joint attempt to decrypt a file stolen from a “NATO
country 1” bank”.

Thordarson admits to Stundin that this actually refers to a well
publicised event in which an encrypted file was leaked from an
Icelandic bank and assumed to contain information about defaulted
loans provided by the Icelandic Landsbanki. The bank went under in the
fall of 2008, along with almost all other financial institutions in
Iceland, and plunged the country into a severe economic crisis. The
file was at this time, in summer of 2010, shared by many online who
attempted to decrypt it for the public interest purpose of revealing
what precipitated the financial crisis. Nothing supports the claim
that this file was even “stolen” per se, as it was assumed to have
been distributed by whistleblowers from inside the failed bank.

More deceptive language emerges in the aforementioned judgment where
it states: “...he [Assange] used the unauthorized access given to him
by a source, to access a government website of NATO country-1 used to
track police vehicles.”

This depiction leaves out an important element, one that Thordarson
clarifies in his interview with Stundin. The login information was in
fact his own and not obtained through any nefarious means. In fact, he
now admits he had been given this access as a matter of routine due to
his work as a first responder while volunteering for a search and
rescue team. He also says Assange never asked for any such access.

Revealing chat logs

Thordarson spoke with a journalist from Stundin for several hours as
he prepared a thorough investigative report into his activities that
include never before published chat logs and new documents.

The chat logs were gathered by Thordarson himself and give a
comprehensive picture of his communications whilst he was volunteering
for Wikileaks in 2010 and 11. It entails his talks with WikiLeaks
staff as well as unauthorized communications with members of
international hacking groups that he got into contact with via his
role as a moderator on an open IRC WikiLeaks forum, which is a form of
live online chat. There is no indication WikiLeaks staff had any
knowledge of Thordarson’s contacts with aforementioned hacking groups,
indeed the logs show his clear deception.

The communications there show a pattern where Thordarson is constantly
inflating his position within WikiLeaks, describing himself as chief
of staff, head of communications, No 2 in the organization or
responsible for recruits. In these communications Thordarson
frequently asks the hackers to either access material from Icelandic
entities or attack Icelandic websites with so-called DDoS attacks.
These are designed to disable sites and make them inaccessible but not
cause permanent damage to content.

Stundin cannot find any evidence that Thordarson was ever instructed
to make those requests by anyone inside WikiLeaks. Thordarson himself
is not even claiming that, although he explains this as something
Assange was aware of or that he had interpreted it so that this was
expected of him. How this supposed non-verbal communication took place
he cannot explain.

Furthermore, he never explained why WikiLeaks would be interested in
attacking any interests in Iceland, especially at such a sensitive
time while they were in the midst of publishing a huge trove of US
diplomatic cables as part of an international media partnership.
Assange is not known to have had any grievances with Icelandic
authorities and was in fact working with members of parliament in
updating Iceland’s freedom of press laws for the 21st century.

On the FBI radar

Thordarson's rogue acts were not limited to communications of that
nature as he also admits to Stundin that he set up avenues of
communication with journalists and had media pay for lavish trips
abroad where he mispresented himself as an official representative of
WikiLeaks.

He also admits that he stole documents from WikiLeaks staff by copying
their hard drives. Among those were documents from Renata Avila, a
lawyer who worked for the organization and Mr. Assange.

Thordarson continued to step up his illicit activities in the summer
of 2011 when he established communication with “Sabu”, the online
moniker of Hector Xavier Monsegur, a hacker and a member of the rather
infamous LulzSec hacker group. In that effort all indications are that
Thordarson was acting alone without any authorization, let alone
urging, from anyone inside WikiLeaks.

What Thordarson did not know at the time was that the FBI had arrested
Sabu in the beginning of June  2011 and threatened him into becoming
an informant and a collaborator for the FBI. Thus, when Thordarson
continued his previous pattern of requesting attacks on Icelandic
interests, the FBI knew and saw an opportunity to implicate Julian
Assange.

Later that month a DDoS attack was performed against the websites of
several government institutions.

That deed was done under the watchful eyes of the FBI who must have
authorized the attack or even initiated it, as Sabu was at that point
their man. What followed was an episode where it seems obvious that
Icelandic authorities were fooled into cooperation under false
pretenses.

Ögmundur Jónasson was minister of interior at time and as such the
political head of police and prosecution and says of the US
activities: “They were trying to use things here [in Iceland] and use
people in our country to spin a web, a cobweb that would catch Julian
Assange”.

    “They were trying to use things here [in Iceland] and use people
in our country to spin a web, a cobweb that would catch Julian
Assange” -- Ögmundur Jónasson

Jónasson recalls that when the FBI first contacted Icelandic
authorities on June 20th 2011 it was to warn Iceland of an imminent
and grave threat of intrusion against government computers. A few days
later FBI agents flew to Iceland and offered formally to assist in
thwarting this grave danger. The offer was accepted and on July 4th a
formal rogatory letter was sent to Iceland to seal the mutual
assistance.. Jónasson speculates that already then the US was laying
the groundwork for its ultimate purpose, not to assist Iceland but
entrap Julian Assange:

“What I have been pondering ever since is if the spinning of the web
had already started then with the acceptance of the letter rogatory
establishing cooperation that they could use as a pretext for later
visits,” says Jónasson.

Icelandic policemen were sent to the US to gather further evidence of
this so-called imminent danger and Jónasson says he does not recall
anything of substance coming out of that visit and no further attacks
were made against Icelandic interests.

But the FBI would return.

Icelandic officials deceived by the US

Towards the end of August, Thordarson was being pursued by WikiLeaks
staff who wished to locate the proceeds of online sales of WikiLeaks
merchandise. It emerged Thordarson had instructed the funds be sent to
his private bank account by forging an email in the name of Julian
Assange.

Thordarson saw a way out and on August 23d he sent an email to the US
Embassy in Iceland offering information in relation to a criminal
investigation. He was replied to with a call and confirmed that he was
offering to be an informant in the case against Julian Assange.

The prosecutors and FBI were quick in responding and within 48 hrs a
private jet landed in Reykjavik with around eight agents who quickly
set up meetings with Thordarson and with people from the Icelandic
State Prosecutors office and the State Police Commissioner.

Mid day, Mr. Jónasson, then Minister of Interior got wind of this new
visit and requested confirmation that this related to the same case as
earlier in the summer. “I asked on what rogatory letter this visit was
based and if this was exactly the same case”, Jónasson says in an
interview with Stundin. “I then found out that this was of a totally
different nature than previously discussed”. He says he put two and
two together and said it was obvious that the intention was to lay a
trap in Iceland for Assange and other staff members of WikiLeaks.

Such actions were according to Jónasson way outside the scope of the
agreement and thus he ordered that all cooperation with the agents be
stopped and that they would be informed they were acting in Iceland
without any authority. Only days later he learned that the agents and
prosecutors had not yet left the country so the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs contacted the US embassy with the demand they halt police work
in Iceland and leave the country.

They did, but left with the new informant and “star witness”, Sigurdur
Ingi Thordarson who flew with them to Denmark.

Not a hacker but a sociopath

Thordarson has been nicknamed Siggi the hacker in Iceland. That is
actually an antonym as several sources Stundin has talked to claim
that Thordarson's computer ability is menial. This is supported by
several chat logs and documents where he is requesting assistance from
others doing rather uncomplicated computer jobs. Once he even sought
FBI expert help in uploading a video from his own phone.

The meeting in Denmark was the first of a few where the FBI
enthusiastically embraced the idea of co-operation with Thordarson. He
says they wanted to know everything about WikiLeaks, including
physical security of staff. They took material he had gathered,
including data he had stolen from WikiLeaks employees and even planned
to send him to England with a wire. Thordarson claimed in interviews
he had refused that particular request. It was probably because he was
not welcomed anymore as he knew WikiLeaks people had found out, or
were about to firmly establish, that he had embezzled funds from the
organization.

After months of collaboration the FBI seem to have lost interest. At
about the same time charges were piling up against Thordarson with the
Icelandic authorities for massive fraud, forgeries and theft on the
one hand and for sexual violations against underage boys he had
tricked or forced into sexual acts on the other.

After long investigations Thordarson was sentenced in 2013 and 2014
and received relatively lenient sentences as the judge took into
account that he changed his plea at court and pleaded guilty to all
counts.

According to a psychiatric assessment presented to the court
Thordarson was diagnosed as a sociopath, incapable of remorse but
still criminally culpable for his actions. He was assessed to be able
to understand the basic difference between right and wrong, He just
did not seem to care.

Incarceration did not seem to have an intended effect of stopping
Thordarson from continuing his life of crime. It actually took off and
expanded in extent and scope in 2019 when the Trump-era DoJ decided to
revisit him, giving him a formal status as witness in the prosecution
against Julian Assange and granting him immunity in return from any
prosecution.

The New York Times Problem

In the month following Assange's arrest in the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London on April 11th 2019 a new rogatory letter arrived in the
Ministry of Justice in Iceland. This time the request was to take a
formal statement from Thordarson in Iceland in the presence of his
lawyer. The Ministry had a new political head at the time, who had
limited knowledge of the prior history of the case.

Although the Department of Justice had spent extreme resources
attempting to build a case against Julian Assange during the Obama
presidency, they had decided against indicting Assange. The main
concern was what was called “The New York Times Problem”, namely that
there was such a difficulty in distinguishing between WikiLeaks
publications and NYT publications of the same material that going
after one party would pose grave First Amendment concerns.

President Donald Trump's appointed Attorney general William Barr did
not share these concerns, and neither did his Trump-appointed deputy
Kellen S. Dwyer. Barr, who faced severe criticism for politicizing the
DoJ on behalf of the president, got the ball rolling on the Assange
case once again. Their argument was that if they could prove he was a
criminal rather than a journalist the charges would stick, and that
was where Thordarson’s testimony would be key.

In May 2019 Thordarson was offered an immunity deal, signed by Dwyer,
that granted him immunity from prosecution based on any information on
wrong doing they had on him. The deal, seen in writing by Stundin,
also guarantees that the DoJ would not share any such information to
other prosecutorial or law enforcement agencies. That would include
Icelandic ones, meaning that the Americans will not share information
on crimes he might have committed threatening Icelandic security
interests – and the Americans apparently had plenty of those but had
over the years failed to share them with their Icelandic counterparts.

In any event, Assange has never been suspected of any wrongdoing in
Iceland. Stundin has seen confirmation of this from the District
Prosecutor in Iceland, the Reykjavik Metropolitan Police. Assange has
no entry in the LÖKE database of any police activity linked to an
individual collected by the Icelandic State Police Commissioner from
2009-2021.

Assange's lawyer also inquired in the Icelandic Foreign Ministry if
the points in his updated indictment where Iceland is referred to as
NATO country 1 meant that his case had any relevance to Icelandic
membership to NATO, the bilateral defense agreement between USA and
Iceland or any national security interests. All such connections were
dismissed in a reply from the defense attache at the Ministry.

Immunity and a new crimespree

According to information obtained by Stundin the immunity deal between
DoJ and Thordarson was presented at the Headquarters of the Reykjavik
police where the only role of the Icelandic policeman was to confirm
the identity of Thordarson before leaving him alone with his lawyer in
the back room where he met the US delegation.

It is as if the offer of immunity, later secured and sealed in a
meeting in DC, had encouraged Thordarson to take bolder steps in
crime. He started to fleece individuals and companies on a grander
scale than ever; usually by either acquiring or forming legal entities
he then used to borrow merchandise, rent luxury cars, even order large
quantities of goods from wholesalers without any intention to pay for
these goods and services.

Thordarson also forged the name of his own lawyer on notices to the
Company House registry, falsely claiming to have raised the equity of
two companies to over 800 thousand US dollars. The aim was to use
these entities with solid financial positions on paper in a real
estate venture.

The lawyer has reported the forgery to the police where other similar
cases, along with multiple other reports of theft and trickery, are
now piling up.

When confronted with evidence of all these crimes by a Stundin
journalist he simply admitted to everything and explained it away as
normal business practice. He has not yet been charged and is still
practicing this “business”. Local newspaper DV reported last week that
Thordarson had attempted to order merchandise on credit using a new
company name, Icelandic Vermin Control. Despite using a fake name and
a COVID face mask he was identified and the transaction was stopped.
He was last seen speeding away in a white Tesla, according to DV.