Eli Lake, Columnist

The Unraveling of Julian Assange

The WikiLeaks founder uses leaks to push an agenda -- and Trump is along for the ride.

January 6, 2017 at 10:00 AM UTC

Corrected

January 6, 2017 at 1:40 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

In a dark place.
Photographer: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images

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You almost have to feel sorry for Julian Assange. Shut in at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London without access to sunlight, the founder of WikiLeaks is reduced to self-parody these days.

Here is a man dedicated to radical transparency, yet he refuses to go to Sweden despite an arrest warrant in connection with allegations of sexual assault. His organization retweets the president-elect who once called for him to be put to death. He spreads the innuendo that Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, was murdered this summer because he was the real source of the e-mails WikiLeaks published in the run-up to November’s election. And now he tells Fox News’s Sean Hannity that it’s the U.S. media that is deeply dishonest.