TEHRAN — It is a crystal clear fact that Donald Trump is a terrorist. In another revelation, Yahoo News revealed that in 2017, Trump’s administration had planned to assassinate Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks website.

The Yahoo News report said senior officials inquired about "options" for what to do with Assange, including the feasibility of assassinating or kidnapping him.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo - who later became secretary of state - was determined to take revenge on Assange after the leak, Yahoo News reported.

In 2017, Pompeo designated WikiLeaks a "non-state hostile intelligence service," meaning it could be targeted with the same aggressive actions used against foreign states' intelligence agencies.

A former senior counterintelligence official told Yahoo News that "there seemed to be no boundaries" during discussions with the Trump administration about Assange in 2017.

Scenarios included abducting Assange from the embassy, intercepting a Russian effort to extract him, or an outright assassination attempt. While none of the operations were ever approved, they paint an alarming portrait of intelligence agencies’ ongoing obsession with Wikileaks and its controversial founder.

Pompeo and other senior officials "were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7," a former national security official told the publication. "They were seeing blood."

Yahoo News said it could not confirm whether the discussions were escalated to the Trump White House. The CIA and Pompeo did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

In 2017, Assange was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He had been taking refuge there since 2012, after Swedish prosecutors opened an investigation into him following allegations of rape and molestation.

Assange had claimed that if he were extradited to Sweden for questioning, he would be sent to the U.S., where he said he would face persecution. Assange had been charged in the U.S. with offenses related to WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables.

Yahoo News reported that U.S. officials picked up intelligence suggesting that Russia was planning to smuggle Assange out of the UK to Moscow, prompting a search for ways to ensure that he wouldn't escape.

Among the possible scenarios to prevent a getaway were engaging in a gun battle with Russian agents on the streets of London and ramming the car that Assange would be smuggled in, former officials told Yahoo News.

Ultimately, assassination plans were dropped because of legal concerns at the highest levels of the Trump administration. The report also described concerns that a kidnapping would derail U.S. attempts to prosecute Assange.

"As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information," Barry Pollack, Assange's lawyer in the U.S., told Yahoo News.

The U.S., which has been involved in countless terrorist attacks over the years, has become more arrogant in its reckless adventures. Revelation of reports that Pompeo as CIA chief had tried to kidnap or assassinate Assange comes as the Trump administration was lecturing countries about the need to respect freedom of press. 

By trying to assassinate a person whose crime was to reveal the true stories about countries, Pompeo, Trump and their inner circle proved that they are not much different from their Saudi friends who dismembered Jamal Khashoggi.

The Trump administration’s hunger for killing did not stop there. In January 2020, he ordered the cowardly assassination of Iranian anti-terror hero General Qassem Soleimani. A move he proudly justified as “response to an escalating series of attacks...to protect United States personnel, to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks...and to end Iran's strategic escalation of attacks,” which were truly false. 

The United States must know that terrorism, kidnapping, and extremism will not bring peace and stability to the world. 20 years of invasion must have taught the Americans a lesson, yet the lesson has not been learnt yet. 

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in his remote speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 21 that if rationality prevails in the minds of decision-makers, “they have to realize that nations’ perseverance is stronger than the power of superpowers.”

Referring to the U.S. terrorism in the past decade, Raisi said that over the past decade, the U.S. has been making the mistake of modifying its “way of war” with the world instead of changing its “way of life”. “An erroneous path cannot be brought to fruition by merely adopting a different method,” he opined. 

A new era has begun. 

SA/PA