LONDON--U.S. investigators pursuing a long-running criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange have dug into the website's activities going back years, people who have been in contact with witnesses in the case say.
American investigators are gathering information and pursuing witnesses involved in both recent WikiLeaks disclosures and the website's large-scale postings of U.S. military and diplomatic messages over several years from 2010.
Officially, U.S. authorities have issued no public comments about the status of Wikileaks-related investigations. But a document which U.S. authorities said was mistakenly filed in open court in an unrelated case last November alluded to a sealed U.S. criminal complaint against Assange, though the document does not provide specifics regarding which laws U.S. prosecutors believe Assange violated.
U.S. prosecutors have not officially confirmed an Assange indictment but the existence of secret charges against him also has not been explicitly denied. A spokesman for the U.S. prosecutors office in Alexandria, Virginia declined to comment.
A source who met Assange inside the Ecuadorean Embassy said that the WikiLeaks founder believes that among the subjects upon which he suspects an American indictment would be based would be WikiLeaks' publication in March 2017 of a trove of hacking tools developed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which WikiLeaks called "Vault 7". Federal prosecutors in New York last year indicted a former CIA employee, Joshua Schulte, for that hack. Schulte has pleaded not guilty.
