The administration of US President Donald Trump has prepared charges against Julian Assange, the founder of the global whistleblowing service WikiLeaks in an attempt to arrest him, sources say.
US officials familiar with the issue told CNN on Thursday that the Justice Department’s investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks goes back to 2010, but prosecutors have struggled since then with whether the First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibited the prosecution of Assange.
However, now they believe they have found a way to arrest the man who published thousands of files taken away by the former US Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, now known as Chelsea Manning.
During the administration of former President Barack Obama, the Justice Department determined it would be difficult to charge Assange because WikiLeaks wasn’t the only entity which published documents stolen by Manning. Several newspapers, including The New York Times and The Guardian,…