VLADIVOSTOK (Sputnik) — The United States has repeatedly attempted to destroy WikiLeaks and push the organization to get rid of all top-secret documents it obtained, but Washington had lost all the key battles so far, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in an interview released Sunday.
In his interview to Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week) program on Rossiya-1 TV channel, Assange said:
“They have tried to destroy WikiLeaks as an organization, as my organization. They are proceeding to try to prosecute me and my staff… but all the key battles they have lost.”
“The Pentagon publicly demanded that we destroy everything that we were going to publish about them, that we destroy everything that we had published about them. We didn’t destroy a single thing,” he added.
Julian Assange launched the WikiLeaks whistleblower website in 2006. Four years later he was accused of sexual assault by Swedish authorities. He has been residing at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, out of fear of being extradited to the United States where he could face espionage charges for publishing secret documents.
Thousands of classified diplomatic and military documents from all over the world, most notably from the United States, have been published by WikiLeaks in the past years.
