"In September 2021, Yahoo! News reported that in 2017 in the wake of the Vault 7 leaks, the CIA discussed plans to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange. They also planned to spy on associates of WikiLeaks, sow discord among its members, and steal their electronic devices. "[T]op intelligence officials lobbied the White House" to designate Wikileaks as an "information broker" to allow for more investigative tools against it, "potentially paving the way" for its prosecution. Laura Poitras described attempts to classify herself and Assange as "information brokers" rather than journalists as "bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide".[380] Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo stated that the US officials who had spoken to Yahoo should be prosecuted for exposing CIA activities."
Why are Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying that officials who had spoken to Yahoo should be prosecuted for exposing CIA activities, if it all is just a conspiracy theory based on a anonymous blog poster?
Thats a different instance — the drone strike reference was to an anonymous blog post lying about how Hillary Clinton had wanted to drone strike Assange. It’s frequently trotted out to “both sides” actual conspiracies like Nixons war crimes or Trump and Pompeo plotting things like what you've linked there.
The first instance (that I still got on archive) of someone claiming that Hillary Clinton wanted to kill Assange occurred in Dec 18, 2010 by The Juice Media, a left-wing Australian company that produces comedic contemporary political and social satire videos. (https://youtu.be/hl4NlA97GeQ?t=237)
Then we have the case of Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson. In 2011 the FBI tried to recruit Sigurdur, who volunteered at wikileaks. "spy on associates of WikiLeaks, sow discord among its members, and steal their electronic devices" is a pretty fair description on what then occurred.
After Assange was granted asylum in 2012, the security company UC Global who was in charge of the building was also working with CIA.
The US embassy was also active in discussion with the Swedish prosecutors during this time about Assange and Wikileaks, which the Swedish government said "did not influence the case". The prosecutor did however break Swedish law in other ways, a fact found by the Swedish high court.
Also around this time there was a leaked document that I can't locate at this point, which showed plans for an extradition. Those where at the time dismissed as rumors, even if we know now that such plans were drafted and put into action in 2019.
All this time Hillary Clinton where United States Secretary of State, representing the United States to foreign countries. It is unclear how much responsibility she had over FBI and CIA, and with the extradition, but when it came to the cable gates a lot people assumed she was partially in charge of the US reaction in terms of foreign affiars. It is one of the main theories why Jualian Assange seemed to have a personal vendetta against Hillary Clinton 4 years later in 2016.
Hillary Clinton did also get the question if she, as the Secretary of State, ever discussed the assassination of Assange. Her answer was that she do not remember, but if she did so it would have been a joke. That did not reassure people.
