KEVIN Rudd and his foreign affairs department have been accused of all but ignoring pleas from Julian Assange's legal team to protect the WikiLeaks founder from a possible death penalty in the US.

The foreign affairs department may have also been caught out in an embarrassing lie, after telling The Age they had replied to a letter from Assange's British lawyer, Gareth Peirce, when they had not.

Abandoned: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Credit:Getty Images

Tony Kevin, an Australian diplomat of three decades who served as ambassador to Poland and Cambodia, was critical of Mr Rudd's handling of the Assange case, saying Australia appeared unprepared to grapple with its highly political nature.

''They have just treated it like a standard consular issue, which is really quite inappropriate given the heavy politics surrounding it,'' he said.