“Any phone that had access does not have any,” Mr. Picabia said.

Wryly, the technician added, “But the music is playing!” The Laibach song was on repeat. Embassy staff were humming it in the hallways.

As Assange tried to work out the system failure, he also considered how to turn it to his advantage. “It could work out well, because it is proof of what we’ve been saying,” he said. He was certain that his enemies in the intelligence community were sending a message: they would not watch passively as their secrets were distributed. There would be no press conference, but he had launched Vault 7 anyway. “We still have a chance to respond to whatever garbage they come up with today,” he said. “We might be more reactive, but we had a contingency plan for this. It’s on the Web—the archive is out. I have a backup link. We can tweet.”

During the Presidential campaign, Assange had become a Republican darling. Once he launched Vault 7, the love cooled. “Assange should spend the rest of his life wearing an orange jumpsuit,” the Republican senator Ben Sasse declared on March 9th. That night, Assange was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, and padding around the Embassy with a pint of yogurt. “He said he wanted me to wear a jumpsuit for the rest of my life,” he told me, and grinned. “I’m already there! I wanted to get one that was more like a velvet orange catsuit—and to look very relaxed and accomplished—but this is the best we could get.”

Pressure from the Trump Administration was beginning to build. A few weeks later, Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director—another partisan WikiLeaks fan during the election—declared the organization to be a “hostile non-state intelligence agency.” In a press conference, he bluntly criticized Assange and his staff, and made a case for aggressive action against WikiLeaks. “We can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free-speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”

The next day, I sat in the conference room while Assange paced around me with a coffee mug in hand. “I’m in the process of managing a response,” he said. “So there was his new legal interpretation—the head of the C.I.A. deciding to redefine the law—and then there was a statement in relation to WikiLeaks: ‘This ends now!’ ” he said. “Which, coming from the C.I.A., is a menacing statement. Given that the C.I.A. doesn’t engage in prosecutions and court action, what is meant by ‘This ends now’? Why so coy? Is it a threat against my staff?”

A week later, the Justice Department indicated that the Espionage Act case against Assange—left dormant by the Obama Administration—was being revived. “Even Americans who may have serious doubts and disagreements with WikiLeaks’ conduct should be concerned about legal efforts directed against them,” Ben Wizner, an A.C.L.U. attorney, told me. “Never in the history of the United States has there been a prosecution of a publisher for publishing truthful information. A successful prosecution of WikiLeaks will be a precedent that is used to support a much broader crackdown against mainstream news organizations.”

At the same time, Wizner said, it was becoming harder to identify the principles guiding WikiLeaks. Assange’s provocations—his indifference to facilitating information warfare, his willingness to pay for secrets, his encouraging millennials to take C.I.A. internships as “whistle-blowing opportunities”—were recasting the difficult moral act of exposing institutional abuse as something that began to look like espionage. When the Trump Administration’s Justice Department began a campaign to crack down on leaks, Assange had so politicized his position that he had lost the authority to speak convincingly on the matter—even though he had in many ways redefined the conversation about whistle-blowers. “He has done damage to the whole movement of digital rights,” a former supporter told me, asking for anonymity out of fear of reprisal, like many others who did not want to identify themselves.

In London, I asked Assange about criticism he had received for insufficient redactions, or exposing personal information. Over the years, WikiLeaks documents have revealed the identities of teen-age rape victims in Saudi Arabia, anti-government activists in Syria, and dissident academics in China. “It’s nearly all bogus,” he said. “In any case, we have to understand the reality that privacy is dead.”

“If someone gave you all of Facebook’s chats, would you publish them?”

He paused. “All of them?” he asked. I knew he had been pondering the question. He had once described Facebook as “the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.” He told me that he was unsure how he would approach such a submission, but that he thought it could be socially transformational. “It would change what people should say, what people shouldn’t say, how unusual is betrayal and backstabbing,” he said. “It would change the norms of private human behavior. Something like that would need a lot of careful thought. It’s not obvious.”

“Would every name be anonymized?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a hypothetical.”

“Whoa! That’s a lot of flame, Beth! I’ll pick up a fire extinguisher on my way back from the gym.” Facebook

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Throughout the spring, Assange was in the mood for war. Almost every time I heard from him there was a conflict to discuss. Laura Poitras, the filmmaker, had made a documentary about him that he felt was unfair, and so he sent cease-and-desist letters, and plotted to sue her for twelve million pounds in damages. There were new fronts in his legal battles and new skirmishes with journalists and critics; on one Twitter jag, Assange posted thirty different links to people who had called for his assassination. There were claimed victories: when Donald Trump, Jr., decided to tweet out e-mails that he had received about the meeting with Russians, Assange took credit for persuading him to do so: “Did you see our incredible result with Trump Jr.?”

In May, Kim Dotcom poured accelerant on the conspiracy that Seth Rich was Assange’s source for the D.N.C. e-mails by claiming that he had evidence to back it up. The stunt was magnified by Fox News, which ran a follow-up story, reportedly with the President’s involvement, which was so packed with fabrications that the network was forced to retract it. Every time the story exploded into the news, Assange gave it life by retweeting the latest iteration. He either did not care or did not recognize that he appeared to be using Seth Rich as a pawn. When I told him that I thought he had opened the discussion about Rich as a diversion, he accused me of being a conspiracy theorist, and said that it was not his problem that the story had metastasized across the right-wing media. “My actions are more than appropriate,” he told me. “The issue is how to prevent them from being distorted.”

Assange’s popular support now included Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity, along with a coterie of alt-right trolls. He was pleased to have the alt-right involved in the WikiLeaks project. In his view, people at the margins of political life were becoming energetic seekers of truth, as they combed through primary source material on his Web site.

The more his public influence took on the features of populism, the more Assange was forced to accept the support of people no matter their views. George Gittoes told me about seeing an Australian newspaper headline announcing that Pauline Hanson, a politician known for anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views, had declared her support for Assange. “She’s a monster,” Gittoes said. “I got onto Julian real fast. I said, ‘This is no good.’ And he said, ‘But she’s the first politician to support me! I don’t like going against my one supporter.’ ” Later, from Afghanistan, Gittoes explained the complexity of his own support for Assange: “His thinking on Trump is beyond my comprehension, but I can give him the benefit of the doubt on that because the whole Trump phenomenon is so fluid. The reason why I support Julian and see him as an inspiration is very simple. He proves that one individual can still stand up against the powers we all feel oppressed by.”