The Guardian’s fake scoop

In November 2018, the US Department of Justice accidentally revealed that it had filed sealed charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012. Assange has said for some years that he is in danger of being extradited to the US, where he fears being given a life term for espionage, or worse (1). In a scoop on 27 November, the Guardian revealed that Paul Manafort, chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, had met Assange in London three times: in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

The news was all the more sensational as in 2013 Trump had not yet declared his candidacy for US president. CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times licked their chops. They suspected Assange of having collaborated with the Russian authorities in disseminating information embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, and saw his interviews with a close ally of Trump as confirming a long-term collusion between the US president and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, in which Assange had acted as liaison agent.

But had Manafort’s three meetings with Assange really taken place? At first glance, there could be no doubt: the Guardian is respected around the world, and leads in the denunciation of fake news. And the article presented the story as an unqualified fact. So the proof was there: the meetings had definitely happened.

Then doubt set in. People remembered that one of the article’s authors, Luke Harding, had a personal grievance against Assange. And it was revealed that the work of one of the two other journalists responsible for the scoop had immediately been deleted from the Guardian’s online edition. This was Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorian and opponent of former president Rafael Correa, who had granted Assange asylum. The article’s original headline ‘Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy’ was modified a few hours later with the addition of ‘sources say’, and the two men’s meeting became an ‘apparent meeting’.

As if all this were not enough, Fidel Narváez, then Ecuadorian consul in London, formally denied that Manafort’s three visits had happened. WikiLeaks initiated legal proceedings against the Guardian, and Manafort published a categorical denial. There is no trace of his name in the Ecuadorian embassy’s visitors’ book and there are no pictures of him entering or leaving one of the most surveilled and filmed buildings on the planet.

US journalist Glenn Greenwald summed up with savage humour: ‘It is certainly possible that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself “secretly” visited Julian Assange in the embassy. It’s possible that Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un joined them’ (The Intercept, 27 November). Possible, but unlikely. The Guardian would never have missed such a scoop.