Documents leaked from Wikileaks reveal how solicitors at Howard Kennedy legacy firm Finers Stephens Innocent were caught up in a doomed plot to spirit Julian Assange away to Russia.

When Wikileaks published a trove of US diplomatic cables on 28th November 2010 it triggered calls to extradite Assange to the US. The Australian squatter was already facing the threat of extradition to Sweden in relation to sex crime allegations. The documents leaked to the Associated Press show how Assange, apparently unable to decide between American or Scandinavian branches of the Graybar Hotel, planned to wriggle out of his fix by getting to Moscow:

"I, Julian Assange, hereby grant full authority to my friend, Israel Shamir, to both drop off and collect my passport, in order to get a visa, at the Russian Consulate, London."

Assange named Jennifer Robinson, a solicitor at FSI, as the person the Russians should contact to confirm his likeness:

"Should you need to validate the authenticity of this document please feel free to contact my solicitor, Jennifer Robinson of STEPHENS INNOCENT LLP".

 

 

The passport copy was signed by Mark Stephens, Howard Kennedy partner, legal pundit and one-time Spitting Image puppet. The copy, together with leaked Powers of Attorney granted to Stephens, were drawn up four weeks before Cablegate when extradition to Sweden appeared to be the greatest threat to Assange's liberty. 

 

 

But on 30 November Interpol closed off Assange's Russian escape route. It issued a Red Notice for his arrest in relation to the Swedish allegations. Instead of a dacha, in June 2012 he skipped bail and bolted to the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he's been enduring visits from Nigel Farage and complaining about guinea pig pie ever since.

Asked if she got a call from the Russians to confirm Assange's request, Robinson told RollOnFriday "No". Assange "never applied for a visa, nor did he receive one", she said. In an email to RollOnFriday the lawyer, who is now a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, intimated that the leak was a smear campaign by a bitter ex-Wikileaks staffer. She said the source of the leaked documents was Sigurdur Thordarson, who was "paid by the FBI to conduct intelligence operations against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in 2011" and convicted in 2015 of fraud in a case where Assange was a witness for the prosecution. "This raises questions", she said, "about what the UK knew of this US operation against WikiLeaks and lawyers in the UK".