Today British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt repeated the tired old canard that WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange “is free to walk out of the doors of the Ecuadorean embassy any time he wishes,” despite the fact that the US government has been increasingly open about its desire to arrest Assange, and that the UK government has for six years refused to say whether it has received a US extradition request from the government which tortured Chelsea Manning. He’s as free to leave as a man with a gun pointed at his head after being told “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”

“Serious charges have been laid against him and we want him to face justice for those charges but we are a country of due process,” Hunt said of Assange. “At any time he wants to he is free to walk out onto the street of Knightsbride and the British police will have a warm welcome for him.”

Hunt didn’t specify what those “serious charges” are, which is weird, because as far as the public record goes, there are none. Assange was never charged in the notorious Swedish sexual assault investigation, and that investigation was dropped months ago. The closest thing to a charge on the record is a warrant for an alleged bail violation which was absurdly filed a full 12 days after he applied for asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, and any charge arising therefrom would not be “serious” by any stretch of the imagination.

So we have a UK official publicly stating that there is an agenda to arrest Assange on mysterious “serious charges” right before a visit to the UK by Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, who recently met with US Vice President Mike Pence and reportedly discussed Assange.

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