In a bizarre comment even by the standards of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Mexican president promised to launch a campaign to demolish the Statue of Liberty if the United States fails to drop charges against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.
The president’s remarks came during one of his morning press conferences, at which he said sending Assange to prison, possibly for the rest of his life, would mean that the iconic New York monument could no longer be considered a symbol of freedom.
WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Assange was arrested by British authorities in April, 2019, after spending nearly seven years as a refugee holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Last month, U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel signed an order to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, where he faces 18 cases of conspiracy to obtain and release classified material and violations of espionage laws stemming from the receipt of top-secret military documents.
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