Mystery swirls around Assange’s status at Ecuadoran Embassy

LONDON — Midway through releasing a series of damaging disclosures about U.S. presidential contender Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his hosts at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London abruptly cut him off from the Internet. In follow-up messages posted Tuesday, the group claimed Secretary of State John Kerry had personally intervened to ask Ecuador to stop Assange from publishing documents about Clinton. “While our concerns about Wikileaks are long-standing, any suggestion that Secretary Kerry or the State Department were involved in shutting down Wikileaks is false,” U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said in an email. The disclosure was the 11th installation in a series of leaks that have captured the workings of Clinton’s inner circle and included excerpts of her well-compensated speeches to investment bank Goldman Sachs. Assange fled to the Ecuadoran Embassy on June 19, 2012, after a drawn-out and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he remains wanted over an allegation of rape.