Lying (Alleged) Reporter Contributed To The Guardian’s Manafort-Assange ‘Bombshell’

DC: An Ecuadorian journalist who has been accused of fabricating documents in the past helped write a would-be bombshell for The Guardian in November that alleged former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met multiple times, including during the 2016 presidential campaign, with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Fernando Villavicencio was listed as one of three reporters, along with Luke Harding and Ben Collyns, on the print version of the Guardian’s story, which was published on Nov. 27. His name was left off of the web version of the article.

As The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi notes, the Ecuadorian government previously accused Villavicencio, a vocal critic of Ecuador’s former president, Rafael Correa, of fabricating documents related to an agreement between Ecuador and China to drill for oil in the Amazon forest.

“There is also evidence that the author of this falsified document is Fernando Villavicencio, a convicted slanderer and opponent of Ecuador’s current government. This can be seen from the file properties of the document that The Guardian had originally posted (but which it has since taken down and replaced with a version with this evidence removed),” the foreign ministry wrote on May 27, 2014 in response to an article from The Guardian alleging the oil deal.

Villavicencio’s article with The Guardian alleged that Manafort met Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange is living under asylum, in 2013, 2015 and March 2016.

If true, the story would have major implications for the special counsel’s investigation, which is looking into whether the Trump campaign took part in the hacking of Democrats’ emails during the campaign. Manafort, who has been convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud in the special counsel’s probe, joined the campaign a month after he last allegedly meeting with Assange.

The Guardian report generated widespread shock, but was soon met with skepticism because of the lack of physical evidence supporting the claim. Manafort did not sign a visitor log kept at the Ecuadorian embassy, and no surveillance footage was cited placing Manafort at the embassy.

Instead, the report relied upon anonymous sources who claimed that Ecuador’s intelligence agency has information that Manafort and unnamed Russians visited Assange.

Both WikiLeaks and Manafort vehemently denied the story, claiming that the meetings never occurred. Both sides said they were considering legal action against The Guardian, which is based in the U.K. but has wide circulation across the globe. more here