Wikileaks chief Julian Assange slammed the New York Times in October for the paper's critical front-page profile of him.
But now Assange is taking issue with The Guardian's coverage of him. So could the British paper be shut out next?
However, Leigh added that "it seems he's going to war with just about everyone at the moment."
Assange's "war" with The Guardian landed on the front page of Tuesday's Times of London (shown above), a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that, so far, hasn't been on the receiving end of any of WikiLeaks' trove of classified documents. (The Times of London article is behind a paywall, but
many of the details have already leaked out.)
The Times reports that Assange is "particularly angry with Nick Davies" — the article's author — for "selectively publishing" damaging allegations from the 68-page report. Davies isn't just any reporter covering WikiLeaks; he's said to be a friend of Assange and also helped
broker the original agreement to provide leaked cables to The Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel. (Davies could not be reached for comment.)
Assange said the leak of the Swedish police report "was clearly designed to undermine my
bail application." He added: "Someone in authority clearly intended to keep Julian in prison."
Leigh
defended Davies on Twitter Monday night, suggesting that The Guardian reporter actually kept out specific details from the police report while publishing what was deemed necessary for the story. That runs counter to Assange's view that The Guardian treated him unfairly in how the paper covered the allegations.
"Nick left out a lot of graphic and damaging material in the allegations because he thought it would be too cruel to publish them," Leigh said by phone.
It may seem ironic that the WikiLeaks founder would criticize The Guardian for publishing leaked information, but
in an interview with the BBC, Assange made a distinction between what he does and what's been leaked about him.
"We are an organization that does not promote leaking," Assange said. "We're an organization that promotes justice … that promotes justice through the mechanism of transparency and journalism."
Assange once more called the Swedish prosecution a trumped-up effort to tarnish him and WikiLeaks. "When a powerful organization that has internal policies that is meant to be creating and following the law, i.e. Swedish prosecution's judicial system, abuses its own regulation and its own position to attack an individual," he said, "that is an abuse of power."
Although he's long maintained his innocence in interviews, Assange has refused to respond to some specific questions relating to the allegations. Assange recently walked out of an ABC News interview and
called the reporter a "tabloid schmuck" for bringing up certain details in the allegations.
"This stuff about #assange signing 'exclusively' for the times is totally, categorically, crap,"
Mostrous wrote on Twitter. "No deal, just an interview.