House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., Wednesday urged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to place the whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its founder on a U.S. government list that would ban people and companies in the United States from conducting business with both.
WikiLeaks has come under fire by lawmakers and some Obama administration officials for releasing classified and other sensitive U.S. government documents, including most recently thousands of State Department diplomatic cables.
In a letter, King called on Geithner to place WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange on Treasury's Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons List, which is maintained by the department's Office of Foreign Asset Control. The list includes such groups and invidusals as terrorists and narcotics traffickers, according to the State Department.
"The U.S. government simply cannot continue its ineffective piecemeal approach of responding in the aftermath of WikiLeaks' damage," King wrote. "The administration must act to disrupt the WikiLeaks enterprise. The U.S. government should be making every effort to strangle the viability of Assange's organization."
King noted that U.S. firms such as Amazon.com, PayPal and Visa that had been doing business with WikiLeaks have since stopped. But he noted that Assange signed a book deal late last year with U.S. publishing company Alfred A. Knopf that will pay him about $1 million, which will help him keep WikiLeaks going. "Assange seems more emboldened than ever in WikiLeaks' continued viability," King added.
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., along with Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., introduced legislation in the closing weeks of the last Congress that would amend the Espionage Act to make it illegal to publish the names of human intelligence informants to the U.S. military and intelligence community
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