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Stockholm • The founder of Wikileaks was denied a Swedish residency permit on Monday and said his whistleblowing website had been cut off by a company that handled many of its donations.

Julian Assange blamed the financial cutoff on the U.S. government, which denied any involvement.

The U.S. did tell reporters it was bracing for the potential disclosure by Wikileaks of hundreds of thousands of secret Iraq war documents, and asked media companies not to publish them.

The Pentagon said the group had as many as 400,000 documents from a military database on operations in Iraq but Assange downplayed expectations that a leak was imminent.

In a Twitter post, Assange said information were coming from "a single tabloid blog" that had put out a "tremendous amount" of false information about his site. In Sweden, the national immigration authority delivered a setback to Assange's efforts to gain protection from its generous media freedom laws by announcing that it had rejected his request for residency.

Migration Board spokeswoman Gunilla Wikstrom declined to explain why Assange's application had been denied, saying the reason was confidential.

Allegations of rape and sexual molestation have been made by two Swedish women against Assange, who has denied them.

Prosecutors have not decided whether to file charges in the case, which became public nearly two months ago.

Speaking generally, Wikstrom said only crimes that have been proven would affect the Migration Board's decision, which Assange has three weeks to appeal.

Assange did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the residency issue.

But he released correspondence from London-based Moneybookers.com, which ended its relationship with WikiLeaks this summer, shortly after it published a massive trove of U.S. intelligence documents relating to the war in Afghanistan, an unprecedented leak that angered the Pentagon and energized opponents of the war in Afghanistan.