This is the best summary I could come up with:
On April 4, a Justice Department attorney in Europe sent a dire message to colleagues back home: Their five-year battle to bring Julian Assange from Britain to the United States to stand trial for publishing hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic and military files was likely to fail.
If a deal was not made with the WikiLeaks founder before a U.K. court’s April 16 deadline to provide assurances related to free speech, they would lose all their leverage and possibly their British attorneys, who increasingly saw the case as unwinnable.
“Time is short and my understanding is that the present plea proposal is currently on the [deputy attorney general’s] desk,” another member of the trial team emailed to leaders at the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control unit on April 4.
Without the First Amendment assurance, one trial attorney said in an email, the British lawyers representing the U.S. government concluded they would run into “an ethical obligation to drop the case” because of “their duty of candor” — they could no longer argue for extradition when a condition required by the court had not been met.
If they missed the deadline in 12 days, one attorney told leaders in the counterintelligence and export control section of the department by email, they would “face a situation where we lose our leverage and the UK potentially abandons us.”
The Justice Department agreed that Assange could plead only to his involvement in procuring and publishing war logs and diplomatic cables given to him by Chelsea Manning, an Army private and intelligence analyst.
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i wonder if that means that if he hadn’t taken the deal; he would be free already.
Why wouldn’t he wait then? If he’s waited 12 years so far, why not wait the extra year or two to avoid any charges? He’s instead agreed to plead guilty. Sounds instead like he realized he would never win the stalemate and was tired of house arrest.
Because it was a bet either way. Indeed your stalemate. After this there might have been other legal avenues that the US would have attempted… prolonging the whole ordeal.
Especially the human aspect. Government employees just go home at the end of their day and sleep fine. Assange spent his time in an embassy/prison while this whole ordeal went through. Now it is over.
The US did not have him in one of their actual prisons, but they did imprison him for over a decade.
Sounds instead like he realized he would never win the stalemate and was tired of house arrest
IIRC he wasn’t under house arrest, he was at an actual jail
Why wouldn’t he wait then?
by taking the plea deal, he’s a convicted felon that will be stuck in australia for the rest of his life; under the watchful eye of surrogates of the american hegemony he spat on.
if he had waited, he would be free to go anywhere he wanted; outside the control of the people who still want him in imprisoned.
Removed by mod
