Julian Assange just lost
For all the hubbub these past several months, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is still sitting in limbo in a British prison cell, waiting for the very long extradition process play out, as the United States continues to attempt to get its hands on him. Now things have finally taken an interesting new turn.
Julian Assange has actually completed his prison sentence in Britain, where he’s only been charged with skipping out on bail. So he asked the judge to let him out of prison until his extradition hearing finally takes place. But because of his history of, well, skipping out on bail, the judge has denied this. Why does this matter?
In short, it means that Assange can’t run off to a friendly country, or hole himself up in another embassy, in an attempt at evading extradition. This means that eventually, Assange will likely be shipped to the United States for prosecution. This brings us to the criminal charges that the Trump regime has brought against Assange. Several of them are legitimate charges, while one of them is a blatant attempt at falsely classifying Assange as a journalist, in the hope of establishing legal precedent that actual journalists can be criminally charged for working with certain kinds of sources.
What’s far from clear is whether Julian Assange will be extradited before or after the 2020 election. If it ends up being beforehand, we’ll see what antics and hijinks the Trump regime has up its sleeve for trying to turn the Assange case into some kind of ham fisted election ploy. If extradition happens after the election and Trump has lost, look for the charges against him to be amended into legitimate ones.
