WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at a United States District Court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, on June 26. 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.
For months, according to multiple people familiar with the case, the U.S. trial team attorneys had been pushing senior officialswould have involved Assange pleading guilty to multiple misdemeanors, which he could do remotely, rather than in the Virginia court where he had been charged in 2018. A WikiLeaks representative would then appear in court and plead guilty to a felony on behalf of the nonprofit organization.
The Assange case had challenged U.S. government officials across three administrations, since WikiLeaks published reams of documents revealing U.S. military and diplomatic secrets in 2010.
“They asked for an assurance the United States government couldn’t give,” said Nick Vamos, former head of extradition for the Crown Prosecution Service. “It could have gotten really messy.”The Americans argued that the constitutional issue boiled down to a question of legal residency, not nationality.
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