A US lawyer for Julian Assange says the US government persists in trying to extradite and jail the WikiLeaks founder, despite a report prosecutors are considering a plea deal.
The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported the US Justice Department is “considering whether to allow Julian Assange to plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information”. Under such a deal, Assange potentially “could enter that plea remotely, without setting foot in the US”.
Assange’s roughly five years in prison in the United Kingdom would count toward the US sentence and he’d likely be able to walk free once a deal was made, the WSJ reported.
But Barry Pollack, a Washington-based lawyer for Assange, poured cold water on the idea when contacted by Crikey.
“It is inappropriate for Mr Assange’s lawyers to comment while his case is before the UK High Court other than to say we have been given no indication that the Department of Justice intends to resolve the case and the United States is continuing with as much determination as ever to seek his extradition on all 18 charges, exposing him to 175 years in prison,” he told Crikey in an emailed statement.
Greg Barns, an adviser to Assange’s Australian campaign, said the team would continue to push the Albanese government to “provide a very quick resolution” to the matter.
“This is a political case and it has been since day one,” he told Crikey. “We’re arguing for the government to continue putting pressure on the Biden administration to end this.”
Assange’s UK-based legal team was recently in court seeking leave to appeal the Australian’s extradition to the US, an application that’s still being considered. If UK High Court judges Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson are not convinced, Assange’s only remaining recourse, other than a potential plea deal, would be an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
The WSJ reported the UK High Court decision is expected within weeks, and added the US would have 28 days to collect Assange if the court rules against him.
The US government says the Australian endangered lives when his whistleblowing organisation WikiLeaks published leaked documents in 2010 and 2011 related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Assange’s supporters say the publications were legitimate works of journalism and that Assange, who is being held in London’s Belmarsh prison, shouldn’t be punished for it.
What are you thoughts on the attempt to extradite Julian Assange? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
“US still determined to extradite Assange despite report of plea deal, says lawyer”
Then its time Australia and Australians starting boycotting all things pertaining to the USA.
cartledge muscles up..
Gaol Ronald McDonald for crimes against food, and being a scary pervert targeting children.
Wouldn’t it be nice? Unfortunately American investment owns such a lot of the place we’d be boycotting a high percentage of our own country, starting with “our” four big banks. There’s a reason the USA can and does do what it wants with us.
I suspect the EU would be happy to take up some of that slack. 😉
The US government says the Australian endangered lives when his whistleblowing organisation WikiLeaks published leaked documents in 2010 and 2011 related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
This is the biggest and most enduring wad of bullsh*t to be flung about, throughout a shameful and inhumane episode almost entirely defined, from the State and MSM side at least, by mountains of bullsh*t. It is NOT up to journalists, publishers, artists, academics, free speech advocates or indeed any non-State employes or officials…to safeguard the State’s secrets for them. If a State employee is harmed by the release of ‘unauthorised’ information about them, or their, or related State activities, then the culpability for that harm rests solely with the State.
Exposing this codswallop – that all citizen’s have a ‘citizenly duty’ to buy into the State’s security and military apparati – as codswallop, and setting about dismantling it, is precisely what Assange/Wikileaks has always been all about. That’s why the State is being so vindictive in his torture. It must obliterate the entire project. For that reason, I dearly hope that Assange continues to resist any transactionalist or ‘pragmatic’ outcome here. Whatever more it costs him, including death. The entire point of this sustained, majestic act of freedom of fighting would be obscured by the State’s propagandising over any ‘humane’ resolution.
Hang tough, JA. F**k them all, the spooks and the bullies and the generals and their lickspittle lackies in the commercialised media.
He made many suboptimal decisions, ethically and morally, with eyes wide open e.g. liaising with Trump’s Russian influenced campaign team and Farage et al, along with his allies and related behaviour. His local allies avert their gaze from facts offshore…..
Finland based disinfo analysts at Vatnik Soup used media sources to develop a timeline:
‘In 2012, it was reported that Russia Today (now RT) would give Assange his own talk show. On the show, Julian interviewed many anti-US and pro-Kremlin figures, including Noam Chomsky, Pakistani politician Imran Khan, and the secretary-general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.’ 11/22
‘During the US 2016 presidential election, WikiLeaks released hacked emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Cybersecurity experts stated that the attack on the DNC server was conducted by GRU’ 12/22
‘…a Russian military intelligence agency. The Mueller report concluded that GRU used an alias “Guccifer 2.0” to share the content with WikiLeaks and others. The e-mails also gave birth to various conspiracy theories, including Pizzagate and Frazzledrip.’
https://vatniksoup.com/en/soups/269/
The entire point about genuine advocates for freedom of information is that they will release information that outrages everyone’s political and ideological biases, Drew. Everyone’s. I know it’s incredibly hard to believe, but some of the partisan causes and figures you support are…gasp…sometimes guilty of sh*tty subterfuge that ought to publicly aired. The US Democrats, Ukraine and Israel aren’t perfect global citizens.
Shocking, I know.
Find me a free speech warrior who never annoys you and I’ll find you a free speech fake. And find me a progressive who isn’t appalled and outraged by Assange’s treatment and I’ll find you a tire-kicking soft pap prog. Oh…hi there, Drew!
Well yeah, but making the Dems look worse at that moment in 2016 was either a spectacularly Ill-timed bit of naive absolutism, or a result of cosying up to some very nasty people, and as much as I wanted to believe it was the former, I seem to recall there was some other stuff around that time which made that way too implausible.
None of which is to say that Assange should’ve been made an example of like this, but I’m not sure anybody in a position of authority is prepared to see just how ugly Uncle Sam is under the mask by standing up for truth and justice…
I’m not saying the Jews deserved to be gassed, but gee well you’ve got to put these things in historical perspective…oh dear me I seem to have busted Godwin’s.
Look, you’re either a supporter of freedom of information/o/asociation/etc, or you’re not. There’s no equivocating middle ground. Information-based principles allow us that indulgence.
The entry price, of course, Kimmo…is full authorial disclosure. Most Crikey commenters fail at that first and fundamental ‘free speech’ hurdle.
So of course you are ‘fair-weather free speech advocates’ on Assange, etc.
Assange has, of course, paid a very high price for ‘free speech’ entry: not being too gutless to stand by his authorial self publicly has cost him best part of fifteen years and much of his physical and emotional sanity. That majestic act of sustained will buys him more f**king right to truly speak freely and distribute whatever f**king information he bloody well chooses than any of us here and for that matter any quasi-anonymous State official or bylined MSM journo playing a cosplay-only ‘free speech’ game who would keep him physically crushed.
No-one on this planet gets to tell Julisn Assange any bloody thing about what he can and can’t do or say publicly. Least of all any anonymous minnows on an obscure prog-kiddies’ playtime website owned by hypocritically ‘progressive’ neolib millionaires.
Anonymous minnows, eh? At least my name (and Drew’s, and Henk’s) is a link. No idea why, no idea why yours isn’t. This puddle of piss would be a lot clearer and deeper if it was up to me.
Nah, think mine is a link…but Crikey’s steam driven architecture is daffily self-referential, it’s always only ever linked back to itself.
A stealthy mountebank on the lam.. Peter Foster with a keyboard.. The real hero here is Chelsea and they already took their lumps..
This straw manning is the sort of thing I expect from many others when I try to say something nuanced, but I’m disappointed to see you failing to live up to your projected persona here, Jack.
Obviously bullsht is bad and we’re against it. But acting without reference to context from a handful of absolute principles is hopelessly naive. The context here was the imminent prospect of that sad spectacle of alternating black comedy and horror the world watched aghast for four years, only to be temporarily concluded by January 6th.
Maybe, in the interests of less bullsht all round, it might’ve been a good move to avoid tipping the scale in that direction at that moment. Because anyone who really cared about how dirty the DNC was already knew by then from the way they’d treated Bernie in the primaries, choking off a true opponent to everything Trump stood for, and providing us Turd Sandwich vs Giant D0uche 2016.
The (vastly preferable but still totally sht by any sane measure) Turd Sandwich was a total snooze who was only just going to beat the Giant D0uche, despite the Lovecraftian horror of that prospect.
So thanks, Assange, for undoing a lot of your good work by helping open the portal to the yawning abyss.
But of course, obviously fck the Yanks, they shouldn’t get to put their hands on him. On the other hand, everyone who speaks English is their bich. What are ya gonna do.
No, I still reckon that misses the point of Wikileaks. Assange’s agon – that is shorthand for the whole project’s agon, btw, Assange has always only been the facade of an ensemble effort – is much bigger than partisan politics. It’s an absolutist push to destroy – dismantle – the mass coercive power of several thousand years of accumulated epistemic inertia.
The idea that humanity should acquiesce to the information diktats of something as arbitrary (and cynically man-made) as ‘The State’…is far more perverse than the idea that we should obey the mystic Commandments of some interventionist G-d. F**king ridiculous, the worst kind of surrender.
In that sense, partisan politics is less than meaningless. To say that Wikileaks should somehow have ‘picked information sides’ during 2015/16 from a sense of historical least-worst-ism is like believing that Abraham’s G-d was obviously a Democrat because he ended up commuting Isaac’s death penalty, awwwww.
It’s a category error. Wikileaks, what it’s trying to achieve, is well above partisan politics.
Literally one of the main reasons Wikileaks exists is to enable anonymity.
No, in fact that is not a ‘reason’ it exists, Doc. It’s an operational mode setting, a purely optional and expedient one, btw. Actually, Wikileaks – very properly – doesn’t really give a sh*t about safeguarding the anonymity or otherwise of its information suppliers…except in so far as to keep the future pipeline secure. And if you look hard at the whole trajectory of the biggest Wiki related stories…in fact they only become usefully disruptive stories once they have a real live human being to hang them off, anyway.
So – again, very properly – a figure like Bernard/Chelsea Manning and their eventual fate is (nor should be) of any great moral import to Assange/Wikileaks. Why should they care? I’m one of those who believes very strongly that Manning should have been charged, tried and convicted by the US State for breaking the Official Secrets Act he/she willingly signed. H/She broke the law. H/She probably did betray many CoW soldiers and agents, etc. H/she made their choices. Including to enlist and be part of the State’s Organised Killing & Bullying Machinery in the first place. Their ‘anonymity’ is pure op. temp. expedient. Only a fool turns whistleblower and truly thinks the sponsors encouraging them to betray their office/fellows in doing so won’t in turn betray their identity, as quick as blink when it suits the higher project. Again, rightly and properly so. What, you anonymous lot think you all deserve medals and respect and plaudits for skulking about gutlessly in the night behind a balaclava, like graffiti artists, when everywhere in the world courageous people are dying for the banal, miraculous privilege of making themselves by pure will free enough (no matter how physically brutalised) to declare in public: ‘Here I stand, so f**k you, State’?
How any of you can post anonymous after Navalny mystifies me.
And Assange is not anonymous. And he is paying the price for that. Is the point here. It’s one worth dying for. What matters to the Wikileaks project is not the information itself; not the source and its fate; it’s dismantling the gatekeeping of information in entirety. Discarding the very idea that most of us (weak) humans ‘need’ to be ‘protected’ from certain information by a a tiny (stronger) few.
as is eventually usual my replies have ended up disappearing into moderation, sorry doc. I take your comments very seriously even if I can’t always continue conversations
apparently there is already over a hundred October 7 museums ..
Assange has much PR to support him in various media, but multiple activists doing far more dangerous and deadly activism are ignored, then you ignore Assange’s behaviour and suboptimal choices, then platform him….too glib and easy.
Further, I’d place Assange in a RW ecosystem, as evidenced by liaising with the fragrant likes of Farage, Stone et al representing Russia-Trump influence, possibly like Downer’s confusing London meeting or liaison when High Commissioner with Russia-Trump’s Papadopoulos; in the public record inc. Turnbull’s (p***ed off description) via Lowy Centre’s Interpreter and many offshore media outlets (not local?).
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/downer-turnbull-trump-poke-five-eyes
have disappeared into moderation drew, soz & rgds
They want to haul Assange before the judiciary in U.S ..How about they first get Trump prosecuted and jailed for all he did, hid files, created inserruction..how about they get that horse past the post before anything else?
Lol, have you MET hierarchical power structures?
To be honest no, all though about 50 years ago I did stand in front of a crowd and wave to the Queen..
Now my views on Royalty have changed , mayhaps I got older and grumpier.
Or mayhaps I just got tired of all the bullsh•t being sprayed about by these idiots who are in power.
Dunno Kimmo…I let others form opinions on what say!
Both?
Yeahh Jack and our gutless Government bends to the whim of what the U.S wants, the U.S gets!
Paul Keating is right, we are so far up the U.S that it will only take time for us to be singing Star Spanngled banner.
And I thought that Albanese would be a breath of fresh air and all he and his party still in lock step with U.S
I personally hope I am not around when we become just another star on the U.S flag!
When did you stop thinking Albo and crew would be a breath of fresh air, by the way?
Years of believing Labor Governments, but now I have seen the light hallelujah and will sit in a circle with other former believers and sing kumba yahh.
And just as a foot note, we have that ex U. S Marine in a Aussie jail who flew with the RAAF and once again we pander to U.S because he allegedly trained pilots in China and the U.S want him back.
Back before Vietnam the U. S Special Services were training Viet Cong on how to beat the French and Afghans how to beat Russia.. And Julian Assange they want… fair dinkum
yep, it’s demeaning William
At least our best friend isn’t like despicable Russia, where people who do nothing mores than embarrass the state are sent to gaol on trumped up charges and are likely to die inside.
Good thing, huh.
err.. that was litotes…right?
Die inside or be more specific “ die outside” fall thru windows, get bashed to death in neutral countries
Would you trust a US government hot to trot for revenge – after being shown up as masters of cant – looking to make an example of a whistleblower, aimed at any others so tempted to let their cat out of whatever bag?
Is it too much to hope that our government will for once stand up to the US? Does Albo really think that the US will want to punish its most compliant serf if we insist on it dropping the spurious extradition demand?
We don’t stand up to the Yanks. Not since the ‘Dismissal’ (coup).
Can’t somebody here accuse him of murder and get him extradited to Australia?