After years of trying to bring the WikiLeaks founder back to the United States to stand trial, the near-collapse of the case in a British court sent the Justice Department hurtling toward a plea deal.
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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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.
The original article contains 1,790 words, the summary contains 260 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!