WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016, during his seven years of refuge there. LONDON — The long legal battle over Julian Assange may finally be nearing an end. It has been a sprawling, almost surreal drama — involving the United States, Britain, Sweden, Ecuador and Australia — that saw the 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder holed up in cramped rooms and held in prison cells for a quarter of his life.
Was he a non-state actor threatening the national security of the United States, as CIA director Mike Pompeo once alleged? Assange’s lawyers say the charges could have brought him up to 175 years in prison. Attorneys representing the U.S. government told British courts considering his extradition that, if found guilty, he might have served 48 to 63 months.showed he was preparing to plead guilty to a single felony count of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and disseminating classified military and diplomatic documents from 2009 to 2011.
The indictment did not address WikiLeaks’ later release of Democrats’ emails, which authorities have alleged were stolen by Russia to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. Russia denied the allegation. Trump, then aIn 2010, Swedish police sought a European arrest warrant for Assange — not for his journalism or whistleblowing — but to question him about an accusation of sexual assault in the Nordic country.
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