“The urgency here has now reached a critical point,” the Justice Section trial lawyer wrote in an email reviewed by The Washington Post. “The case will go to appeal and we will lose.”
For months, lawyers for the US trial team have been putting pressure on senior officials, given the multiplicity of people involved in the case on the Justice Section to approve business therein That would involve holding Assange accountable for multiple misdemeanors, which he could do remotely rather than in the Virginia court where he was charged in 2018. A WikiLeaks representative will next appear in court and plead guilty. Criminal in the name of non-profit group.
However, government officials in the Justice Section did not consider this.
“Time is short and my understanding is that the current plea offer is currently on (the Deputy Attorney General’s) desk,” another member of the trial crew emailed leaders of the Justice Section’s counterintelligence and export monitoring unit on April 4.
Forced to act, the United States managed to block Assange’s appeal for two more months. Ultimately, the plea guarantee allowed Assange to return home to Australia. He then pleaded guilty to criminal violations of his espionage business on a remote western Pacific island.
The collapse of his prosecution for revelations of US activities abroad in 2010 and 2011 almost from beginning to end led to consequences for freedom of expression rights in the country and strained relations with foreign courts. And it fractured an already contentious relationship between prosecutors in the case, who had been pushing for a plea exchange this year, and senior Justice Division officials. Who demanded criminal punishment for Assange.
This account is consistent with interviews with 8 people regular with The Conversation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to explain the delicate interactions.
The Justice Division declined to comment. “We do not discuss internal deliberations,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference Thursday. “The Justice Department reaches settlements in petition cases when the Justice Department believes it can reach a settlement that serves the best interests of the United States.”
The Assange case has challenged US executive officials in three administrations since WikiLeaks disclosed numerous documents revealing US military and diplomatic secrets in 2010. His group’s activities – which included accepting leaked executive documents and publishing them – were so similar to traditional newsgathering that prosecutors would argue that they violate First Amendment protections for freedom of the press. Ultimately, he was convicted in 2018 and arrested in Britain, where he had been granted safe haven in the Ecuadorian embassy as a fugitive from sexual assault allegations in Sweden since 2012.
In December 2023, Justice Section lawyers working on the Assange case alerted superiors to a milestone that had just passed. Assange spent more weeks fighting extradition from a London jail than he likely would have received if he had come to the United States and been held accountable. While Assange and his supporters consistently said he was facing days in prison or even the death penalty, government lawyers involved in the case worked out that his recommended sentence would be about 55 months. He argued that it would have taken a week to resolve the matter.
A petition has been under discussion with Assange’s prison team since August. Assange had two inevitable demands. For one thing, he would not be willing to seek support in the continental United States, where he believed he would be charged with ancient crimes or sent to the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The second thing was that if he pleaded guilty, his sentence would not exceed a week spent in Belmarsh prison in London.
Assange’s legal professionals proposed that he plead guilty to misdemeanors for mishandling a labeled subject, which, unlike a criminal plea, can be done remotely via video. (The crime is now a felony, but it was labeled a misdemeanor the week of the leaks.) Prosecutors got to watch as a representative of WikiLeaks appeared in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Assange was expected to be charged. , and will be held criminally accountable on behalf of the nonprofit. To sweeten the deal, Assange would increasingly ask questions through British or Australian intermediaries about what information WikiLeaks still had and where it had shared it.
Lawyers for the federal government are concerned that they may not be able to win a conviction at trial over habits dating back 14 years. No one had previously been found responsible for publishing administrative information in exchange for leaking it as part of an espionage business. The Obama leadership never filed charges against Assange, and few federal cases arose early under the Trump leadership Legal professionals at the Virginia office opposed prosecution of the free-speech garden entirely.
There was no discussion on the petition during this cold season since August last year.
The following, in March, a British court ruled that it was preparing to deport Assange to the United States – if the US authorities confirmed that he was entitled to the same free-speech protections as an American citizen. Separately, the judges said, Assange could just argue that he was being discriminated against by virtue of his Australian nationality.
US prosecutors said they could not and would not produce that loyalty. In a 2020 civil case, the Model Court held that “foreign organizations operating abroad have no First Amendment rights.” Top court decisions in various cases have held that foreign citizens do not have the same free speech rights as American voters.
That Catch 22 situation prompted blackmail on April 4 that without immediate trade, the extradition effort could fail. Without the First Amendment commitment, a trial lawyer said in an email, British lawyers representing the U.S. government concluded that they would run into a “moral obligation to drop the case” because of “their duty of candor.” They could not argue for extradition when the conditions required by the court were not met.
U.S. trial lawyers urged their superiors on April 4 to get Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco approved for the trade, more than one person said. In the event that they neglected the deadline in 12 days, a lawyer Counterintelligence and export leaders were advised to keep an eye on the division of the section via e-mail, saying they “could face a situation where we would lose our advantage and the UK would potentially leave us.” Will give.”
Frustrated by delays and disagreements, Virginia’s entire team withdrew from the case, a highly unusual development. Attorneys from the Department of Justice’s Nationwide Security Section began negotiations with Assange’s lawyers.
To meet the April 16 deadline, US Embassy officials sent a letter to the British court promising that Assange could only “raise and try to rely on” the First Amendment during the trial, although they declared that “there is no question about the applicability of the First Amendment.” Decisions in the U.S. are exclusively the purview of U.S. courts.” , British judges were not impressed and allowed Assange to pursue his appeal in May. For the British representatives of the Justice Section, it was a source of entertainment.
Nick Vamos, former head of extradition for the Crown Prosecution Service, said, “They asked for assurances that the United States government could not give.” “It could have been really messy.”
The American citizens argued that the constitutional factor was limited to the question of prison residence, not nationality. However, if extradition were to fail for this reason, it would set a precedent for other foreign criminal pursuits, similarly arguing that American citizens have been discriminated against by denying them equal rights.
With the most likely lethal end result looming, direct negotiations escalated.
Kristin Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks’ lead essayist, said in a podcast on Tuesday that May’s decision in Britain was a “tidal turn” in the debate over the petition. “He pushed things in the right direction; “Communication between the negotiating parties became faster,” he said.
Over the coming weeks, the Justice Section’s legal professionals and Assange’s team have highlighted key points.
Because Assange was adamant on avoiding the continental United States, Justice Department officials and Assange’s lawyers came up with an album idea: find a park that was as far and isolated as possible from the American mainland. Yet this is American territory. They were certainly in a court in one of the areas of the Western Pacific occupied by the United States during World War II.
The Justice Department said definitively that Assange could claim his involvement in purchasing and publishing the war timbers and diplomatic cables given to him by Chelsea Manning, a military officer and intelligence analyst. As a concession, US officials said definitively that Assange would not be charged for any other behavior until the week of the plea – including the deletion of Democratic emails by WikiLeaks in 2016 and CIA hacking tools in 2017.
Assange was not required to pay any compensation; The following month, the indictment against him focused closely on the impact it had on those whose names were revealed, as part of the plea deal, the government said he had known the wrong patients.
The petition trade additionally placed all the risk on the United States. It clearly stated that if the judge did not accept this and attempted to detain him to any extent, the price could be reduced and Assange would move forward freely. So the Justice Division chose the court ruling on Saipan, and by extension the District rules—the only one on the court.
Assange must repay a debt: $520,000 to an Australian executive for the jet that took him from London to Saipan and then straight to Canberra. American executive As for freeing him to fly commercially, he was not eager to travel, and Assange was not eager to let US Marshals escort him Him. So an agreement was reached: Assange would take a private plane to the island with an Australian ambassador and leave.
Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, credited the Australian executive with working out the logistics. “The Australian government and its willingness to represent Julian diplomatically was significant,” Shipton said, praising them for an answer that “could appease the DOJ and secure Julian’s freedom.”
Assange’s team was certainly the last in the industry this generation; He again landed in Canberra on Tuesday.
Devlin Barrett, Shane Harris and Aaron Schaefer contributed to this file.
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