The legal team of the Australian journalist and the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange hopes that the American side will refuse continue to fight for his extradition. “Lente.ru” said the lawyer Barry Pollack representing Assange in the United States.
According to him, the team is extremely pleased with the decision of the court in London, which refused to extradite Washington. “Attempts by the United States to prosecute Julian Assange and get him extradited were counter-intuitive from the outset. We hope the United States will decide not to pursue the case further, taking into account the verdict of the British court,” Pollack said.
As reported by Reuters , the American side plans to file an appeal. At the same time, on January 6, it will be decided whether the founder of WikiLeaks will be released on bail.
Earlier on January 4 it became known that the London court denied the US authorities extradition of Assange on charges of violating the espionage law. The judge named his possible suicide as the reason.
The American Justice Department filed 17 charges against Assange in May 2019, adding one more later. If extradited to the United States, the founder of WikiLeaks could face up to 175 years in prison. The current American president Donald Trump claimed that he was ready to pardon Assange if he named the source from which he received the texts of letters from the hacked servers Democratic Party in 2016
In 2012, fearing extradition to Sweden over rape charges (the case was dropped in 2019), Assange applied for asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There he was continuously for almost seven years.