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Comment by morelisp | Hacker News Reader

> I still wonder what the CIA must have done to get those Swedish prosecutors to spin all of that bullshit for the original arrest warrant.

What would it take to convince you this didn't actually happen? It still doesn't make legal sense - Obama's DOJ publicly declined to charge him given the evidence, and extradition from Sweden would still have required extradition from the UK since he would've been serving time in both countries.

Assange never got charged by the US administration he actually embarassed, successfully jumped bail, waited out the clock on the rape charges, and finally got his extradition denied. It seems to me he got everything he wanted out of this - he just wasn't careful what he wished for.

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> Obama's DOJ publicly declined to charge him given the evidence

Which means very little - the fact that the US has now tried to extradite him proves that.

> extradition from Sweden would still have required extradition from the UK since he would've been serving time in both countries.

How so? AIUI Sweden would have notionally promised not to extradite him, but there was little mechanism to enforce this.

The charges the US attempted to extradite him for were based primarily on things he did or allegedly did or which came to light after the rape charges.

Ockham's razor also applies. If you want Assange charged in the US on 'espionage' or similar and you have a choice of notifying the Swedish authorities that he is wanted for serious crimes in the US or instead relying upon separate local allegations that are so vague the Swedish legal system has to work its way through an appeals process to even decide to whether to pursue the case or not whilst leaving him at liberty to leave the country, you're unlikely to choose the latter.

> which came to light after the rape charges

There were never any rape charges. Please get your facts correct before asserting falsehoods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Arrest_Warrant#Specia...

> A state wishing to prosecute a surrendered person for offences committed before his or her surrender, or extradite a surrendered person to a third state, must, subject to certain exception, obtain the permission of the executing judicial authority. Such a request is made in the same form as a European Arrest Warrant, and granted or refused using the same rules which determine whether surrender would be granted or refused.

> the fact that the US has now tried to extradite him proves that.

It proves they care now, under a wildly different (and totally clownshoes) DOJ, which if anything lends more credence to the theory they did not care back then or we would have seen them try back then.

> What would it take to convince you this didn't actually happen?

What it would take to convince me would be for Assange to not be literally fighting a US extradition order, right now.

What was always going to happen, is what is happening now.

If a person was one of the people who said things for years like "Well, actually, the US is not trying to extradite Assange", then they were completely and totally wrong, and should be embarrassed as to how they could have possible thought that.

What makes it impossible to believe the DOJ under one outgoing president declined to prosecute a case, and then a new DOJ under a new infamously press-hostile president took it up?

Extradition requests are not platonic and timeless, they are issued by specific people for specific reasons at specific times.

No, people don't get to retroactively make up new excuses as for why this doesn't count.

This is was what always was going to happen. The motivation for the US to extradite him was always clear. And exactly what people predicted was going to happen, did indeed happen.

And the people who predicted otherwise were wrong, and should be made fun of for how wrong that they were, and how misinformed they were to think anything else could have happened.

The Obama administration prosecuted Manning, and would have had an equal amount of reason to prosecute Assange, and the extradition request is exactly what happened at the end of the day.

The only possible situation for me to believe that they were not prospecting Assange would have been if Obama simply pardoned Assange, which did not happen.

> how misinformed they were to think anything else could have happened.

How exactly am I misinformed? What facts am I wrong on? What inconsistency is there if I believe that Obama's DOJ genuinely never intended to charge Assange with anything?

> The Obama administration prosecuted Manning, and would have had an equal amount of reason to prosecute Assange

No, because Manning and Assange did different things. A key claim in Assange's defense in this case is that Manning did all the illegal things!

> The only possible situation for me to believe that they were not prospecting Assange would have been if Obama simply pardoned Assange, which did not happen.

Obama repeatedly stated he would not pardon anyone not convicted of a crime (e.g. in the context of Snowden) and as far as I know held true to this for all 1927 of his pardons.[0] So why would he pardon Assange, who was not even accused of a crime?

[0] https://www.justice.gov/pardon/obama-pardons

> So why would he pardon Assange, who was not even accused of a crime?

What do you mean why? To prevent literally what is happening right now, and to make it impossible for any US government agency to ever prosecute either Assange or Snowden.

Thats why! Because he is subject to an extradition request. All of that could have been prevented, with a pardon.

This is Kafkaesque levels of reasoning here. Literally what was predicted was going to happen, did indeed happen.

And every justification for "Well, why would you pardon someone who is not being arrested", is literally proven wrong, because this is what ended up happening! The current state of Assange is the proof and the reason why everyone who was arguing against a pardon were wrong.

> Obama repeatedly stated he would not pardon anyone not convicted of a crime

Yes, because he wanted those people to be sent to jail. Because of the efforts that he was doing to get them sent to jail. Thats why. Obama could have stopped all this stuff from happening, but he didn't. Thats the evidence.

> waited out the clock on the rape charges

There were never any charges in Sweden.

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