It is the same conventional wisdom that held that the Swedish state prosecutor would never break Swedish laws in order to keep a prosecution indefinitely ongoing. Naturally the US had no plan to charge Assange the same day that the Swedish state prosecutor had to drop. Then a higher court actually found the state prosecutor breaking Swedish law, because as a state prosecutor is not legally allowed in Sweden to keep a prosecution going indefinitely. Conventional wisdom among Swedish legal professors at universities held that the behavior of the state prosecutor was a bit odd given that they know from a very early on that the whole deal was illegal.

It is very strange. I wonder if it possible could have something to do with foreign affairs, which a state prosecutor is by law very much forbidden to take instructions from. That would be in defiance of the rule of law, but then, they were already in defiance of the rule of law.