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Assange Loses Bid to Set Aside U.S. Charges in Court Fight

Assange Extradition Battle Resumes With Fight Over U.S. Charges

Julian Assange’s extradition hearing resumed in London after a seven-month hiatus, with the judge rejecting an attempt by attorneys for the WikiLeaks founder to set aside the allegations of a broader U.S. indictment.

A new charge sheet against Assange arrived “desperately late,” giving his team no time to respond, his lawyer, Mark Summers, said Monday. The allegations that Assange conspired with hackers affiliated with the “Anonymous” group and worked to help Edward Snowden flee the U.S. go far beyond the existing charges, he said.

“How much of this is said to be criminal activity is anyone’s guess,” Summers said. “What’s happening here is abnormal, unfair and liable to create real injustice.”

Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the argument, saying that Assange could have previously applied to postpone the proceedings and didn’t do so. She then refused a further request to delay the hearing.

“This cannot have come as a surprise to the defense,” she said.

The U.S. has charged Assange with endangering national security by conspiring to obtain and disclose classified information. He’s accused of working with army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to get classified documents from databases containing about 90,000 Afghanistan war-related activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related reports and 250,000 State Department cables.

The extradition proceedings restarted at the Old Bailey court in London after months of delay, with Assange looking clean-shaven and with cropped hair. The 49-year-old has been in a London jail for a year and a half since he was kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy where he was hiding from Swedish sexual-assault allegations.

Assange’s team were attempting “to take a knife” to the extradition, a lawyer for the U.S. said, saying there was nothing improper with the indictment.

In a legal filing for the hearing, the U.S. sought to rebut Assange’s repeated insistence that his activities were journalism and the cables had exposed government wrongdoing.

“The United States is not seeking Mr. Assange’s extradition in respect of any responsible journalistic treatment of the material provided by Chelsea Manning,” attorney James Lewis said. “He is being sought for his complicity in receiving and obtaining classified information.”

The hearings are set to last for as long as four weeks.

In the buildup to the first stage of the trial in February, Assange’s lawyers told the court that U.S. President Donald Trump was prepared to offer the WikiLeaks founder a pardon if he “played ball” about leaks of emails from the Democratic National Committee.

In a legal filing for the latest hearings, the attorney, Jen Robinson, said that then-U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher proposed that Assange “identify the source” for the 2016 election publications in return for the pardon.

The agreement would “both benefit President Trump politically and prevent U.S. indictment and extradition,” Robinson said in the court document.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.