Former federal prosecutor Joseph Moreno told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball on Tuesday that it is not guaranteed that British authorities will extradite jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the U.S.
“By no means is it guaranteed that the Brits will turn him over,” Moreno said on “Rising.”
“When you extradite someone, even from a friendly jurisdiction like the U.K., the U.S. has to basically lay out its case,” he said. “They’re going to say these are the charges, this is the evidence that supports it, this is why we think it’s righteous, this is the maximum penalty he could face.”
Assange, who had been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, was arrested by British authorities last week.
The U.S. Justice Department later announced that Assange is charged with conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to “knowingly access a computer, without authorization and exceeding authorized access,” to obtain classified information that “could be used to the injury of the United States.”
“The Brits will take a look at all of that, and they’ll say ‘okay, maybe, theoretically, hacking is, in fact, a crime.’ But … you have the journalistic angle, the extent to which did he really participate in hacking, or was it just encouraging a source to get information that was ultimately not even, maybe, successful,” Moreno said on Tuesday.
“Then there’s the fact that it’s been so long. The fact that he’s been holed up in this Ecuadorian Embassy by himself. He probably has mental health arguments there too, which have been successful,” he said. “So he has a number of different arguments to make to say, ‘Hey, I shouldn’t even have to go to the U.S. to face these charges.'”
— Julia Manchester
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