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Julian Assange gained international notoriety in 2010 after the organization he founded, Wikileaks, published leaks that originated from a US Army intelligence analyst. The most impactful of which was a video Wikileaks entitled, "Collateral Murder," which featured a series of air-to-ground attacks by US Apache helicopters in Baghdad.

Assange again made headlines following the US presidential election in 2016, when correspondence between him and a senior Trump campaign official, Donald Trump Jr, was leaked via Twitter. In the leaked Twitter messages, Assange is requesting that Donald Trump Jr leak his father's tax returns to Wikileaks so that they can release them before other media organizations receive them. [1] This caused some to question Wikileaks, which for years has privileged itself on being a transparent media organization.

Julian Assange If we publish them [Trump's tax returns] it will dramatically improve the perception of our [Wikileaks] impartiality. This is the real kicker. That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing about Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won't be perceived as coming from a "pro-Trump" [or] "pro-Russian" source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us [Wikileaks] with. [2]

On April 11, 2019, Assange was arrested after the Ecuadorean government suspended the citizenship it had granted him and evicted him from the embassy in Britain. After the arrest a judge found him guilty of skipping bail, and he was detained partially as a result of an outstanding extradition warrant under the Extradition Act, on behalf of US authorities. [3]

Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for the Home Department, signed the extradition order. Javid's decision opens the way to the court sending the WikiLeaks founder to the US. Assange faces an 18-count indictment, issued by the US Department of Justice, that includes charges under the Espionage Act. He is accused of soliciting and publishing classified information and conspiring to hack into a government computer.

On May 23, 2019, US Department of Justice released a statement, "A federal grand jury returned an 18-count superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, 47, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange's alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States." [4]

On May 30th, 2019, lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder told the court that Assange was too ill to appear in court via video. According to a judge presiding over the case, Assange will face a five-day US extradition hearing beginning on February 25th, 2020.

Ben Brandon, representing the US, ran through a summary of the accusations against Assange, including that he had cracked a US defence network password. Assange, appearing by video, protested: "I didn’t break any password whatsoever." [5] Mark Summers, Assange's attorney, described the case as "an outrageous and full-frontal assault on journalistic rights".

Per the US Department of Justice, The superseding indictment alleges that Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning's transmission of classified records to Assange. The discussions also reflect that Assange actively encouraged Manning to provide more information and agreed to crack a password hash stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a United States government network used for classified documents and communications. Assange is also charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to crack that password hash.

Assange is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on each count except for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, for which he faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after taking into account the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.