For those people who keep arguing that his refusing to talk to the Swedes was genuinely because of fears that they would extradite him to the US, this is why that was always a very strange argument.
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I’m not exactly sure what the right thing for the government to do in this case was, but I’m fairly confident that this wasn’t it.
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Well, Sajid Javid was involved so that was the main clue.
More seriously, he’s the Home Secretary. He gets an extradition request from our ‘major ally’. If you don’t know what the right thing to do is, the safe answer is always going to be approve the request, then you get to hand it over to the courts and wash your hands of it.
Very Pontius Pilate. Not perhaps quite so Randian but then he claims no longer to be such an ardent fanboy.
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Javid is the British Home Secretary… what does that have to do with the argument that Assange should stand trial for what he was accused of in Sweden? Are you really surprised that the Conservatives in GB would happily hand him over to a GOP administration? Sweden SHOULD have first dibs, since they brought the charges well before the US did, and the crimes he is accused of are far graver than anything he did with regards to hacking.
Agreed that it’s not it. Standing trial for rape should take precedence over hacking charges. Full stop.
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AIUI, the argument here is that Assange was always in far greater risk of being extradited from the UK than from Sweden, so his excuses for running from Sweden to the UK are self-serving bullshit, and this shows why.
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That’s what I had heard…
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But I don’t think that is the fact of the matter, if I recall correctly he didnt run from charges in Sweden. I think he was questioned and was cleared to leave the country, and later when he was already in the UK he was again sought for questioning.
Edit to add: Maybe i mistook your meaning, if so nevermind
He hid out in the embassy explicitly to avoid being sent back to sweden to avoid rape charges, because he argued at the time, it was a pretext (in other words, those women lied, according to him) to extradite him to the US:
Here is the Guardian on the whole thing (with regard to the rape charges in Sweden, at least):
The argument seems to hinge between two disputed points - one that the rape allegations were a honeypot operation, which fuck that. Second, over whether or not Sweden would extradite him to the US BEFORE they dealt with the rape allegations.
According to this Intercept article, extradition from Sweden would be LESS likely…
Make of all that what you will, I guess.
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I ment while he was in Sweden. I initially read LurksNoMore’s comment to claim he fled the country, but right after posting realized he/she was probably inferring to the arrest warrent. A near pointless correction anyway 
But thanks for the links, I have been meaning to refresh and update myself on the whole case. After these last developments, him ending up in Sweden seems much less likely.
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Javid wants to be PM. Every single thing he does right now needs to be viewed as a calculated move to get brownie points within the Tory party.
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He was in the UK when he hid in the Embassy, not Sweden. He’d already left at that point, and that was what he was hiding from, with his justification being that the Swedes were cooking shit up (and those women were just US agents or whatever) for the Americans. It looks like he’d have been LESS likely to be extradited from Sweden, though.
That is the case, yes, since Javid has signed an extradition order. I mean, who would have thought that an authoritarian leaning president, who might have gotten illegal help getting arrested that included wikileaks, would have demanded extradition from a friendly UK government?
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Much less likely:
Since the Swedes haven’t even got around to requesting he be extradited (again) and may never do so.
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Yes, I get that.I just am not surprised at this development at all and am not sure how anyone can be. Him standing trial in Sweden would have been better for him, especially if he believes he’s innocent. Of course the British government was always going to play ball, because the British have as much dirt from the war on terror as we do…
He could have gone to any number of places, so why hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy and acting like a dick for however many years seemed like a winning strategy, I don’t know… Meanwhile, Snowden is at least free to move around within Russia, and Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner seem to be the only ones the one taking pretty much all the jail time in all of these leaks. Par for the course, I guess.
This shit is depressing…
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Sorry, didn’t mean to imply you didn’t. Just adding the info for context since bergen’s post made me think they thought there was some prospect of Assange getting extradited to Sweden rather than the US.
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I’d much rather him go to sweden, since that’s an actual crime he might have committed. I’m not happy about the role that wikileaks played in leaking the DNC emails, but ffs, who gives a fuck. I don’t know how much of an influence that had on the election. I do know what kind of an effect being raped can have on people and I care much more about that.
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Those who live by the Trump, die by the Trump.
No sympathy at all for Julian. His collusion to put Trump in office has hurt every immigrant, every child separated from their parents, every lgbt person, every woman demanding bodily autonomy - that list is so fucking long.
Screw that weasel bastard.
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