Given that it’s on espionage charges, who’d know what Assange has to say?
Try him in secret, lock him up and you get to say “See, how tough I am. Lock him up! Lock him up!”
More realistically, what could Assange possibly have to say that could cause Trump any meaningful harm?
Bearing in mind all of the stuff that one would assume would already have buried any other candidate long before he was elected and all of the stuff since he was elected - none of which has had any significant impact?
It seems to me Assange could claim to have a signed deposition from Trump and Putin setting out full details of their plan to put Trump into the White House in return for Putin keeping quiet about Trump’s dalliances with underage rentboys and the general reaction would be outrage on the part of people who don’t like Trump and equal outrage about the “awful lies” on the part of Trumpists and the GOP.
Once upon a time, the UK would have sought an assurance that he wouldn’t be executed if extradited as a necessary precondition to allowing any extradition where the death penalty was a possibility.
We’ve now apparently decided that the death penalty is only wrong in some cases.
