US government to face off against Julian Assange at extradition hearing that could see WikiLeaks founder jailed for 175 years
- Assange has been indicted in the US on 18 charges over the publication of classified documents
- The WikiLeaks founder argues he was acting as a journalist entitled to First Amendment protection
The US government and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will face off Monday in a high-security London courthouse, a decade after WikiLeaks infuriated American officials by publishing a trove of classified military documents.
A judge at Woolwich Crown Court will begin hearing arguments from lawyers for US authorities, who want to try Assange on espionage charges that carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.
The extradition hearing follows years of subterfuge, diplomatic dispute and legal drama that have led the 48-year-old Australian from fame as an international secret-spiller through self-imposed exile inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to incarceration in a maximum-security British prison.
Assange has been indicted in the US on 18 charges over the publication of classified documents. Prosecutors say he conspired with US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
US authorities say WikiLeaks’ activities put American lives in danger. Assange argues he was acting as a journalist entitled to First Amendment protection, and says the leaked documents exposed US military wrongdoing. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
