Julian Assange Launches Legal Challenge Against Trump Administration (theguardian.com)

SonicSpike shares a report from The Guardian: Julian Assange, the fugitive WikiLeaks founder whose diplomatic sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy appears increasingly precarious, is launching a legal challenge against the Trump administration. Lawyers for the Australian activist have filed an urgent application to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) aimed at forcing the hand of U.S. prosecutors, requiring them to "unseal" any secret charges against him. The legal move is an attempt to prevent Assange's extradition to the U.S. at a time that a new Ecuadorian government has been making his stay in the central London apartment increasingly inhospitable.

The 1,172-page submission by Assange's lawyers calls on the U.S. to unseal any secret charges against him and urges Ecuador to cease its "espionage activities" against him. Baltasar Garzon, the prominent Spanish judge who has pursued dictators, terrorists and drug barons, is the international coordinator of Assange's legal team. He has said the case involves "the right to access and impart information freely" that has been put in "jeopardy." The Trump administration is refusing to reveal details of charges against Assange despite the fact that sources in the U.S. Department of Justice have confirmed to the media that they exist under seal. The application alleges that U.S. prosecutors have begun approaching people in the U.S., Germany and Iceland and pressed them to testify against Assange in return for immunity from prosecution. Those approached, it is said, include people associated with WikiLeaks' joint publications with other media about U.S. diplomacy, Guantanamo Bay and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Re:How things change

[DNS-and-BIND]

Go ahead, blame those dirty foreigners. It's sooo easy to throw it off on someone else. It feels magnificent to retroactively, automatically define your values as the most important ones and those of others as inconsequential and selfish. Make no mistake: Trump's presidential win was the fault of the Democratic Party. They chose a demonstrably corrupt, very rich, connected insider candidate over one - Bernie Sanders - shown by polling to have a better edge over all Republican candidates. It was a spectacular failure of the Clinton machine to consider the impoverished, postindustrial Midwest as a given despite decades of policy neglect. Hillary Clinton herself underestimated just how very unlikeable a person she is. Trump wasn't the best candidate but that's just how little people like Clinton and fear her Beltway aura. Leftists melted down across the Internet, exposing their biases and breathtakingly narrow comprehension of the universes inhabited by others.

By the way, everything Wikileaks has leaked has been true. 100% truthfulness record. Unlike, for example, the US mainstream media which deliberately vilified a bunch of schoolkids, violating their own "journalist ethics" and accepted standards and practices with glee. Assange just did what he's done his whole life: try to do as much damage to America as possible. Ironically spreading dissent by saying the election was fixed is playing right into Russia's hands. The election was legitimate, the outcome was legitimate. If ye claim otherwise you're literally furthering Putin's cause. At least get paid if you're going to do that...working for free is a sucker's job.