Assange’s health seemed to be ‘deteriorating rapidly’ before arrest, says friend

An “uphill battle” won’t stop Julian Assange from fighting his extradition to the United States. That’s according to his friend and self-proclaimed computer hacker Lauri Love.

British police on April 11 dragged the WikiLeaks founder out of the Ecuadorian Embassy where he had been living since 2012. In an interview with CNN, Love said when he visited Assange a few weeks before, he appeared to be “deteriorating rapidly” and knew he would soon be arrested.

LONDON, ENGLAND - APRIL 11: Julian Assange gestures to the media from a police vehicle on his arrival at Westminster Magistrates court on April 11, 2019 in London, England. After weeks of speculation Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by Scotland Yard Police Officers inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in Central London this morning. Ecuador's President, Lenin Moreno, withdrew Assange's Asylum after seven years citing repeated violations to international conventions. (Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

Related article Julian Assange's legal battles have only just begun

“He puts on a very brave face, but it was clear he was very worried,” said Love, who lives with his parents in rural England. “This was weighing heavily on his mind and soul.”

Love knows a thing or two about waging a successful extradition fight. In 2013, American officials accused him of hacking multiple government agencies, including the US Army, NASA, and US Missile Defense. He was charged in three federal indictments and faced up to 99 years in an American prison.

“It was very scary and very worrying, anxiety causing, depressing, almost mind-boggling,” said Love.

At his extradition hearing, Love argued he would not survive the US prison system and should be tried in the UK. His extradition was initially approved, but last February, a British judge reversed that decision, ruling he should instead stand trial in the UK. Prosecutors in the UK have yet to file new charges against Love.

Love is urging the public to “overcome a carefully cultivated distaste for Julian as a character” and to look at the spirit of the US indictment against the Australian whistleblower, which he calls “vindictive retribution” for the WikiLeaks disclosures.

“It is a pretext to send the message that if you are going to report on things there is a line and you do not go beyond that line,” Love said. “They are making an example of him.”

Lauri Love arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to appeal the decision to extradite him to the US on November 30, 2017.

A defense against extradition

On Wednesday Assange was sentenced to just under a year in a UK prison after he was found guilty of violating his bail conditions when he entered Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden in 2012.

Assange faces his first extradition hearing on Thursday. Prosecutors in the US have charged Assange with helping former Army intelligence specialist Chelsea Manning break into US Defense Department computers.

“The Americans don’t need to prove their case to the UK extradition court,” said Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition at the Crown Prosecution Service where he was directly responsible for Assange’s case. “They just need to prove that there is sufficient evidence that if the offense occurred here, somebody could be arrested for it.”

Vamos said Assange’s lawyers are likely to make three arguments. The first is that the extradition request is politically motivated, the second being retribution for Assange’s WikiLeaks disclosures. Vamos said a third argument Assange’s team could make is that he won’t be able to receive a fair trial in the US, and that extradition could violate his human rights due to inhumane American prison conditions.

“It’s going to be one of those where he throws the kitchen sink at it, I think that’s clear.”

In an interview last month, Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson told CNN that her team would “of course be raising the politicization of the case.”

Robinson told reporters after Assange’s bail violation sentencing on Wednesday: “We’ve been saying since 2010 that this threat [of extradition] is real. The focus of our energies will now be on fighting that extradition request and that fight starts tomorrow.”

In the weeks since his arrest, Assange has been held at HMP Belmarsh in Thamesmead, southeast London.

Vamos said Assange’s case will be a tough one to win.

“A whiff of political motivation in the background is not going to be enough to stop somebody’s extradition if the courts also think this is a proper offense which has been properly charged,” Vamos said.

“What you need to prove is that the entire proceedings are corrupted and tainted by politics and that the person who is being prosecuted solely or primarily on the basis of their political beliefs, their political opinions, or political activities.”

Julian Assange gestures from a police vehicle on his arrival at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on April 11, 2019. Assange, founder of the website WikiLeaks, has been a key figure in major leaks of classified government documents, cables and videos.

Assange holds a copy of The Guardian newspaper in London on July 26, 2010, a day after WikiLeaks posted more than 90,000 classified documents related to the Afghanistan War.

Assange attends a seminar at the Swedish Trade Union Confederation in Stockholm on August 14, 2010. Six days later, Swedish prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest based on allegations of sexual assault from two women. Assange has always denied wrongdoing.

Assange, in London, displays a page from WikiLeaks on October 23, 2010. The day before, WikiLeaks released approximately 400,000 classified military documents from the Iraq War.

Assange and his bodyguards are seen after a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in November 2010. It was the month WikiLeaks began releasing diplomatic cables from US embassies.

Assange sits behind the tinted window of a police vehicle in London on December 14, 2010. Assange had turned himself in to London authorities on December 7 and was released on bail and put on house arrest on December 16. In February 2011, a judge ruled in support of Assange's extradition to Sweden. Assange's lawyers filed an appeal.

In October 2011, a month after WikiLeaks released more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables, Assange speaks to demonstrators from the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

Assange leaves the High Court in London in December 2011. He was taking his extradition case to the British Supreme Court.

Assange leaves the Supreme Court in February 2012. In May of that year, the court denied his appeal against extradition.

Assange addresses the media and his supporters from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on August 19, 2012. A few days earlier, Ecuador announced that it had granted asylum to Assange. In his public address, Assange demanded that the United States drop its "witch hunt" against WikiLeaks.

Assange speaks from a window of the Ecuadorian Embassy in December 2012.

Assange addresses the Oxford Union Society from the Ecuadorian Embassy in January 2013.

Assange appears with Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino on the balcony of the embassy in June 2013.

Assange speaks during a panel discussion at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2014.

Assange attends a news conference inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2014.

Assange is seen on a video screen in March 2015, during an event on the sideline of a United Nations Human Rights Council session.

Assange, on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy, holds up a United Nations report in February 2016. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that Assange was being arbitrarily detained by the governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Assange speaks to the media in May 2017, after Swedish prosecutors had dropped their investigation of rape allegations against Assange. But Assange acknowledged he was unlikely to walk out of the embassy any time soon. "The UK has said it will arrest me regardless," he said. "The US CIA Director (Mike) Pompeo and the US attorney general have said that I and other WikiLeaks staff have no ... First Amendment rights, that my arrest and the arrest (of) my other staff is a priority. That is not acceptable."

Assange was seen for the first time in months during a hearing via teleconference in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2018. The hearing was then postponed due to translation difficulties.

A van displays images of Assange and Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who supplied thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Friday, April 5. A senior Ecuadorian official said no decision has been made to expel Assange from the embassy. According to WikiLeaks tweets, sources had told the organization that Assange could be kicked out of the embassy within "hours to days."

A screen grab from video footage shows the dramatic moment when Assange was hauled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy by police on April 11, 2019. Assange was arrested for "failing to surrender to the court" over a warrant issued in 2012. Officers made the initial move to detain Arrange after Ecuador withdrew his asylum and invited authorities into the embassy, citing the Australian's bad behavior.

Assange gestures from the window of a prison van as he is driven into Southwark Crown Court in London on May 1, 2019, before being sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching his bail conditions in 2012.

A sketch depicts Assange appearing at the Old Bailey courthouse in London for a ruling in his extradition case on Monday, January 4. A judge rejected a US request to extradite Assange, saying that such a move would be "oppressive" by reason of his mental health.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

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A troubled history of UK-US extraditions

Love is not the only alleged hacker that US officials have struggled to extradite. In 2012, Theresa May, in her role as Home Secretary, controversially blocked the extradition of a British unemployed computer system administrator accused of breaking into US military computers.

The defendant, Gary McKinnon, is autistic and admitted to committing the crime, saying he was trying to find out if the US was covering up the existence of UFOs. McKinnon threatened to commit suicide if he was extradited, and May overruled a court order in order to keep him in Britain.

After the McKinnon case, UK extradition law was changed to limit the amount of influence politicians could yield in the process.

Extradition decisions now primarily rest with judges. According to Love, public sentiment played a role in his extradition being blocked. “The media actually helped vastly to bring about this mutual sense of understanding of people that were following my case that this is an abuse of the extradition procedure process and this is something we do not want to happen,” Love said.

“I think it allowed the judges enough space to consider the law carefully enough to do the right thing.”

Don’t expect Assange to be given the same leeway, said Vamos.

“Really when it comes down to it, the UK doesn’t have any skin in the game with Assange,” Vamos said.

“He’s not a UK citizen, he’s not a UK resident, so there’s no great national interest on a political or policy or a legal basis to say we need to protect Julian Assange,” Vamos explained.

“There is a high-level argument about journalism and freedom of speech, and that’s a great argument to have but it’s not ultimately, I think, going to prevent his extradition because the UK doesn’t have that personal interest in protecting him.”