Hello, On 7/7/21, David Barrett <dbarrett@expensify.com> wrote:

It wasn't dropped:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48253343

You are mistaken. It is as understandable as it is deniable spreading of FUD: "the case" has been closed and reopened more times than most people realize. Your article is dated 13 May 2019. As of Tue 19 Nov 2019 the Guardian reported that the case was indeed dropped yet again: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/19/sweden-drops-julian-assange-in... Note that "the case" being reopened wasn't for all of the original accusations as some had expired due to statue of limitations. As of the summer of 2020, it is my understanding that the statute of limitations for all of the Swedish accusations has passed. In any case, the prosecutor said that memory had faded, and so ended the case. The "Swedish case" as such is officially closed. The Swedish and UK authorities are still resisting freedom of information requests about the case. I highly recommend following the litigation by investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi: https://twitter.com/smaurizi/ - she has uncovered some very interesting documents relating to Julian's situation in the UK, Sweden, and the United States. An example from three years ago of some of what she has uncovered: https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2018/02/13/news/few_documents_many_mysterie... It may be unclear to some readers that Julian sought and received asylum, a basic and fundamental human right. Later, the UN found in his favor against the UK several times in an adversarial judicial process. The UK lost, part of losing was the finding of their behavior as persecution and yet, they continue to persecute him. He is now being held in a maximum security prison without even the pretext of being convicted of a crime, merely the possible extradition which was even denied on humanitarian grounds. It is an outrageous injustice that he is not free.

They did temporarily while he was hiding in the embassy (again, he was hiding from Sweden, not the US -- Obama didn't try to arrest him, Sweden did, and Assange ran), but now that he's out of hiding, it's reopened.

You describe his residence at the Ecuadorian Embassy as "hiding" when in fact his residence, like his grant of asylum, was well known. He was then subjected to illegal surveillance for his stay in the embassy which is currently being litigated about in Spain. In addition to the UN rulings in Julian's favor https://justice4assange.com/UN-Working-Group-Decision.html there is also the Inter-American court https://justice4assange.com/IMG/pdf/Inter-American_Court_Advisory_Opinion_OC... ruling in Julian's favor. Furthermore, what you're saying about the Obama admin and about the US government generally over the last decade is highly misleading and essentially false. I'll tell you about my own situation to give others a sense of how incorrect you are about your broad assertions. I was first detained in 2010 regarding WikiLeaks and threatened by the US military on US soil as a natural born US citizen. I was flagged, detained, held incommunicado, questioned about my politics, manhandled, groped, and threatened on a regular, systematic basis. I left the United States of America after the unending harassment continued well into 2013, so I went to continue my journalistic work in Europe. All of that was done under the Obama administration and it always centered around Julian. I have met many Obama and Trump admin bureaucrats or elected politicians in Europe during the last decade working as a journalist and I have challenged as many of them about the WikiLeaks issue as often as was possible. A couple of years ago ( https://netzpolitik.org/2019/wikileaks-the-us-is-indeed-investigating-assang... ), my lawyers were contacted by the prosecutors from the Alexandria, Virginia office of the Department of Justice leading the prosecution against Julian. This is the same kind of overly political, outrageous threat that many people have faced since 2010, and in 2021, it is still continuing! They made an offer of immunity from prosecution, similar to the others they've offered over the last ten years to nearly everyone near Julian. They did offer me so-called "full immunity" rather than the normal "qualified immunity" offer they seem to normally toss on the table which was noteworthy. Ultimately such an offer is not very compelling to anyone who cares about anything other than themselves. The DoJ made it clear that in exchange for testimony against my journalistic colleague Julian, I could return home from exile and live a "happy" life. They also expressed that they knew I'd like to return to the country of my birth, and tried to pull on my emotional strings. They characterized the offer as the "easy way" and implied that the "hard way" was inevitable: They threatened to extradite me from Europe without immunity from prosecution if I refused their "easy way" offer. I refused their offer and informed them that I would rather die on foreign soil than allow them to get their hands on me. They have attempted to follow up on the "hard way" but lucky for the world, the European authorities actually care about national and international law, by comparison to the UK and the US. The US DoJ attempts to pressure me into testifying have so far been thwarted and I am not alone in my political grand jury resistance. Manning and Hammond also successfully resisted, and I am extremely inspired by their political actions. It's really striking at first that the UK declined to send him to America on humanitarian grounds. It seems like a brutal condemnation of American justice: even the British object! The problem is that they're part of the entire ruse as has been remarked in the recent book by former UK minister Alan Duncan. The UK is simply dragging out his situation as long as is possible. Mexico has now offered Julian asylum https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/mexico-julian-assange-asylum-us-b17... to settle the matter, and we can be fairly certain of the course that will be chosen by the UK: whatever drags out the situation longer, whatever makes Julian's situation more intolerable. I suggest all readers who are interested in the details visit https://justice4assange.com/ and consider picking up the book "The Trial of Julian Assange" by Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, when it is released: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/697240/the-trial-of-julian-assange-... This interview with Nils Melzer is worth reading even though it misses the developments of 2021: https://www.exberliner.com/features/julian-assange-trial-2020/nils-melzer-as... This is and has always been a political persecution by governments against regular people working to uncover truths about our world. To attempt or to force alleged sources or journalists to testify against Julian for matters concerning journalistic work is an outrageous attack on press freedom. This is a fact that nearly all major news paper editors in the US and the world agree with when consulted - the attack on Julian and on WikiLeaks is an attack on the free press of the entire world, the United States included. The politically motivated surveillance, targeting, harassment, and threats are a bipartisan issue in the US among authoritarian-leaning warmongers. Obama's DoJ did not *charge* Julian, and rather they built the groundwork of the case with the obviously unconstitutional charges that the Trump administration brought to the UK. Without Obama's DoJ going after my twitter https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/technology/twitter-ordered-to-yield-data-... account, would Trump's DoJ had the same list of people to target? Doubtful! It's a rare case of bipartisan agreement that should make everyone sick, except for the few who wish to be on the side of the would-be executioner. The Biden administration should cease spying on, harassing, arresting, jailing, and exiling people *associated* with WikiLeaks. The Biden administration should drop the case against Julian Assange and the case against WikiLeaks. A luta continua, Jacob Appelbaum