the writer here makes several good points concerning the arrest of julian assange;



Assuming he is successfully extradited (legal experts say there is a chance he might be able to successfully fight extradition, despite the blatant antipathy expressed toward him by British judges), Julian Assange will stand trial in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia where prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia will try to prove that he broke US law by goading Chelsea Manning into turning over hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
To recap: Prosecutors surprised Assange's supporters when they revealed in their extradition warrant that, rather than pursuing him on espionage charges, or charges related to Wikileaks' publication of the classified documents, only one charge had been levied against Assange: conspiracy to hack a government computer.
If convicted, he could face a maximum of five and a half years in prison.

In the Assange indictment, prosecutors claimed that after Manning had already handed over hundreds of thousands of documents to Wikileaks, Assange tried to help the former Army private and intelligence analyst crack a password that would have allowed her to access hundreds of thousands of documents.
However, Assange never succeeded in cracking the password, at least not as far as prosecutors are aware. What he did allegedly do was conspire with Manning to transmit the documents she had succeeded in stealing, while - and this is key - encouraging Manning to turn over more documents when she expressed reluctance.
To support its case, the government has obtained chat logs from March 2010 showing Manning communicating with a mysterious individual who alternatively went by the handles "Ox" and "pressassociation". The government believes this user was Assange. After transmitting hundreds of thousands of war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and detainee assessment briefs from Guantanamo Bay, Manning said her stash of secret documents had run dry.
"After this upload, that’s all I really have got left."...........https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-11/dojs-entire-case-against-assange-hinges-one-critical-piece-evidence