Dershowitz predicts Assange won’t be extradited, face U.S. charges

Fox News contributor Alan Dershowitz predicted in a new interview that the Trump administration would be unable to secure the legal extradition of Julian Assange from the U.K. to force the Wikileaks founder to face charges under the Espionage Act.

In an interview with AM 970 “The Answer” in New York, Dershowitz said that it would be unlikely to see Assange ever face charges for his role in the publication of classified materials leaked by Chelsea Manning that detailed U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

{mosads}”I think the Trump administration has overplayed its hand,” the Harvard law professor told host John Catsimatidis. “They had a very strong case for extradition when they initially accused him…breaking in to a password[-protected machine] and stealing materials, that’s a crime.”

“But publishing materials? That’s The New York Times and The Washington Post, and I think Great Britain is going to have a lot of difficulty extraditing Assange to the U.S. to face trial for merely publishing information stolen not by him but by others,” he added.

Assange was arrested last month by British authorities after spending years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to evade charges he faced in Sweden for sexual assault and now in the U.S. related to his publication of stolen materials at Wikileaks.

A U.N. torture expert who recently visited Assange in British prison said that the Wikileaks founder showed signs of having been psychologically tortured, and warned that he would face a “show trial” if extradited to the U.S.{mosads}

“Our finding was that Mr. Assange shows all the symptoms of a person who has been exposed to psychological torture for a prolonged period of time. The psychiatrist who accompanied my mission said that his state of health was critical,” Nils Melzer told Reuters this week.

“I am seriously, gravely concerned that if this man were to be extradited to the United States, he would be exposed to a politicized show trial and grave violations of his human rights,” he added.