@katchen As happy as I am for Chelsea - assuming this 5-month delay in her release is not a blind for their getting their torturing hands on Julian and something to be cancelled by the next President - the first thing I thought of after cheering involved the brave and noble Assange in the grasp of evil. Wikileaks will continue, but people had better be ready to protest in case Assange can be saved whatever barbaric abuses they may have in mind.

TPTB tend to re-enact previous atrocious behaviours and may even be stupid enough try to torture Julian into 'admitting' that 'the Russians did it!' or anyone else whose country they have not yet militarily war-crimed.

but, unfortunately, Assange said he would turn himself in if Manning's sentence were
commuted.

And the cynic in me wonders, was justice or was getting his hands on Assange Obama's real motive?

@Strife Delivery Might a simpler explanation be possible? Like maybe Obama spitting in the eye of his handlers--I don't have to do what you tell me anymore, so unless you all want to see yourselves named in my forthcoming memoirs...I imagine that Obama has assembled blackmail materials of his own.

I am curious what the end game for this one is.

It may just be as petty as trying to shore up Obama's quickly crumbling legacy I don't know.

@Not Henry Kissinger May we assume that's how many fingers she saw, Winston?

to sit at the Chestnut Street Cafe and trace 2+2=5 in the dust on the table...

@katchen the supreme court will certainly have an interesting time trying to formulate a jurisdictional argument. some guy in some other country releases some documents that were given to him by somebody he neither paid nor extorted. guess what? american espionage laws don't apply -- and cannot apply, under any reasonable scheme of logic (which i understand does not necessarily attain to the law) -- to the citizens of other countries doing whatever the fuck they want with information that comes their way.

the book "Spycatcher" was published in the United States. it contains information that the author obtained in his role as a british intelligence officer. its publication in the UK would have been a crime. can you imagine Her Majesty's Government attempting to extradite the American publisher to be tried for violating the Official Secrets Act?

the torturous logic our justices required even to justify the extradition request, never mind a conviction, will be something to fucking see.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-17/julian-assange-responds-amid-gr...

This is how zero hedge interprets the statements:

So, to sum up, it appears that US extradition is on the cards for Julian Assange as he is "confident" of a fair trial under President Trump - a very different situation to Obama's Justice Department which "prevented a fair jury."

@Timmethy2.0 From my recent reading a pardon cannot be reversed because the legal result is as if the person never committed the crime. I think a commutation would work the same way since it is a conditional pardon.

A conditional pardon imposes a condition on the offender before it becomes effective. Typically this means the commutation of a sentence. For example, the president has the power under the Pardon Clause to commute a death sentence on the condition that the accused serve the rest of his or her life in prison without eligibility for Parole, even though a life sentence imposed directly by a court would otherwise be subject to parole. In upholding this type of conditional pardon, the Supreme Court in Schick v. Reed, 419 U.S. 256, 95 S. Ct. 379, 42 L. Ed. 2d 430 (1974), reasoned that "considerations of public policy and humanitarian impulses support an interpretation of that [pardon] power so as to permit the attachment of any condition which does not otherwise offend the Constitution."

Unless the pardon expressly states that it is issued because of a determination that the recipient was innocent, a pardon does not imply innocence. It is merely a forgiveness of the offense. It is generally assumed that acceptance of a pardon is an implicit Acknowledgment of guilt, for one cannot be pardoned unless one has committed an offense.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Presidential+pardon

Or would that be legally impossible? It would be important to clarify that.