Listen: Chris Hedges Interviews Julian Assange

[Luminous Animal]

5. Someone is being dishonest here and it is not Assange.

Your quote #1
JA: Politically, it’s—the head of the Swedish Supreme Court came out and said that the case is a mess ...

That response was specific to Assange's extradition case not the criminal case. Here is the quote in context. (emphasis mine)

Chris Hedges: So what do you, when you watch all these sort of, you know, all this movement, what do you think they’re trying to do? How do they want to try and get you out of here?

Julian Assange: I think it’s a mess. I don’t think that they have—there’s so many different parties with different interests. It’s a mess. The U.K. wants it to go away, but doesn’t want to lose prestige in relation to Ecuador. The situation in Sweden is getting so bad now that … Sweden will never offend the U.S. Neither country—neither the U.K. or Sweden will ever offend the U.S. But within that, the situation is so bad now in Sweden—

Your quote #2... I am not sure what you are claiming here. Of course the Susman said that the U.S. is waiting until after the Swedish case, a fact that both Assange and his assistant repeated. (For some reason, you messed with the sequence and put two sentences together that were separated by other comments in the interview).

In context:

JA: They don’t need to. … We have some indications. The [then-U.S.] ambassador for the U.K., Louis Susman, said in the beginning of 2011 that they were waiting until after the Swedish case. The Independent [newspaper]—

CH: Waiting for what?

JA: What’s the U.S. interest in this situation? It’s up for my extradition. He didn’t say that, but it’s the obvious context.

Assange’s assistant: So the U.S. ambassador to the U.K. said early—

JA: 2011.

Assange’s assistant: … early 2011 that the U.S. was waiting to see what happened with the Swedish case.

Assange’s attorney Michael Ratner: They wouldn’t file at the same time, because then there’d be two competing extraditions—and so they would wait until—

CH: Oh, I see. OK, I got it.

JA: If not, there’d be one in the queue, and then the other one would come in, and then it would be the plight of the home secretary to make a decision, a reviewable court decision, a politically reviewable decision, to swap the precedent for these.

MR: So what they would do, is if they were going to actually, if Julian had won a non-extradition, they would likely at that point in the U.K. court file their extradition.