Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Julian Assange said that the United States’ extradition request was motivated by politics and that the U.S. attitude to the WikiLeaks founder had changed when Donald Trump came to power.
Almost a decade since his WikiLeaks website enraged Washington by leaking hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents, Assange, 48, is fighting extradition from Britain to the United States where he is accused of espionage and hacking.
The United States asked Britain to extradite Assange last year after he was pulled from the Ecuador embassy in London, where he had spent seven years holed up avoiding extradition to Sweden over sex crime allegations which have since been dropped.
Assange has served a prison sentence in Britain for skipping bail and remains jailed pending the U.S. extradition request.