LATEST UPDATE: No New Charges To Be Filed Against Julian Assange!

From the NY Post, here are more details:

Embattled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will escape further charges in the US — including for the 2017 leak of the CIA’s cyber-snooping tools, according to a new report.

The hacker, already in prison in Britain and facing espionage charges in the US, was widely believed to be charged over the massive “Vault 7″ leak that then-press secretary Sean Spicer insisted undermined “our security, our country and our well-being.”

But the US Department of Justice has decided not to pursue charges over the catastrophic leak, according to Politico, citing a U.S. official and two other people familiar with the case.

“There is a comfort level within the national security establishment of where the charges ended up,” a US national security official told Politico.

The decision was made in part by tight deadlines to bring additional charges — along with fears a court battle could expose even more CIA secrets. The CIA has never confirmed the authenticity of the almost 9,000-page leak.

“There is no question that there are leak cases that can’t be prosecuted against the leaker or the leakee because the information is so sensitive that, for your proof at trial, you would have to confirm it is authentic,” Mary McCord, who was acting assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department until 2017, told Politico.

“So the irony, often, is that the higher the classification of the leaked material, the harder it is to prosecute.”

At the time, Wikileaks admitted that the “Vault 7″ leak was the “largest ever publication of confidential documents” from the CIA.

It claimed to expose how CIA software could secretly turn everyday electronics, like smartphones and high-tech TVs, into listening devices to spy on unsuspecting users.

Assange — who is currently serving a 50-week sentence for jumping bail in the UK — still faces serious charges if successfully extradited to the US.

The Washington Post confirmed the story:

The Justice Department has delivered to officials in the United Kingdom a formal extradition request for Julian Assange, making further U.S. charges against the WikiLeaks founder unlikely.

A U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter said the request was sent Thursday. The United States’ treaty with Britain required that the request be sent within 60 days of Assange’s April 11 arrest at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

The same treaty bars the United States from prosecuting Assange for any alleged crimes beyond those outlined in the extradition request, unless those acts occur after his extradition. In an 18-count indictment filed last month, prosecutors charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act and conspiring to hack into a government computer.

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The Justice Department did not pursue Assange for the 2017 exposure of Central Intelligence Agency hacking tools known as “Vault 7,” according to government officials, out of concern that doing so would do more damage to national security. Joshua Adam Schulte, a former CIA employee, is accused in New York federal court of leaking that information to WikiLeaks.

A grand jury investigation of Assange has remained active in recent weeks. Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, whose interactions with Assange form the basis of the charges against him, remains in jailfor refusing to testify before the grand jury. Sigurdur Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks associate who became an FBI informant, says he voluntarily met with prosecutors in Virginia late last month and was asked detailed questions about Assange’s relationships with hackers. A spokesman with the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria declined to comment on Thordarson’s account.

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