The problem was, if Assange could be jailed for doing journalism, why not also the editors of the papers he published with? Locking up the senior staff of the New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel, was never going to be a good look.
This very difficulty stayed the hand of officials in Barack Obama's administration. They felt cornered by the First Amendment.
But under Donald Trump the reticence quickly lifted. His justice department officials argued that Assange was a hacker, not a journalist.
With this as their premise, they felt free to redefine the new, digitally based national security journalism Assange and WikiLeaks pioneered as "espionage".
To do so, they turned to the 1917 Espionage Act, a draconian piece of First World War legislation that gave the government powers to jail critics.
It was a move with serious implications. Trump's justice officials were effectively claiming a new kind of universal jurisdiction: the right to put Assange on trial even though he was not a US citizen and was not accused of carrying out any of the acts in question on US soil.
The English courts have now attracted rancor by seemingly giving their assent to political persecution. Critics fear the precedent means any journalist in the UK could now be dragged to the US for prosecution should they cause Washington sufficient embarrassment.
Raising SuspicionsAssange and his supporters say the legal arguments of the extradition process were never more than a facade. They say there were plenty of clues that the US was seeking vengeance against Assange, not justice.
A decade ago, long before the US was openly battling to get hold of Assange, he was facing another extradition battle - this time with a Swedish prosecutor - as part of an investigation into allegations of sexual assault. It was around that time that Assange fled to Ecuador's embassy in London seeking political asylum.
The disappearance of email chains between Britain's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Sweden from that time have raised suspicions that all was not as it seemed.
A few survive, and suggest that extra pressure was being applied.
A CPS lawyer wrote to a Swedish counterpart in 2011: "Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition." The following year, as Sweden appeared to be preparing to drop the investigation against Assange, the same UK lawyer replied: "Don't you dare get cold feet!!!"
Moves were afoot against Assange in the US too. In 2011, a grand jury was convened in the Eastern District of Virginia behind closed doors to draft an indictment. The location was no accident. That district of Virginia is where most of the US intelligence agencies are headquartered.
Pursued By WashingtonBut the gloves really came off after Trump entered the White House. The CIA stepped into the fray, with its then director Mike Pompeo characterising WikiLeaks as "a non-state hostile intelligence service".
In fact, in 2017 the CIA launched a "secret war" against Assange, according to an investigation by Yahoo News published in September. The agency variously plotted to poison Assange and kidnap him while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy.
According to the report, the CIA proposed to seize the Australian and smuggle him to the US in an echo of the "extraordinary rendition" programmes the agency used in the "war on terror".
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