We’ve been trying to drag Wikileaks founder Julian Assange out of Europe and to America to face espionage charges for years now, with little to show for our efforts. In January, a judge denied a United States extradition request, despite having a long-standing extradition agreement with the United States. He was ordered to remain in prison pending an appeal from the Americans, which we filed immediately. Even that process has been grinding and slow because it took a full six months for the court to even agree to allow us to appeal. That happened yesterday, so the appeal will be heard in High Court, but we don’t have a date for that yet. (Associated Press)

Britain’s High Court has granted the U.S. government permission to appeal a decision that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot be sent to the United States to face espionage charges.

The judicial office said Wednesday that the appeal had been granted and the case would be listed for a High Court hearing. No date has been set…

The judge ordered that Assange must remain in prison during any potential U.S. appeal, ruling that the Australian citizen “has an incentive to abscond” if he were freed.

This ruling doesn’t mean that we’re going to be able to extradite Assange. It only means we get the chance to ask again and the Brits don’t seem to be in any rush to clear this matter up.

Keep in mind that the judge who made the original ruling didn’t suggest that the charges Assange would face in the United States were false or that he might not be convicted. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition request for “mental health reasons,” saying that Assange may be likely to commit suicide if he’s locked up in an American prison. The High Court will need to be convinced otherwise if we hope to have the decision overturned.

It really should have been a fairly easy case to make that we would be able to keep Assange on suicide watch throughout his confinement and trial. Of course, that argument became more complicated thanks to Jeffrey Epstein. Still, unless Assange is actually suffering from some sort of mental disorder, he doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who would take his own life, particularly with an ego that size.

The other complicating factor here is the question of whether or not Joe Biden is even interested in prosecuting Assange. His girlfriend (and mother of his two children) was making a public plea to Biden this week, asking him to abandon the prosecution. It would be nice to think that a sitting President wouldn’t interfere in the operations of the Justice Department in such a fashion, but we can’t be too confident about that. It was Donald Trump who launched the prosecutorial effort, and we already know that if Joe Biden can identify anything that the Bad Orange Man wanted to do, he’ll usually do what he can to thwart those efforts. That may prove to be the case with Assange.

It would certainly be interesting to get Julian Assange back here and into a courtroom on espionage charges. Who knows what songs he might sing if it offered him the chance to cut a deal and avoid a possible prison term of 175 years? He might even know some additional things about what Chelsea Manning did when hijacking those hundreds of thousands of classified military documents that Assange dumped out into the world. And if such information exposed any potential crimes not covered under the commutation Manning received from Barack Obama, things could get even more interesting still.