> He's being prosecuted for allegedly extracting a password from a hash value
They don't claim Assange extracted a password. They just claim that Assange said in the chat "no luck so far"! That is, that he wrote to Manning that he tried.
> Manning did not have administrative-level privileges, and used special software, namely a Linux operating system, to access the computer file and obtain the portion of the password provided to Assange.
Fun to see them exonerate themselves for using broken security by calling a hash a, "portion of the password".
They don't claim Assange extracted a password. They just claim that Assange said in the chat "no luck so far"! That is, that he wrote to Manning that he tried.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/press-release/file/1153481...
The indictment is "conspiracy" with Manning.
So there's certainly something to back up the claim from this title
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-april-11...
namely, that "Assange's arrest is 'a vendetta, not justice'"
For more context, at the moment this news from ca one month ago have even more sense:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/08/chelsea-mann...
"Chelsea Manning jailed for refusing to testify to grand jury in WikiLeaks case"