Assange was vanished most likely on October 16, around the same time all social media accounts of Wikileaks have been taken over. Snce then a chain of better and better fake appearances were published, starting with old footage deceptively labeled as new, then bad quality surprise "live" audio streams to obscure events, finally with tampered cut-and paste jobs of videos (the Pilger interview, the Hannity one and finally a real sneaky "live" video a reddit AMA of him. - getting more and more sophisticated with every step. Since they can't keep it up indefinitely they now construct a plausible story of how Assange ended up in US custody to process and parade him in a kangaroo court before the eyes of the world. I predict death penalty. Conservatives with their superficial love affair with wikileaks will still agree, that he was a cyberterrorist all along, liberals will cheer his demise and take the opportunity to point out that "this is what trump does to his supporters, see?!" And wikileaks will remain as a honeypot for whistleblowers and too curious "tinfoinlhatters".

Another inconvenience to the power structure eliminated and progress will march on in the same direction, with just a slightly different music playing.