Biden Hints at Freedom for Julian Assange
It won’t give him back the years he’s spent in confinement, but WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may finally get a bit of justice after years of persecution for embarrassing U.S. officials. Under pressure from the government of the journalist’s home country of Australia, President Joe Biden said he’s “considering” dropping the case against Assange. It’s been a long time coming, but such a move would be welcomed not just by the prisoner, but by people everywhere who scrutinize government conduct.
A Belated Change of Policy?
“We’re considering it,” President Biden said at the White House last week in response to a question about honoring Australia’s request that Assange be released.
“This is an encouraging statement from President Biden,” responded Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “I have said that we have raised, on behalf of Mr. Assange, Australia’s national interests, that enough is enough, that this needs to be brought to a conclusion.”
Albanese has long made an issue of Assange’s incarceration, commenting in February: “Our view is very clear. It is the same view I had in Opposition, it is the same view I have as Prime Minister, which is enough is enough. There is nothing to be served from the ongoing incarceration of Mr. Assange and he should be allowed to come home.”
The prime minister spoke days after his country’s parliament voted 86–42 in favor of asking the U.S. and the U.K. to bring “the matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia.”
Of course, “we’re considering it” isn’t exactly an admission of error in the legal proceedings against the founder of WikiLeaks, let alone a grant of the man’s freedom. But it’s a significant shift for a government that pursued Assange across three administrations and that just months ago, in the person of State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, insisted WikiLeaks’s acquisition and publication of information embarrassing to U.S. officials was “not a legitimate journalistic activity.”
Espionage or Journalism?
Assange faces charges under the Espionage Act, which dates to 1917. His alleged “crime” is publishing classified U.S. government documents on WikiLeaks, including the “Collateral Murder” video of a U.S. airstrike killing civilians in Baghdad. The publications were based on leaks from U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. The U.S. government, which found the revelations extremely inconvenient, called the leaks “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States” in a 2020 superseding indictment of Assange.
Manning served seven years in prison, then was briefly jailed again in 2020 for refusing to testify against Assange. The WikiLeaks founder was then, as now, in British custo
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