Biden Mulls Ending Prosecution of Julian Assange

U.S. President Joe Biden said on April 10 he’s mulling ending the prosecution of Julian Assange.

“We’re considering it,” President Biden told reporters at the White House in Washington.

President Biden was answering a question asked by a journalist about Mr. Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. The president did not provide further details.

Mr. Assange, 52, is facing charges in the United States over allegations he illegally helped U.S. Army analyst Bradley Manning obtain classified information, and then disclosed that information.

Wikileaks published a trove of materials on the U.S. military and the Middle East, including a video showing troops manning drones gunning down a Reuters employee and civilians. The trove included the identities of human sources.

“Assange’s actions risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries and put the unredacted named human sources at a grave and imminent risk of serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in 2019 when announcing additional charges against Mr. Assange.

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Mr. Assange’s supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimized because he exposed U.S. wrongdoing.

Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange, called President Biden’s comments encouraging. Three weeks earlier, Pollack had said Assange’s legal team saw no indication of resolution to U.S. charges against him.

“It is encouraging that President Biden has confirmed that the United States is considering dropping its case against Julian Assange,” Pollack said in an email.

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment on President Biden’s remarks.

Mr. Manning, who now goes by the name Chelsea, was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted of numerous charges, including intentionally communicating national defense information that was acquired by accessing a U.S. government computer. Former President Barack Obama commuted the sentence in 2017, drawing criticism from Republicans.

Mr. Assange, an Australian native, has been imprisoned in the UK since 2019 because he violated bail conditions in a separate case due to his holing up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for years.

If extradited, Mr. Assange faces a sentence of up to 175 years in a maximum security prison.

The motion “will send a powerful political signal to the British government and to the U.S. government,” Parliament member Andrew Wilkie said.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he raised the matter while meeting with President Biden in America in 2023.

“It is not too late for President Biden to stop Julian’s extradition to the US, which was a politically motivated act by his predecessor,“ Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, said in a statement. ”By dropping the charges against Julian he will be protecting freedom of expression and the rights of journalists and publishers globally. We urge him to end this legal process, to free Julian, and to recognise that journalism is not a crime.”

Former President Donald Trump, challenging President Biden in the 2024 race, has said that Mr. Assange “has been treated very badly.” He has not said whether he would drop the prosecution if he wins another term.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently said he would pardon both Edward Snowden, a former U.S. contractor who exposed National Security Agency spying operations, and suggested he would end the prosecution of Mr. Assange.

“We believe the Department of Justice acted correctly in 2013, during your vice presidency, when it declined to pursue charges against Mr. Assange for publishing the classified documents because it recognized that the prosecution would set a dangerous precedent,” Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and 14 other members of Congress said.

“It is the duty of journalists to seek out sources, including documentary evidence, in order to report to the public on the activities of government. The United States must not pursue an unnecessary prosecution that risks criminalizing common journalistic practices and thus chilling the work of the free press. We urge you to ensure that this case be brought to a close in as timely a manner as possible,” they added later.

John Demers, an assistant attorney general, said before that Mr. Assange is not a journalist.

“Julian Assange is no journalist,” Mr. Demers said. “This [is] made plain by the totality of his conduct as alleged in the indictment—i.e., his conspiring with and assisting a security clearance holder to acquire classified information, and his publishing the names of human sources.”

Reuters contributed to this report.