Biden ‘considering’ ending Julian Assange case — after Trump also flirted with idea
WASHINGTON — President Biden said Wednesday that he’s “considering” ending the US case against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange — after former President Donald Trump also publicly weighed intervening before leaving office without doing so.
Assange, 52, has lived for five years in a British prison as he challenges US efforts to extradite him to face 18 counts of allegedly breaking the law by leaking American military and diplomatic secrets in 2010.
“We’re considering it,” Biden replied at the White House when asked about a request by Australia’s government to end the case against its citizen.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a February speech to his country’s parliament that “enough is enough” and “this thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely” — before the Australian House of Representatives voted 86-42 to call on the US and UK to let Assange return to his homeland.
Albanese met with Biden in October at the White House and was expected to raise the case, but it’s unclear what precisely the men discussed behind closed doors.
Assange’s stay at the UK’s Belmarsh Prison enters its sixth year Thursday.
US charges against Assange were unsealed in May 2019 — a month after British police arrested him at Ecuador’s embassy in London for jumping bail seven years earlier in a different case involving alleged sexual misconduct in Sweden.
Assange received political asylum in 2012 from Ecuador by claiming the Swedish allegations were a ruse to get him sent to the US, but the South American country later withdrew protection after housing him for nearly a decade inside its embassy.
Press advocacy groups say that the Assange case, including charges under the Espionage Act, could set a precedent to be used against journalists who encourage sources to hand over classified information.
Former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning received a 35-year prison sentence in 2013 for leaking documents to Assange. Her penalty was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017, in one of his final acts in office.
Assange’s supporters argue that material provided by Manning showed US military abuses in foreign conflicts, but his detractors say he recklessly published information that could have harmed American soldiers and their allies in war zones.
The WikiLeaks leader later endeared himself to some Republicans by publishing hacked Democratic emails in 2016 that showed party bosses worked to undermine the insurgent candidacy of socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and gave Hillary Clinton advance warning about a debate question.
Trump, who is seeking a rematch against Biden in November, also toyed with issuing pardons to Assange and other figures championed by his libertarian allies, including former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed federal mass surveillance programs in 2013.
Trump said shortly after leaving office in January 2021 that he considered pardoning either Assange or Snowden, who received asylum in Russia after the US cancelled his passport.
The former president said one of the men had possible links to foreign intelligence while the other had been “exposing real corruption” — without saying which description applied to which man.
“You have two sides of it: In one case, you have sort of a spy deal going on, and then another case, you have somebody that’s exposing real corruption,” Trump said in an interview with commentator Candace Owens.
“I won’t say which one, but I feel a little bit more strongly about one than the other.”
