WASHINGTON — President Biden said Wednesday he is “considering” ending the U.S. case against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. This comes after former President Donald Trump also publicly said he was considering intervening before leaving office without intervening.
Assange, 52, was indicted on 18 counts of breaching the law in 2010 for leaking US military and diplomatic secrets and has spent five years in a British prison after challenging his extradition.
Asked at the White House about the Australian government’s request to end the case against its citizens, Biden said, “We’re considering it.”
In February, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a speech to Parliament that “enough is enough” and that “we can’t let this go on forever”.
Albanese was expected to raise the issue when he met with Biden at the White House in October, but it is unclear what exactly the two men discussed behind closed doors.
Assange’s sentence at Britain’s Belmarsh Prison begins its sixth year on Thursday.
US charges against Assange were dismissed in May 2019. It comes a month after British police arrested him at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for jumping bail in a separate case involving allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden several years earlier.
Mr. Assange received political asylum from the South American country in 2012, claiming that the Swedish suspicions were a ploy to get him sent to the United States.
Press advocacy groups say the Assange case could set a precedent against journalists who encourage sources to hand over classified information.
Former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for leaking documents to Assange. Her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017 as one of her final acts in office.
Mr. Assange’s supporters say the documents provided by Mr. Manning show abuses by U.S. forces in foreign conflicts, but his critics argue that Mr. It alleges that it recklessly released information that could have harmed its allies.
WikiLeaks leaders later launched a hack showing party officials engineered to undermine the socialist Vermont senator’s insurgent candidacy in 2016 and forewarned Hillary Clinton about debate questions. He became popular with some Republicans after publishing his emails with the Democratic Party.
President Trump, who seeks a rematch with Biden in November, is backed by liberal allies including Assange and Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who exposed a federal mass surveillance program in 2013. It is also considering issuing pardons to other people who do so.
Shortly after leaving office in January 2021, President Trump said he was considering pardoning either Assange or Snowden, who defected to Russia after the United States revoked their passports.
The former president said one of the men may have ties to foreign intelligence and the other is “exposing real corruption,” but which description applies to which man. It was not revealed.
“There are two sides to this,” Trump said in an interview with commentator Candice Owens. It’s exposing corruption.”
“I can’t say which, but I feel a little stronger about one than the other.”
