The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media attacks and legal assaults under Donald Trump.
Attorney General Merrick Garland even implemented expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy.”
But the biggest proof of Biden’s commitment remains incarcerated in a London jail cell, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 as he faces prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that had never before been used to publish classified information.
If the US Justice Department continues to pursue Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group leaked classified information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, North Korea’s diplomacy -American and Democratic domestic politics before the 2016 elections, it will be very long. way to determine whether the current administration intends to follow through on its promises to protect the press.
Now Biden is facing a renewed push, both in the United States and abroad, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.
Five major media organizations trusted with government secrets, including the Guardian and the New York Times, published an open letter earlier this month saying his indictment “sets a dangerous precedent” and threatens to undermine the first amendment
At the same time, officials in Australia, where Assange was born and remains a citizen, met with their American counterparts to demand his release. “My position is clear and it has been made clear to the US administration: that it is time for this matter to be closed,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the Australian parliament late last month .
In Brazil, meanwhile, President-elect Luis Inácio Lula da Silva demanded an end to what he called Assange’s “unjust imprisonment” after a meeting with WikiLeaks publishers who were pressing for the your freedom
Some of Assange’s defenders, who have attacked his prosecution as a trampling on the First Amendment, say they are optimistic that the case may have reached a turning point that could eventually lead to his freedom.
“This case is very significant,” Columbia University law professor Jameel Jaffer, who directs the university’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said in an interview. “At the end of the day, I find it hard to believe that the Biden administration wants this case to be their legacy of freedom of the press, and it will be their legacy if they continue to pursue it. This will eclipse everything else when it comes to freedom of the press. press”.
Justice department officials are not tipping their hand about where Assange’s prosecution could lead as he continues to challenge his extradition to the United States in a British appeals court. The Justice Department declined to comment on all outside calls to drop the case, but an official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Garland “has made it clear that he will follow the law wherever it leads,” as he has in other political aspects. loaded cases
For all the outside pressure on the Justice Department to drop the case, a critical factor could be internal regulations Garland announced in October prohibiting the use of records seizures and other investigative measures against “the media of communication that act within the scope of the news”. meeting” except in what the department said would be limited circumstances.
The new regulations stemmed from a year-long review that followed frequent complaints from news organizations about intrusive tactics used by the department during the Trump administration to collect records from reporters and investigate news-gathering practices in the course of investigations into leaks and leaks. other sensitive issues.
One of the central controversies in Assange’s rise to notoriety has always been the question of whether he should be considered a journalist covered by the First Amendment, as his defenders have long maintained, or a rogue agent that, as Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska once said. , was “an outlet for foreign propaganda and … an enemy of the American people.”
Barry J Pollack, Assange’s lead US lawyer, told the Guardian that “the new regulations certainly call for someone at the highest levels of the Justice Department to take a fresh look at this indictment to see if it’s really consistent with the new policy” and to determine “is this the type of case we want to pursue?”
“The time is ripe for this,” Pollack said.
Assange has been a polarizing figure around the world for a dozen years, since WikiLeaks began publishing and sometimes sharing with mainstream media outlets, including the Guardian and the New York Times, millions of pages of often classified material he had collected from the government. whistleblowers and other sources. His defenders hailed him as an unabashed truth-teller, while critics, often within the intelligence agencies, have attacked him for the damage they say the leaks have caused to ongoing operations.
His group’s first major exposés in 2010 documented US military abuses and missteps in Iraq and Afghanistan, and each subsequent batch of leaked materials, from secret State Department cables to hacking tools from the CIA, brought Assange more notoriety and attention.
Beyond the massive leaks, Assange also faced allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, though the investigation was eventually dropped because Swedish prosecutors said the evidence was not strong enough. To avoid capture, he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 under an agreement granting him political asylum. The CIA and the Trump administration were so focused on the secrets he had exposed that they discussed kidnapping Assange from the embassy and killing him, according to a Yahoo News report last year.
Joe Biden has repeatedly called on the UK to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
The Justice Department, under Trump, first brought criminal charges against Assange in 2019, when British authorities arrested him and dragged him out of the embassy. Assange, looking disheveled with a long white beard, shouted: “This is illegal, I’m not leaving.”
Beginning less than two weeks after Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, his justice department has repeatedly asked British courts to renew the US extradition request for Assange. After a long battle in the British courts, the then Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition request from the US in June, but Assange is appealing that decision, arguing that “he was being prosecuted and punished for their political views”.
Almost all of the 18 charges brought against Assange in the 2019 indictment center on WikiLeaks’ actual online publication of secret military and government material, many of which came from former US military whistleblower Chelsea Manning . Only one of the charges accuses Assange of actively working to help Manning secure classified information. In that case, prosecutors charged that Assange offered to help Manning crack the password of a classified military system, an attempt that failed.
Manning was eventually sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking government secrets before President Barack Obama commuted the rest of her sentence in 2017. At a court-martial hearing in 2013, Manning insisted there was never any pressure of WikiLeaks to seize any secret material from military computer systems. “The decisions I made to submit documents and information to (WikiLeaks) and the website were my own decisions, and I take responsibility for my actions,” Manning said.
The charges against Assange for obtaining and publishing classified information, without any active role in its theft, mark “the crossing of a legal rubicon,” Jaffer said at Columbia University. This is an ominous legal threshold, he said, for Assange and all journalists.
“This is the first time the US government has used the Espionage Act to go after a publisher, and the implications are huge,” Jaffer said. Assange “has been accused of activities that journalists engage in every day and that journalists must engage in every day to inform the public. This would have dramatic implications for national security journalism.”
This article was amended on 12 December 2022 to clarify that Assange was facing sexual assault allegations, not charges, in Sweden. Also, Biden’s inauguration year was 2021, not 2020.