Biden Hints at Freedom for Julian Assange

U.S. need for Australia’s cooperation in the Pacific may win the journalist’s release.

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 custody awaiting extradition to the U.S. after seven years of refuge/exile in Ecuador's London embassy. After a change of government, Ecuador turned him over to the U.K., which has held him since 2019.

That's a high price to pay for making officials uncomfortable via journalism—which is what Assange did, even if government flunkies insist that unauthorized disclosures of secrets must necessarily be spying.

"The U.S. Department of Justice claims that Assange broke the law by receiving classified documents from a source, speaking with that source, possessing the documents, and publishing some of them. In other words, things journalists at news outlets around the country do every day," points out the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

"Journalists and their unions have recognised since the outset that Julian Assange is being targeted for carrying out tasks that are the daily work of many journalists – seeking out a whistleblower and exposing criminality," according to Maja Sever, president of the European Federation of Journalists.

Elite Media Types Against Journalism

The U.S. government may say Assange's actions don't constitute journalism, but actual journalists disagree. Well, most do. In fact, the persecution of Assange got cover from some name-brand media types and institutions. They resented that he got a high-profile scoop that escaped them, his status outside elite press circles, and his frankly difficult personality and sometimes sketchy conduct—as if assholes are unknown in an ego-driven industry.

"Mr. Assange is not a free-press hero," sniffed The Washington Post's editorial board in 2019. "Yes, WikiLeaks acquired and published secret government documents, many of them newsworthy," the board allowed, but he did so "contrary to the norms of journalism."

"The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime," The New York Times editorial board agreed. It did, however, hedge its bets and allow that "the prosecution of Mr. Assange could become an assault on the First Amendment and whistle-blowers."

This was absolutely bizarre coming from two newspapers key in publishing, in 1971, the leaked government documents known as the Pentagon Papers, which revealed secret analyses of America's involvement in Indochina. But it made sense given the elite media's growing separation from the U.S. public, and the status of many big-name outlets as temporary resting places for intelligence and law enforcement officials taking brief breaks from government careers. Entwined with the state, too many high-profile media names have become flacks for authoritarianism.

But regular people doing journalism recognize Assange as one of them. Advocates for liberty see the dangers in prosecuting those who reveal government misconduct. And Australians want one of their own to come home.

The Triumph of Realpolitik

At a time when freedom barely gets lip service in government circles, that last point may be the deciding factor. With tensions rising between the West and China, the U.S. needs allies in the Pacific.

"The United States has allied with Britain and Australia to form a new anti-China grouping," The Atlantic's Tom McTague noted in 2021. That AUKUS alliance will include nuclear-powered attack submarines for Australia, we learned last year, as well as trilateral naval cooperation among the partners.

Ultimately, realpolitik may succeed where civil libertarian concerns and simple decency failed. If Julian Assange finally regains his freedom, it may be due to U.S. willingness to move past revelations of its past foreign policy failures so it can make way for new diplomatic and military ventures.

Undoubtedly, that will leave a need for Assanges of the future to cover the results.