A bipartisan coalition of U.S. Representatives is asking President Joe Biden to pardon one of the world’s most hated — and beloved — information activists.
Reps. Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) wrote a letter to the President urging him to pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to “send a clear message” that the outgoing administration will not target journalists.
The Australian WikiLeaks publisher pleaded guilty in June to charges related to publishing classified leaked U.S. military documents in 2010. He was sentenced to time served as part of a plea deal he reached with the U.S. Justice Department to end his overseas imprisonment in London. Assange had spent years in the Ecuadorian Embassy attempting to avoid extradition from the U.K. to the U.S.; however, he was apprehended and jailed in 2019.
“We write, first, to express our appreciation for your administration’s decision last spring to facilitate a resolution of the criminal case against publisher Julian Assange and to withdraw the related extradition request that had been pending in the United Kingdom,” the congressmen wrote to Biden. “This brought an end to Mr. Assange’s protracted detention and allowed him to reunite with his family and return to his home country of Australia.”
Before the 53-year-old struck a deal with the Biden justice department, Assange faced up to 175 years in jail on espionage and other charges, Fox News reported.
The leaks Assange published came from U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning and appeared to describe alleged war crimes committed by the U.S. government in the Middle East and the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention camp, as well as alleged incidents of the CIA engaging in torture and surreptitious rendition.
Manning was prosecuted and imprisoned from 2017 until his sentence was commuted by President Obama in 2017.
Manning is now transgender and goes by the name Chelsea. He unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in the Maryland Democrat primary in 2018. Manning was then jailed again for a period in 2019 and 2020 for contempt of court for refusing to testify before a grand jury regarding Assange.
While Obama’s Justice Department decided not to indict Assange, prosecution was initiated by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration.
“Put simply, there is a long-standing and well-grounded concern that section 793, which criminalizes the obtaining, retaining, or disclosing of sensitive information, could be used against journalists and news organizations engaged in their normal activities, particularly those who cover national security topics. This risk reportedly informed the Obama administration’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Assange,” McGovern and Massie wrote.
Assange was the first journalist to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
“The terms of Mr. Assange’s plea agreement have now set a precedent that greatly deepens our concern,” the congressmen’s message reads. “A review of prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes clear that Mr. Assange’s case is the first time the Act has been deployed against a publisher.”
Massie and McGovern said they concurred with Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, who responded to the plea agreement with, “While we welcome the end of his detention, the US’s pursuit of Assange has set a harmful legal precedent by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers.”
“We therefore urge you to consider issuing a pardon for Mr. Assange,” the reps added. “A pardon would remove the precedent set by the plea and send a clear message that the U.S. government under your leadership will not target or investigate journalists and media outlets simply for doing their jobs.”
McGovern and Massie previously pled with the President to drop the case against Assange in 2023. However, that effort was unsuccessful.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump reportedly offered Assange a pardon if he denied a link to an alleged Russian hack of DNC emails. This revelation came around 18 months before a report indicated that Trump’s then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo and agency officials had considered assassinating Assange in the early years of the Trump administration.