Biden Admin Rejects Australian Request for Letting Go of Julian Assange

The witch-hunt for Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange that started in the Obama-Biden administration continues in the Biden-Harris administration as Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has rejected the Australian government’s request to drop its judicial pursuit and extradition of Assange to the U.S.

At a press conference on Saturday (July 29, 2023) in Brisbane, Australia, Blinken told Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong that Australia needs to understand the serious nature of the concerns the United States has over Assange’s publication of classified information, damaging national security. Blinken was cited in media saying: 

The actions that he is alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named human sources at grave risk of physical harm, grave risk of detention.

Following Blinken’s statement on Assange, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters on Tuesday (August 01, 2023) that his government remains firm in its position that the U.S. end its prosecution of Julian Assange, who is an Australian citizen.

“This has gone on for too long. Enough is enough,” said  Albanese, as cited by the Associated Press.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) launched a criminal investigation into Julian Assange in late 2010 when the Obama Administration’s Attorney General (AG), Eric Holder, condemned the damning revelations published by Wikileaks posted publicly that year, showing acts of war crimes committed by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Bush and Obama administrations. The revelations came from classified files, including video footage, leaked by former army soldier Chelsea Manning.

The DOJ didn’t charge Assange under the Obama administration. Mike Pompeo as CIA director under President Trump, spied on journalists meeting Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, UK, in 2017 and the DOJ worked on Assange’s indictment, which was finally unsealed in 2019.

He was charged with illegally obtaining, receiving, and disclosing classified information. The U.S. government has since pressured the British authorities into extraditing Assange to America to be tried here.

Assange has lost one appeal against his extradition order issued in 2021 in the concerned British court and is awaiting the decision of his next appeal, which could be his final appeal in a British court.

In public opinion, free speech advocates have widely condemned the prosecution of Assange as intimidation by the corrupt powers that want to make an example of him to stifle whistle-blowers and independent journalists. This year in May, free speech activists interrupted an interview with Anthony Blinken at the Global Press Freedom Day event, calling for freeing Assange.