Above photo: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meeting with President Joe Biden at East Asia Summit, November 2022. Office of U.S. President.
Biden administration is “considering” Australia’s request that the case against Julian Assange be dropped.
President Joe Biden said Wednesday his administration is “considering” Australia’s request that the case against Julian Assange be dropped.
Biden’s remark came in response to a reporter’s question at the White House on Wednesday. The news came in a tweet from Kellie Meyer, a reporter for News Nation, who quoted a White House pool report from the Japanese prime minister’s visit.
The exchange between the reporter and Biden was captured on video.
Australia has been increasing the pressure on Biden to end Assange’s ordeal, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese raising the issue directly with Biden, and the Australian Parliament in February passing a resolution calling for his release.
Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
“This is an encouraging comment from President Biden. I believe this must be brought to a conclusion and that Mr Assange has already paid a significant price, and enough is enough. There’s nothing to be gained by Mr Assange’s continued incarceration, in my very strong view. And I’ve put that as the view of the Australian government.”
Assange, who was arrested on April 11, 2019, will mark his fifth year at London’s Belmarsh Prison on Thursday. He is awaiting a decision by the High Court of England and Wales on whether he will be granted a full appeal against the Home Office’s order to extradite him to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information about U.S. crimes of state.
Assange attorney Jennifer Robinson told Sky News Australia:
“We are of course encouraged by his response, this is what we have been asking for over five years. Since 2010 we’ve been saying this is a dangerous precedent that’s being set. So, we certainly hope it was a serious remark and that the US will act on it.”
Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, told Sky News the case is a “political hot potato” for Bien that he could easily rid himself of.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, told Sky News in Britain that it was “extraordinary to hear this for the first time from Joe Biden,” but said “of course we’ll hope to see in the coming days, and I hope the press corps at the White House, and those in power in the halls of power in Washington D.C. gets clarification of what this means.”
“We all know that Biden is no longer on top of his mental faculties … but I think that’s so different from what has come out of him before, that it must have meaning,” Craig Murray, the former British diplomat and friend of Assange, told George Galloway on his MOATS show on Wednesday. “But we will have to wait and see.”
Murray said: “I’m not going to get too hopeful immediately on a few words out of the mouth of Biden, because there has been no previous indication, nothing from the Justice Department so far to indicate any easing up.”