On Wednesday, President Joe Biden told a journalist that he was “considering” dropping charges against Julian Assange, the Australian hacker who’s facing a raft of Justice Department indictments. In February, Australia’s parliament passed a measure, with the support of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling for the return of the fugitive to his native country.
The 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder has struggled mightily to avoid the Western justice system for over a decade. Beginning in 2012, he sought refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London, and for the past five years, Assange has been incarcerated in London’s Belmarsh prison, fighting U.S. efforts to extradite him. Two weeks ago, London’s High Court granted Assange yet another delay in extradition, guaranteeing that this protracted legal drama will continue for months if not years more.
It’s therefore understandable that the Biden administration wants this messy case, a long-term irritant between Washington and two of our closest allies, to evaporate at last. However, doing so, letting Assange leave Belmarsh prison a free man, would constitute a terrible mistake.
Assange claims he was merely acting as a journalist when he compromised American security by leaking vast amounts of U.S. classified information online, multiple times. His ardent fanbase, comprised of the ideological “horseshoe” where the far Left and far Right converge in shared anti-Americanism, ceaselessly repeats the mantra that Assange was merely “doing journalism.”
This is yet another Assange falsehood, among many.
The Justice Department in 2019 charged Assange with grave crimes, then updated them in 2020. Assange is charged with 18 violations of the Espionage Act, including collaborating in 2009 with U.S. Army junior intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into classified Department of Defense computer systems. A vast trove of that stolen classified material was subsequently posted online by WikiLeaks, doing serious damage to Western security. Some of the leaked intelligence included the unredacted names of human sources who were supplying information to the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. That needless act put lives in danger, and according to the Department of Justice, some of those individuals disappeared.
Put simply, Assange has blood on his hands. He played a key role in the 2013 defection to Russia of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who stole and leaked more than a million classified U.S. defense documents before winding up in Moscow, where Snowden remains. The Snowden operation betrayed the reality that, for more than a decade, Assange has been doing Russia’s bidding. Assange is Vladimir Putin’s man, an agent of the Kremlin. The U.S. intelligence community has known this for years. As then-CIA boss Mike Pompeo explained forthrightly in April 2017:
It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia … our Intelligence Community determined that Russian military intelligence — the GRU — had used WikiLeaks to release data of U.S. victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.
Pompeo added, “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” adding: “it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.”
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Releasing Assange, letting him escape justice for his crimes, would reward Putin for his many aggressive acts around the world. Worse, it would encourage more Westerners to take the side of authoritarian regimes like Russia and China for fun and fame. Assange’s odd career has gained him worldwide celebrity with his own personality cult. There are plenty more disgruntled, narcissistic young men across the West who would like to emulate him.
Moreover, the timing of releasing Assange could not be worse, with tensions rising in multiple regions and the possibility of a Third World War looming. Now is not the time to go wobbly in the face of Russia and its friends. Joe Biden needs to stand fast and demand that Julian Assange be extradited to face trial and possible imprisonment.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.