Letting Assange walk would set a disastrous precedent for Western security

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…