By Joe Lauria / Consortium News
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.
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.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, told Sky News 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.”
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Joe Lauria
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe