White House claims it had no role in Julian Assange deal — despite Biden saying he was ‘considering’ it
WASHINGTON — The White House denied Tuesday that it was involved in the feds’ plea deal allowing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to return to his native Australia — despite President Biden previously saying he was “considering” it.
Assange, 52, left the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory, Tuesday evening after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain and disseminate national defense information — ending his 12-year legal saga that included seven years in Ecuador’s cramped London embassy and five years in prison fighting extradition to the US.
Upon entering the plea, Assange was sentenced to time served and freed. He boarded a plane bound for Canberra, Australia, immediately after the hearing.
“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice, and there was no White House involvement in the plea deal decision,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.
A source close to Assange said they were unaware of what if any role Biden may have played in the final resolution of the case.
Presidents do sometimes have a role in criminal cases that are significant for international relations, including by approving grants of clemency to foreigners held in US prisons as part of prisoner swaps.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions about Biden’s possible role in the Assange deal.
Assange and US officials reached the deal just weeks after Biden, 81, openly expressed interest in resolving the matter.
“Do you have a response to Australia’s request that you end Julian Assange’s prosecution?” The Post asked Biden on April 10 as he walked along the Rose Garden with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“We’re considering it,” Biden replied in a remark widely covered by news outlets in the US, UK and Australia.
The BBC reported Tuesday that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had raised Assange’s status with Biden when the Aussie head of government traveled to Washington for a state visit this past October.
In February, Albanese declared in a speech to the Canberra parliament that “enough is enough” and Assange’s case “cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely.”
The Australian House of Representatives subsequently voted 86-42 to urge the US and the UK to let Assange return home.
Lawmakers from Down Under also focused their efforts to win Assange’s release on the US ambassador, and former first daughter, Caroline Kennedy, who became an influential voice in favor of the plea deal.
Meanwhile, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who represented Assange when the Swedish government sought his extradition from the UK to answer rape charges more than a decade ago, speculated to London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper that Washington had “thrown in the towel because they know, as everyone else knows, that we [the UK] are going to have a [Labour Party] government next week [after the July 4 general election] and they couldn’t rely on a Labour government to put him on a plane.”
Biden has insisted throughout his presidency that he doesn’t intervene in Justice Department decisions, including the high-profile investigations and prosecutions, respectively, involving himself and former President Donald Trump. Republicans including Trump claim that some recent decisions show a political slant in favor of Biden’s Democratic Party.
In Assange’s case, centrists from both political parties generally favored his prosecution, while a coalition of libertarians, leftists and staunch conservatives argued for his freedom.
Assange’s allies and freedom-of-the-press organizations argued that the case against him threatened to effectively criminalize journalism. The primary-source publisher’s crime involved allegedly encouraging his source, Chelsea Manning, then a junior US Army intelligence analyst, to leak troves of data on American diplomatic and military operations in 2010.
WikiLeaks published catalogues of files from the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — embarrassing the then-Obama administration and infuriating national defense hawks, who argued that the publication recklessly endangered US sources of information in active war zones.
The outlet later published internal campaign communications damaging Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Manning received a 35-year prison sentence in 2013 for leaking documents to Assange, but her penalty was commuted by then-President Barack Obama in 2017.
Assange received asylum from Ecuador in 2012 by claiming the Sweden allegations against him were a ruse to get him sent to the US. He eventually ran out the statute of limitations on those charges, but was indicted in the US in 2019 after Ecuador withdrew its asylum.
