President Joe Biden said that his administration is thinking about whether to agree to the Australian government's request to stop investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after years of detention in the UK. Assange is currently fighting transfer from the UK and has been in detention for years.
The lower house of Australia's parliament voted last month to officially ask the US to drop the case against Mr. Assange. US officials have called his organization a "hostile non-state intelligence" entity that helped Russia meddle in the 2016 election on behalf of former President Donald Trump.
People asked Mr. Biden about the request when he met with Fumio Kishida, the prime minister of Japan, at the White House on Wednesday.
His answer was, "We are thinking about it."
Charges against the computer hacker from Australia come from his work with US soldier Chelsea Manning. In 2019, a federal grand jury charged Mr. Assange with breaking 18 US laws, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Espionage Act.
Prosecutors say that while Ms. Manning was working as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq, Mr. Assange planned and helped her "crack a password hash to a classified US Department of Defense computer."
Some people who support press freedom say that Mr. Assange should be seen as a journalist and should be given the same rights as real journalists who gather and report the news.
But people who do not like Mr. Assange or his organization WikiLeaks have also pointed out that he has regularly worked with and taken information from people and groups that are known to be unfriendly to the US, such as foreign states that want to hurt American interests.
British authorities have been holding Mr. Assange since 2019 when they dragged him from Ecuador's London embassy, where he had been hiding for seven years while avoiding arrest on bail-jumping charges.
American officials are trying to extradite him right now, but a British court has put the case on hold until the US promises that Mr. Assange will not be put to death if he is found guilty in an American court.
The lower house of Australia's parliament voted last month to officially ask the US to drop the case against Mr. Assange. US officials have called his organization a "hostile non-state intelligence" entity that helped Russia meddle in the 2016 election on behalf of former President Donald Trump.
People asked Mr. Biden about the request when he met with Fumio Kishida, the prime minister of Japan, at the White House on Wednesday.
His answer was, "We are thinking about it."
Charges against the computer hacker from Australia come from his work with US soldier Chelsea Manning. In 2019, a federal grand jury charged Mr. Assange with breaking 18 US laws, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Espionage Act.
Prosecutors say that while Ms. Manning was working as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq, Mr. Assange planned and helped her "crack a password hash to a classified US Department of Defense computer."
Some people who support press freedom say that Mr. Assange should be seen as a journalist and should be given the same rights as real journalists who gather and report the news.
But people who do not like Mr. Assange or his organization WikiLeaks have also pointed out that he has regularly worked with and taken information from people and groups that are known to be unfriendly to the US, such as foreign states that want to hurt American interests.
British authorities have been holding Mr. Assange since 2019 when they dragged him from Ecuador's London embassy, where he had been hiding for seven years while avoiding arrest on bail-jumping charges.
American officials are trying to extradite him right now, but a British court has put the case on hold until the US promises that Mr. Assange will not be put to death if he is found guilty in an American court.
