The Biden administration has signaled that for now, it is continuing its predecessor’s attempt to prosecute Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, as the Justice Department filed a brief this week appealing to a British court to overturn a ruling that blocked his extradition to the United States, The New York Times reports.
This week, human rights and civil liberties groups had asked the acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, to abandon the effort to prosecute Mr. Assange, arguing that the case the Trump administration developed against him could establish a precedent posing a grave threat to press freedoms.
The Justice Department had been due to file a brief in support of its appeal of a judge’s ruling last month blocking the extradition of Mr. Assange because American prison conditions are inhumane.
The appeal was lodged on Jan. 19 — the last full day of the Trump administration — so the decision to proceed with filing the brief was the first opportunity for the Biden administration to reconsider the disputed prosecution effort. A spokeswoman from the Crown Prosecution Office said on Friday that the American government filed the brief on Thursday.
The brief itself was not immediately available. Filings in the British court, unlike in the United States, are not public by default. Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, said the American government was not permitted to distribute it but confirmed its filing.
The case against Mr. Assange is complicated and does not turn on whether he is a journalist, but preferably on whether the journalistic activities of soliciting and publishing classified information can be treated as a crime in the United States. The charges center on his 2010 publication of diplomatic and military files leaked by Chelsea Manning, not his later publication of Democratic Party emails hacked by Russia during the 2016 election.
Prosecutors have separately accused him of participating in a hacking conspiracy, which is not a journalistic activity. However, the immediate issue at hand in the extradition case is neither of those things, but rather whether American prison conditions are inhumane.
