Biden faces a renewed push, domestically and internationally, to drop charges against Assange, who is languishing in a UK jail:
The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that "a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy".
But the biggest test of Biden's commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.
[...] Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange's protracted prosecution.
Five major media organizations that relied on his trove of government secrets, including the Guardian and the New York Times, put out an open letter earlier this month saying that his indictment "sets a dangerous precedent" and threatens to undermine the first amendment.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday December 14 2022, @03:48PM
What are you implying? The government never commits offenses - if it did it would lock itself up. It hasn't done so, so obviously it's committed no offense.
What actually happens is sometimes the peasants take offense at something the government did, but since power and justice flow from above that's obviously a failure in the peasants rather than the government.
That democracy fad tried to change things, claiming power ultimately flowed from the people and the government should be bound to their will. But here in the US at least we've mostly stamped that bullshit out - we still go through the motions, but it's been decades since a single law has been passed without broad support from the neo-aristocracy, regardless of how popular it is among the peasants. At least at the national level - the cancer of democracy still has some hold at the local level, but they're working on it.