Biden says he is ‘considering’ Australian call to drop Julian Assange charges
Biden says he is ‘considering’ Australian call to drop Julian Assange charges
US prosecutors say the WikiLeaks founder encouraged and helped Chelsea Manning steal classified files before publishing them
Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the decade-long US push to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing a trove of American classified documents.
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A pardon for Snowden, Assange, and Chelsea would give Biden a lot of credit
Assange is different from the other two.
Agree with what Snowden and Manning did on whatever level you like but their actions aren’t the same unfortunately.
Of the 3 Snowden is feasible.
Assange is by a large margin less altruistic than the other two - all three have paid a steep penalty for their actions, though.
Assange only published leaks. He didn't steal any material himself.
Is chelsea manning in need of a pardon? I thought Obama gave her one.
He commuted her sentence.
I have a slight worry that pardoning Snowden would result in his disappearance/death since Putin would no longer have any use for him. Right now they are protecting someone who is considered an enemy of the US government and has embarrassed the US intelligence apparatus, if that changes then he no longer fills a purpose for the Russian government.
I want Snowden to be home free but right now I think he's in a precarious situation.
If the options are "pardon" and "not pardon", "not pardon" just means he stays in that exact same precarious situation. At least a pardon stands to change it, with the added benefit of being morally correct.
Even if the change is that he gets sent to a Siberian prison and/or executed? As long as the war in Ukraine is ongoing, I sincerely doubt he has any chance of getting out of Russia.
He's not doing much inside Russia one way or another. At least a pardon gives him a way out. And if he gets sent to a gulag, that's not on whoever pardoned him. That's on whoever sent him to the gulag.
But he'd still be in a gulag, I think that part is more important than a clean conscience.
Assange is not an American citizen.
These days it's a public issue in Australia that their ally the US is doing this instead of handing him to them. It makes their politicians look weak.
So there's political pressure on Biden from Australia on this.
He was literally extradited to the US? Of course he can be pardoned, the US is the country hunting him
I wonder how other government bodies would take it