The Biden led-administration will continue to seek to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the UK to the US to face hacking conspiracy charges, the US Justice Department says.
Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said on Tuesday that the US government, led by President Joe Biden, will continue to challenge a ruling by a British judge last month that Mr. Assange should not be extradited to the US because of the risk he would commit suicide.
The debate in the US over possible moves to seek Mr. Assange’s extradition from Britain first arose nearly a decade ago when Barack Obama served as president and Mr. Biden as his vice president.
For eight years, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department opted not to seek the extradition of the Australian-born whistle-blower on the grounds that what he and WikiLeaks did was too similar to journalistic activities protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
In the January 4 ruling, the British judge, Vanessa Baraitser, said, “I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”
The judge then set Friday this week as a deadline for the US to appeal her ruling forbidding Mr. Assange’s extradition.
WikiLeaks drew fury from the US government after publishing thousands of pages of once-secret reports and documents generated by American military and intelligence agencies, including detailed descriptions of CIA hacking capabilities. WikiLeaks also published emails hacked from Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and a key adviser, which Clinton says was a factor in her election defeat to Republican Donald Trump.
On assuming office in 2017, Mr. Trump stepped up public criticism of the WikiLeaks founder. His administration subsequently filed a series of increasingly harsh criminal charges accusing Mr. Assange of participating in a hacking conspiracy.
But since Mr. Biden’s inauguration in January, supporters of the embattled Mr. Assange have been pressing his administration to drop charges against him during the Democrat president’s first 100 days in the White House.