Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. today released a video and launched a petition demanding the immediate release and pardon of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
On Tuesday, London judges will decide whether Assange has exhausted all his appeals in the British courts and will be extradited to the U.S., where he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Assange, a newspaper publisher, has spent 13 years behind bars for revealing crimes committed by our government. From torture at Guantanamo Bay to anti-democratic actions taken by the DNC to civilian casualties inflicted by the U.S. military in the War On Terror, time and again, Assange has shed daylight on America’s moral corruption.
The New York Times, four leading European news organizations, and many other media outlets (including NJTODAY) have called on the Justice Department to drop criminal charges against Assange, warning that the case could criminalize U.S. journalists’ work exposing government secrets and potential wrongdoing.
Editors and publishers of the five media organizations that called for his release – The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Der Spiegel and The New York Times – first collaborated with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish explosive stories based on confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department.
The cables showed that as U.S. ambassador to Germany, New Jersey Governor Philip Murphy insulted German Chancellor Angela Merkel and members of her government, leading to his dismissal from the job he ‘bought’ by serving as finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee in the years following his retirement from Goldman Sachs with tens of millions in profit that coincided with the repeal of Glass–Steagall.
Murphy rejected claims that the diplomatic fallout surrounding the embarrassing revelations of his critical remarks about German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who Murphy called “short on substance” and “a wild card,” and others in Merkel’s government, resulted in his firing.
“Attacking the messenger is never good policy,” Kennedy said. “The government’s war against whistleblowers has turned heroes into criminals. Only if we stand together can we protect free speech, which is why I am encouraging every American to sign our petition to demand the immediate pardon and release of Julian Assange from incarceration.”
Kennedy has promised that if President Biden does not heed this call, then on “my first day in office, I will pardon Julian Assange and investigate the corruption and crimes he exposed.”
Kennedy has also said that he “will issue an executive order to end all attempts by federal agents and federal agencies to censor the political speech of Americans.”
Assange, the publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks, is now in jail facing extradition to the United States, where he could be sent to prison for life.
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said Assange had been arbitrarily detained by Sweden and the United Kingdom since his arrest in London in December 2010.
After losing his appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court against extradition to Sweden, where a judicial investigation was initiated against him, Assange was detained in prison and then under house arrest, he took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012.
He’s been called a heroic whistleblower who stood up for democracy against an increasingly powerful surveillance state by supporters and a
Assange’s fight to avoid facing spying charges in the United States may be nearing an end following a protracted legal saga in the U.K. that included seven years of self-exile inside a foreign embassy and five years in prison.
Assange faces what could be his final court hearing in London starting Tuesday as he tries to stop his extradition to the U.S.
The High Court has scheduled two days of arguments over whether Assange can ask an appeals court to block his transfer or whether he should be sent across the Atlantic.
Assange, 52, an Australian computer expert, has been indicted in the U.S. on 18 charges over Wikileaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010.
Prosecutors say he conspired with U.S. army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He faces 17 counts of espionage and one charge of computer misuse. If convicted, his lawyers say he could receive a prison term of up to 175 years, though American authorities have said any sentence is likely to be much lower.
Assange and his supporters argue he acted as a journalist to expose U.S. military wrongdoing and is protected under press freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Among the files published by WikiLeaks was video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
“Julian has been indicted for receiving, possessing and communicating information to the public of evidence of war crimes committed by the U.S. government,” said his wife, Stella Assange. “Reporting a crime is never a crime.”
Kennedy’s petition states that “When whistleblowers like Daniel Elsberg, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange revealed government corruption–they weren’t betraying America–they were returning America to its democratic and humanitarian ideals.”
“But instead of championing free speech and celebrating these truth-tellers, today our government actively persecutes journalists and whistleblowers–which is why I’m calling on every citizen to sign our petition calling for the immediate release of Julian Assange,” said Kennedy, the sin of slain 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, who was a US Senator from New York and previously served as attorney general in the administration of President John F. Kennedy.
“This isn’t the Soviet Union. The America I love doesn’t imprison dissidents. Our founders put free speech as the First Amendment because all our other rights depend on it. If you give a government license to silence its critics, it now has license for any atrocity,” said the independent contender, widely known as RFK Jr.
“Julian Assange, a newspaper publisher, has spent 13 years behind bars for revealing crimes committed by our government. From torture at Guantanamo Bay to anti-democratic actions taken by the DNC to civilian casualties inflicted by the US military in the War On Terror, time and again, Assange has shed daylight on America’s moral corruption. Since when did revealing crimes become a bigger crime than the crime itself? It’s time we stood up for Assange the way he stood up for us,” said RFK Jr.
“On my first day in office, I’ll pardon Julian Assange and investigate the corruption and crimes he exposed. I will also issue an executive order to end all attempts by federal agents and federal agencies to censor the political speech of Americans,” said RFK Jr.
“Attacking the messenger is never good policy. The government’s war against whistleblowers has turned national heroes into criminals, and, it has deterred others who might still come forward,” said RFK Jr. “Only if we stand together can we protect whistleblowers, which is why I am encouraging every American–regardless of your political party–to sign our petition to demand the immediate pardon and release of Julian Assange from incarceration.”
A federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment on June 24, 2020, charging Assange with offenses that relate to his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.
The new indictment did not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019, however, it broadened the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was charged.
According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks.
The government claims that in 2012, Assange communicated directly with a leader of LulzSec, who by then was cooperating with the FBI, and provided a list of targets from which the hacking group could seek email, documents, databases and PDFs.
In another communication, Assange told the LulzSec leader that the most impactful release of hacked materials would be from the CIA, NSA, or the New York Times.
WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an “Anonymous” and LulzSec-affiliated hacker, who allegedly claims ‘Assange indirectly’ asked him to spam that victim company again.
Former CIA coder Josh Schulte was sentenced to 40 years in prison for a leak of top secret CIA cyberintelligence contained in WikiLeaks ‘Vault 7’ breach that jeopardized U.S. national security and directly placed the spy agency’s personnel, programs and assets at risk.
Comparing the WikiLeaks “Vault 7” leak of top secret Central Intelligence Agency cyber-espionage tools to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” U.S District Judge Jesse Furman said he was “blown away by Mr. Schulte’s complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”
“The impact on our nation’s intelligence operations was enormous and we will likely never know the extent of the damage caused, but no doubt it was massive and real,” Furman said before imposing the 480-month sentence.
“It did have, as substantiated by the deputy director’s unclassified letter and even more substantiated by a confidential letter, an immediate and catastrophic effect on the CIA, and caused untold damage to national security,” the Obama-appointed judge said after the two-hour sentencing hearing.
The broadened hacking conspiracy charges also allege that Assange conspired with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash to a classified U.S. Department of Defense computer.
An indictment contains allegations that a defendant has committed a crime. Assange is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 175 years in prison.