President Biden Is Trampling the Bill of Rights by Prosecuting Julian Assange | Opinion

BEN COHEN , CO-FOUNDER, BEN & JERRY’S ICE CREAM

In April, President Joe Biden stood before thousands of reporters at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and said, "Journalism is not a crime."  But Julian Assange, award-winning journalist and the publisher of WikiLeaks, has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for the last four years for revealing the truth.  The United Nations, religious leaders, and civil rights advocates all agree that solitary confinement for over two weeks is torture. Now the U.S. is trying to keep him in prison for the rest of his life.

The charges against Julian Assange trample the First Amendment, sending a chilling message to reporters and publishers around the world not to seek and publish the truths that governments hide.

When I met with Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, I was most impressed by his intelligence, his compassion, and his belief in the power of truth.  "If wars can be started by lies," he said, "peace can be started by truth."  Now, Assange is being prosecuted for the publication of the Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs, uncovering war crimes, torture, and civilian deaths perpetrated by the United States government in our name and with our money.  Assange's award-winning publications have been cited as a crucial factor in changing public perception of these wars, which have cost trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, and displaced 37 million people.

In other words, the truth matters.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution understood this. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that given the choice between "a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

The Obama-Biden administration defended freedom of the press. They declined to indict Assange because it would risk criminalizing routine journalistic activities that every mainstream media outlet engages in on a regular basis. They understood that prosecuting Julian Assange would destroy investigative journalism as we know it and strike at the core of the First Amendment.

But that changed in 2016. As part of a war on journalism, former President Donald Trump shattered precedent by indicting Assange for his role in revealing government misconduct to the world.  They filed 18 federal charges for newsgathering and publishing material leaked by an Army whistleblower.

The indictment relies on radical legal theories that threaten any reporter or journalist—not just U.S. citizens, but citizens of any country—who publish information that the U.S. government doesn't like.

Biden's Justice Department talks the talk on press freedom, but has failed to remedy the injustice of the Assange indictment and the degradation of press freedom.  Leading press freedom and human rights groups such as the ACLU and Amnesty International have urged Biden to drop the charges.  World leaders including the prime minister of Australia, the president of Mexico, and members of the U.S. Congress have pleaded with Biden to respect the freedom of the press.  And publishers such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País have warned President Biden that "the indictment of Julian Assange "sets a dangerous precedent" that could chill reporting about matters of national security."

If we want to preserve our democracy, we have to defend the freedom of the press. To quote the slogan of The Washington Post that the paper adopted in 2017: "Democracy Dies In Darkness." We must defend the rights of journalists and publishers. President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland must stop their prosecution of Assange.

* from the Opinion page of Newsweek magazine / July 19, 2023

* Ben Cohen is co-founder of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.