WASHINGTON — The White House denied Tuesday that it was involved in the feds’ plea deal allowing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to go to Australia — despite President Biden previously saying he was “considering” it.
Assange, 52, is en route to the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory, to plead guilty to conspiring to obtain and disseminate national defense information — ending his 12-year legal saga that included seven years in Ecuador’s cramped London embassy and five years in prison fighting extradition to the US.
He is then set to head to his native Australia.
“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice, and there was no White House involvement in the plea deal decision,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.
A source close to Assange, who is expected to receive a sentence of time served, said they were unaware of what if any role Biden may have played in the final resolution of the case.
Presidents do sometimes have a role in criminal cases that are significant for international relations, including by approving grants of clemency to foreigners held in US prisons as part of prisoner swaps.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions about Biden’s possible role in the Assange deal.
Assange and US officials reached the deal just weeks after Biden, 81, openly expressing interest in resolving the matter.
“Do you have a response to Australia’s request that you end Julian Assange’s prosecution?” a reporter for The Post asked Biden on April 10 as he walked under the outdoor West Wing Colonnade along the Rose Garden with visiting Japanese Prime Minster Fumio Kishida.
“We’re considering it,” Biden replied in a remark widely covered by news outlets in the US, UK and Australia.
Biden expressed openness to a deal after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a February speech to his country’s parliament that “enough is enough” and “this thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely.”
The Australian House of Representatives voted 86-42 to urge the US and the UK to let Assange return home.
Albanese said he would raise the matter with Biden during an October state visit, but the issue did not come up during public events.
Biden has throughout his presidency insisted that he doesn’t intervene in Justice Department decisions, including the high-profile investigations and prosecutions, respectively, involving himself and former President Donald Trump. Republicans including Trump claim that some recent decisions show a political slant in favor of Biden’s Democratic Party.
In Assange’s case, centrists from both political parties generally favored his prosecution, while a coalition of libertarians, leftists and staunch conservatives argued for his freedom.
Assange’s allies and freedom-of-the-ress organizations argued that the case against him threatened to effectively criminalize journalism. The primary-source publisher’s crime involved allegedly encouraging his source, Chelsea Manning, then a junior US Army intelligence analyst, to leak troves of data on American diplomatic and military operations in 2010.
WikiLeaks published catalogues of files from the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — embarrassing the then-Obama administration and infuriating national defense hawks, who argued that the publication recklessly endangered US sources of information in active war zones.
The outlet later published internal campaign communications damaging Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Manning received a 35-year prison sentence in 2013 for leaking documents to Assange, but her penalty was commuted by then-President Barack Obama in 2017.
Assange received asylum in 2012 from Ecuador by claiming two Swedish sexual misconduct allegations against him were a ruse to get him sent to the US. He eventually ran out the statute of limitations on those allegations but was indicted in the US in 2019 when Ecuador withdrew its asylum.