Alice Walker: Biden must end Trump’s war on the press. Drop the Julian Assange case

When President Joe Biden took office on the heels of a contentious election and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, many Americans expected a return to normalcy.

Gone were the embarrassing, unqualified Donald Trump sycophants and truth-evading gaslighters. Or so we were led to believe.

Almost midway through Biden’s first term, I am disappointed by his failure to rebuke one of the most shameful parts of Trump’s legacy: the war on journalism.

Do not be fooled by Biden’s persona. The White House’s more cordial relationship with the press conceals its continuation of the Trump administration’s attempt to criminalize newsgathering and publishing.

The Trump administration’s decision to prosecute WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange was the brainchild of authoritarian conservatives like Mike Pompeo and Jeff Sessions. They wore their disdain for press freedom proudly, declaring that Assange had no First Amendment rights and stepping up efforts to crack down on whistleblowers.

For his role in publishing the Chelsea Manning leaks, which were covered by major media outlets around the world, Assange was hit with 18 federal counts that carry a potential prison sentence of 175 years. Of those counts, 17 are for receiving and publishing information in violation of the Espionage Act. Such charges are unprecedented. “No journalist — self-described or otherwise — had ever been criminally charged for disclosing government secrets,” Deanna Paul noted in The Washington Post.

What did Assange do to provoke the Trump administration’s ire? In 2010 and 2011, he embarrassed the U.S. government by exposing truths about civilian casualties, war crimes and abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama-Biden administration was in power then, and set its sights on Assange. But officials had the wisdom and restraint to conclude that prosecuting Assange would create a dangerous precedent called “The New York Times problem.” Simply put, there is no way to prosecute Assange without criminalizing the same newsgathering and publishing practices used at The Times, The Kansas City Star and every other news outlet.

Surely, reasonable leaders such as Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland would not allow the prosecution — condemned by journalism and human rights groups around the world — to go forward. Right?

The Biden team inherited this debacle. Instead of abandoning Trump’s war on journalism, they have continued it. They have chosen the politics of “nothing will fundamentally change,” instead of correcting the injustices of a rogue administration.

President Biden and Attorney General Garland should do the right thing: Drop the Assange case and make it clear that reporting and publishing — even when it makes the government look bad — is vital to democratic life. We cannot lecture the rest of the world on freedom and human rights while trying to extradite someone for publishing inconvenient truths about us.

Assange is not even a U.S. citizen, nor is he accused of committing criminal acts while in the United States. He is accused of receiving truthful information from a source, and sharing that information with the public. How would Americans feel if U.S. journalists were detained in foreign countries, with Chinese or Russian authorities demanding their extradition for publishing so-called “government secrets”?

The press has the ability, and responsibility, to pressure the Biden administration. Assange has languished in a maximum security prison in London for more than three years, fighting extradition. The chilling effect on investigative reporters is already tragic. It would be unfathomable if Assange is put on trial.

How would newspaper editorial boards react if a CNN reporter were prosecuted for working with a source to expose corruption at the Pentagon? How would they have responded if President Richard Nixon had locked up Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for meeting Deep Throat in a parking garage? Why aren’t more editorial boards echoing The New York Times and condemning this case as an attack “at the heart of the First Amendment?”

We must all demand that Biden be more than a kinder, gentler Trump. A full-throated rejection of Trumpism means ending the war on journalism, recognizing that the Constitution protects those who reveal uncomfortable truths, and dropping the case against Julian Assange.

Alice Walker is an activist, novelist, and poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for The Color Purple.