Democrats ask Biden to withdraw the accusations against Julian Assange.

Several Democrats in the House have penned a letter calling for the immediate release of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, urging the Department of Justice to drop its charges and halt extradition proceedings aiming to bring him to the US to face prosecution under the World War I-era Espionage Act. The letter addressed Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday to mark the fourth anniversary since Assange’s 2019 arrest, saying the charges against him represent a serious threat to the free press. They cite warnings from a long line of human rights, civil liberties, and press freedoms groups, such as the ACLU, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Defending Rights and Dissent, and Human Rights Watch, which have argued Assange’s case poses “a grave and unprecedented threat to everyday, constitutionally protected journalistic activity.” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by the British authorities in 2019 after losing political asylum status at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Under then-President Donald Trump, the US Department of Justice unsealed a multi-count indictment against Assange on April 11, 2019, slapping him with 17 charges under the Espionage Act, which can potentially carry the death penalty. He has been held at the UK’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison in the years since, as Washington presses an extradition request to bring Assange to the US to face his charges.

Democratic lawmakers argued that Assange’s prosecution would “greatly [diminish] America’s credibility” as a defender of human rights and set a dangerous legal precedent. Assange’s charges stem from the 2010 publication of a massive trove of classified documents obtained by US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, including material suggesting US forces committed war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.