Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared that “the America I like doesn’t imprison dissidents”
US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to pardon “courageous truth-tellers” together with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who’s at the moment being held in a British excessive safety jail as he fights extradition to America.
The US “actively persecutes journalists and whistleblowers” as a substitute of championing free speech, Democratic contender Kennedy tweeted on Tuesday. “This isn’t the Soviet Union. The America I like doesn’t imprison dissidents.”
The Australian-born Assange is successfully going through a lifetime sentence for his position within the leaks by US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Assange was arrested in Britain in 2019 after Ecuador revoked his political asylum, permitting police to enter its embassy in London, the place he had been holed up for seven years.
Assange was then despatched to Belmarsh jail, a facility ordinarily used to accommodate among the most harmful criminals within the UK.
Kennedy, who’s searching for the Democratic Celebration’s nomination for the 2024 presidential election, mentioned he would pardon each Assange and Manning. The latter spent seven years in US custody after leaking troves of categorised supplies to WikiLeaks in 2010, however had her sentence commuted by then-President Barack Obama in 2017.
The US authorities has accused Assange of encouraging and facilitating Manning and is aiming to extradite him for trial. Assange’s defenders have argued that his trial would set a harmful precedent, and that his actions had been no completely different from different publishers of categorised paperwork who sought to guard their sources.
Kennedy named a lot of “different courageous truth-tellers” who deserve comparable exoneration, together with Edward Snowden, who now resides in Russia. As a substitute of prosecuting them, the presidential hopeful pledged he would “examine the corruption and crimes they uncovered.”
Kennedy is amongst three folks to have formally introduced their bids for the Democratic nomination. Whereas incumbent President Joe Biden is the frontrunner, Kennedy is polling at 19%, with writer Marianne Williamson trailing at 9%, in keeping with a current Fox Information survey.
The Biden administration has mentioned it has no plans to drop the fees in opposition to Assange, regardless of calls by media freedom advocates. Critics have accused Washington of hypocrisy, citing its behavior of lecturing different nations over press freedoms.
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