At President Biden’s State of the Union address on Capitol Hill last week, Gabriel Shipton was spotted, who is fighting with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky for clemency for his brother, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
They hoped to take their fight directly to the president, who has so far not responded to pleas to address the Justice Department’s prosecution of Assange.
Assange has been held in a London prison since 2019 as he fights US extradition efforts. He previously spent seven years in exile at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
“He’s not doing well,” Shipton said in an interview with DailyMail.com after visiting his brother last month. ‘The process really exhausts him physically and mentally. So I was quite scared to leave the prison that day.”
The Australian resident faces 17 charges of receiving, possessing and communicating classified information to the public under the Espionage Act, and one charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion if extradited to the US.
He faces a maximum sentence of 175 years in a maximum security prison.
Massie, along with Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, wrote a letter to the Biden administration in October, imploring them to oppose the prosecution of Assange. They have not received a response.
At President Biden’s State of the Union address on Capitol Hill this week, Gabriel Shipton was spotted, who is fighting with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky for clemency for his brother Julian Assange
“He’s not doing well,” Shipton said in an interview with DailyMail.com after visiting his brother Assange, above, last month. ‘The process really exhausts him physically and mentally. So I was quite scared to leave the prison that day.”
Assange filed a final legal appeal against his extradition to the US on February 24.
“We’re just going to keep campaigning, we have a lot of friends here in Congress, and it’s very encouraging,” Shipton said.
‘He has not been charged with any crime and is not serving a sentence in Britain. He is being held there solely at the request of the US Department of Justice in connection with publishing truthful material. So that really highlights that and highlights the threat that it poses to the First Amendment and freedom of the press here in the US.”
Assange founded Wikileaks in 2006 and was instrumental in unveiling nearly half a million pages of mostly classified documents, together with US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
Assange’s family led the march for his freedom in London last month
Assange filed a final legal appeal against his extradition to the US on February 24
Photo of Belmarsh Prison where Julian Assange is being held
In 2010, the site published documents from a 2007 airstrike in Baghdad in which US military officers fatally shot eighteen civilians from a helicopter.
They published war documents in Afghanistan that painted a bleak picture of the war there, including more civilian deaths and Talliban attacks on U.S. troops than had been reported, and suggested that Iran was involved in the insurgency.
They also published the Iraq war documents, which showed that there were some 15,000 more civilian casualties than the government admitted.
Massie suspected that Assange’s case could become a focal point in the presidential election. “Whether we continue our 200-plus year tradition of supporting press freedom or not,” Massie told DailyMail.com.
“This is a very popular issue among Americans, which is to obtain clemency for Julian Assange. And while it’s not as important as immigration or the economy of the two Americans, I think most Americans are on our side. And it’s not just the right thing to do. It would be politically expedient if one of these presidential candidates were to adopt our position.”
He warned that they will have to draw votes from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as a third-party candidate and has pledged to grant Assange clemency.
Massie also noted that Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, recently said on Tim Pool’s podcast that he had changed his mind about forgiving Assange and Wikileaks co-founder Edward Snowden.
“Years ago, when it first happened, I would have said no,” Trump Jr. said. “Now I think, oh my God, he was doing this stuff. You have to release those guys 100 percent because they caught us doing things we said we wouldn’t do.”
“My worldview, the America I wanted to believe existed, doesn’t exist,” Trump Jr. continued.
Massie said, “Now RFK Jr. takes this issue to heart, the question here in the United States is whose RFK Jr. get more votes? Will he take more votes from the Democrats or will he take more votes from the Republicans and I think both Biden and Trump are in a dangerous situation if they don’t take a stand on this.”
“If any of them did that, I think they would immediately neutralize the third-party threat that could erode their own days,” he continued.