Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the decade-long US push to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing a trove of American classified documents.
Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the decade-long US push to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing a trove of American classified documents.
If the options are “pardon” and “not pardon”, “not pardon” just means he stays in that exact same precarious situation. At least a pardon stands to change it, with the added benefit of being morally correct.
Even if the change is that he gets sent to a Siberian prison and/or executed? As long as the war in Ukraine is ongoing, I sincerely doubt he has any chance of getting out of Russia.
He’s not doing much inside Russia one way or another. At least a pardon gives him a way out. And if he gets sent to a gulag, that’s not on whoever pardoned him. That’s on whoever sent him to the gulag.
But he’d still be in a gulag, I think that part is more important than a clean conscience.