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Ben & Jerry’s co-founder burns Bill of Rights outside DOJ building; gets arrested

July 7, 2023 | | Print Article

Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen seemed to be reliving his 60s hippie days as he stood outside the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and burned the Bill of Rights in protest over the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday, getting arrested while doing so.

The multi-millionaire ice cream mogul and radical leftist activist led a protest outside the DOJ over Assange’s detainment while railing about the freedom of the press.

“Little did we know that our greatest struggle would be when we tried to bring the First Amendment to the United States,” Cohen raged.

According to the former owner of Ben & Jerry’s, Assange is nothing more than a publisher and a purveyor of the truth despite his being a hacker and a leaker of classified material.

(Video Credit: News2Share)

“Anything he ever published was the truth,” Cohen proclaimed. “And, the truth revealed war crimes and government lies to the US Congress and to the people.”

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He also claimed that former President Obama did not prosecute Assange due to the freedom of the press and, of course, blamed former President Trump.

“Trump, in his war on journalism, shattered precedent and indicted a publisher for publishing the truth,” Cohen charged.

Then he went on to claim that President Biden has stated that “journalism is not a crime,” even though Biden in 2010 referred to Assange as a “hi-tech terrorist” according to The Guardian.

Assange, 52, is being held at Belmarsh Prison, which is a high-security facility in southeast London, as he awaits extradition to the United States where he is wanted for alleged violations of the Espionage Act. The WikiLeaks founder has been indicted on 18 criminal counts after he published thousands of pages of classified documents related to the Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay between 2010 and 2011. If he is convicted, he could get up to 175 years in prison.

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“It’s outrageous. Julian Assange is nonviolent. He is presumed innocent. And yet somehow or other, he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years. That is torture,” Cohen declared. “He revealed the truth, and for that, he is suffering and we need to do whatever we can to help him.”

“Right now, unless things change, and unless we change them, freedom of the press is going up in smoke,” Cohen asserted as he set fire to a replica of the Bill of Rights inscribed with the words “Freedom of the Press.”

“I’m gonna light this Bill of Rights in four places,” he announced. “One for each year that Assange has been held in solitary confinement.”

“There’s no democracy without freedom of the press because the press is the only thing that can hold government accountable,” Cohen remarked. “And there’s no freedom of the press as long as Assange is being prosecuted.”

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Cohen and Marxist CODEPINK co-founder Jodie Evans were arrested for blocking the entrance to the DOJ building as they sat in front of the pathway for almost an hour in the pouring rain, according to the New York Post.

“If you’re trying to [fight] an issue of injustice, you can scream and yell, you can write but the ultimate thing you can do is get arrested for it — to disobey the unjust law,” Cohen told a reporter. “So that’s what I’m doing and I feel good about it.”

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