Assange Walks Free, But Press Freedoms Are Still In Peril
from the journalism-is-not-espionage dept
The Julian Assange saga has finally reached its absurd conclusion with a plea deal. But while Assange may be heading home to Australia, the implications for press freedom remain as dire as ever. The U.S. government has successfully criminalized a core function of journalism – working with sources to obtain and publish information in the public interest. And they’ve opened the door for future administrations to do the same, all while avoiding the pesky need for an actual court ruling.
I don’t agree with Julian Assange on much. And going back many years, we’ve noted how he’s a problematic character in many, many ways. But just being a problematic person does not mean that we throw basic rights out the window. We warned all the way back to 2010 that the US should not try to twist laws to charge him for doing things that basically any investigative journalist does on a regular basis.
The Obama administration kept looking for ways to charge him, but held back. Many people pointed out that going after him legally would set a terrible precedent regarding press and internet freedom. Eventually, after nearly a decade of investigation, the Trump administration finally had him arrested in 2019. He had already been in the Ecuadorian embassy for years, and they agreed to hand him over. The past five years have been a grueling fight over potential extradition to the US.
However, as we noted, no matter what you think of Assange, the indictment criminalizes things that journalists do all the time. If Assange’s actions with WikiLeaks violated the Espionage Act, then many, many people (not just journalists!) likely violated the Espionage Act as well. Calls for the Biden administration to drop the case fell on deaf ears. Two years ago, a UK judge approved the extradition, though the fight continued.
However, on Monday, a filing in the… um… US federal district court in the Northern Mariana Islands (?!?), revealed that a plea deal had been reached. Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single count: “conspiring with Chelsea Manning to commit the following offenses against the United States”:
To receive and obtain documents, writings, and notes connected with the national defense, including such materials classified up to the SECRET level, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense, and knowing and with reason to believe at the time such materials were received and obtained, they had been and would be taken, obtained, and disposed of by a person contrary to the provisions of Chapter 37 of Title 18 of the United States Code, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 793(c);
b. To willfully communicate documents relating to the national defense, including documents classified up to the SECRET level, from persons having lawful possession of or access to such documents, to persons not entitled to receive them, in violation of Title 18, United States Code. Section 793(d); and
c. To willfully communicate documents relating to the national defense from persons in unauthorized possession of such documents to persons not entitled to receive them, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 793(e).
Again, investigative reporters do all these things in cultivating sources, talking to whistleblowers, and collecting documentation for reporting. The idea that this violates the law is crazy.
But the details of the deal are that by pleading guilty, Assange gets no sentence. He’s already been couped up for years, first in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK, then in a UK prison, and now he is being released and will apparently head home to Australia.
The deal obviously makes sense for Assange, in that he is freed and gets to go home after all these years. It makes sense for the US government that hasn’t seemed all that into keeping up the charade for an actual trial. So it’s good that it’s over.
But still, the whole thing remains ridiculous. Yes, Assange is problematic in many ways. Some of the accusations against him have been troubling. Wikileaks was a mess for years, and certainly had a history of selective leaking to help some entities while harming others. And for all of Assange’s talk of openness and transparency, it was pretty much all bullshit, as shown by the time he tried to threaten and silence people making a documentary about Wikileaks.
Even so, charging him with very serious crimes for merely doing the same thing journalists do is an affront to press freedom. As the Freedom of the Press Foundation rightly points out, it’s good that the case is over, but it’s ridiculous that he had to plead guilty to any of this:
It’s good news that the DOJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day.
The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic. The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit. And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.
Filed Under: chelsea manning, doj, espionage act, investigative reporting, julian assange, press freedom
Companies: wikileaks
Comments on “Assange Walks Free, But Press Freedoms Are Still In Peril”
Makes Sense
The Northern Mariana Islands are north of Australia. He will likely make a quick stop in court there tomorrow, officially agree to the plea deal, sign the paperwork, and then continue the rest of the way back to Australia.
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Hopefully Assange will be taken into custody on Saipan and condemned to a SuperMax forever.
He is a rapist. A criminal hacker. A tool of the Russians. And an enemy of the American People.
Re:
What an interesting statement! Could you provide facts to back each of those points up?
Well, I might concede that he’s been at least a Useful Idiot to the russians.
However, you’ve a fair hill to climb to believably label him “enemy of the American People”.
Re: Re:
Just flag and ignore, it’s just one of TD’s resident trolls that always espouses extreme views to rile people up.
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Re: Re:
He aided our fascist adversaries, both foreign and domestic.
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Well, it that’s your issue, what’s the problem? After all, that simply puts Assange in good company with the Republican Party, the previous American President, and the biggest television broadcaster in America.
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I disagree that he’s a useful idiot: he’s not stupid and he’s not naive. He knows exactly what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, and who he’s working for. He’s a willing asset of Russian intelligence and has been for some time…
…which is why Wikileaks dramatically shifted course. Have you noticed? Despite the smoking guns everywhere, they’ve published nothing very damaging about Trump. We all know Trump is a serial rapist, a fraud, a liar, a con man, a pedophile, and that he’s up to his eyeballs in every kind of dirty deal possible…so where’s the expose’ from Wikileaks?
Hasn’t happened. Doubt it will. Trump is Putin’s bitch, so Wikileaks won’t go after him. So much for transparency, fairness, justice, democracy — Wikileaks is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the FSB, and Assange is Putin’s property. I won’t be surprised at all if he falls out a fourth-story window sometime soon — no loose ends, you see.
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Did he ever actually do any hacking himself though? As far as I’m aware, he cajoled other people into doing the hacking.
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Any evidence for either of those?
Maybe. It’s certainly the best claim of the four you made. However, that in itself isn’t a crime.
I’m not entirely convinced that he is, but even so, given that he’s Australian and doesn’t set foot in America, unless he does something violent about it or personally hacks America, how is that illegal?
Re:
Funny how Swedish prosecutors eventually dropped the case, then. As for the rest of your allegations, you are going to have to provide some kind of evidence or risk Assange suing you for libel.
Two problems
I have two problems with your argument.
Firstly, where does this leave the boundary between journalism and espionage? If the answer is the first releases the information to the whole world, but the second only releases to another state, then clearly the information being imparted in both cases has different ethical values. The damage done to the NSA by Edward Snowden’s public release is exactly the same as if he had just handed it straight to the Russians, or the North Koreans. Do you value your country’s security so little that you can justify the one while also accepting that it leads to the same outcome as the other?
My second problem is that you seem to treat all journalism as being equally worhy of some special protection. You will be aware that we in the UK have had over a decade of mass criminality perpetrated by so-called journalists working for some of our largest circualtion dialy newspaper, including burglary, phone hacking and bugging, just to get a few salacious stories about some celebrities. Does that meet your high ethical standards of investigative journalism and if it does, do you therefore condone such behaviour when the motivation is just to sell a few more copies?
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Re:
Well said! These same ev!l global!st journalist/blogger cucks who don’t believe countries should be able to protect their national security also don’t believe they should be able to protect their borders from mass illegal immigration.
Re: Blaming the messenger
So, you believe that the NSA was right to do the various contra-legal things that it did? And that the US public was wrong to want to hold it to account?
And the various documents Snowden released, but which have NOT been published, what about those? Still believe journalism has no ethics?
Do you value your country’s security so little that you are willing to allow the government to do anything that it feels like, laws or no laws? Are you unwilling to accept that the damage caused by Snowden’s leaks stems directly from the illegality of the NSA’s behavior, and the failure of the NSA to keep itself in line?
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Yes, releasing it to the world is a key part of it. Otherwise, we leave it up to a situation where governments (often embarrassed by whistleblowers) get to determine which whistleblowing is legit and which is not.
That’s never going to end well for investigative journalism.
And the government still, to this day, has failed to show of a single bit of “damage” done by Snowden, beyond the fact that surveillance programs they used that violated everyone’s rights had to be changed slightly.
So, yes, part of investigative journalism is revealing when your government is abusing its powers. That’s how it works.
Again, I disagree with Assange, and think that he has terrible judgment, and a horrible understanding of reality. But, as soon as you raise a question of “worthy” you are asking governments to decide who is and who is not a journalist. Again, that never ends well for a free press. The job of journalists is often to embarrass the government by calling out where they have failed.
That same government should not have the ability to jail them for it.
Burglary and hacking are crimes. Treat them as such. But do not equate the process of publishing whatever has been revealed as the same thing as the hacking and burglary.
It’s a pretty clear distinction: hacking/burglary/etc are clear crimes. They should be treated as such. Publishing what came out of such things is not a crime.
Re: Re:
Also, without releasing it, people won’t believe it. Look up the history of ECHELON before Snowden. Its existence was reported in 1972, then 1988, then 1996 and 1999 and 2000, then in 2001 the E.U. investigated it… And despite all that, until the Snowden documents came out in 2015, it somehow remained in “tinfoil hat” territory to raise any concern about it.
Hacking is not a crime. Like locksmithing knowledge, it can be used for crime, or for legitimate things.
Re:
The damage done to Bob’s body when I push him out of the path of an oncoming truck is exactly the same as if I had just shoved him down the stairs outside his apartment. Do you value Bob’s health so little that you can justify the one while accepting that it leads to the same outcome as the other? If not, holy shit what is wrong with you?
Re:
If you have to ask where the boundary is you don’t understand intent.
No, it isn’t which begs the question: Do you understand why?
Do you value your country’s security so much you are willing to eschew all morals and ethics and say nothing when it break its own laws and perform extra-judicial killings and other reprehensible acts?
All journalism are worthy of the same protections, but not all acts made by journalists are worthy of protection and I think you are conflating the two.
We are all aware of Murdoch’s rags and their total lack of ethics.
If someone thinks you are an idiot, does that also imply that everyone from the UK are idiots? Because that’s the type of argument you just made and it’s a logical fallacy. The argument also implies that no investigative journalism is ethical.
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Re: Re:
Good thing Assange isn’t a journalist.
He’s a hacker. A rapist. A Russian intelligence asset. And an enemy of America.
Re: Re: Re:
He sure wins a lot of journalism awards for not being a journalist: https://somersetbean.com/assange-wikileaks-awards-oct2022-A3-PRINT.pdf
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Re: Re: Re:2
Wow, so legit. A bunch of enemies of the people giving one another awards. Stunning and brave.
Re: Re: Re:
The funny thing is, Assange’s the same “Russian” “asset” who many attribute the Trump presidency to. Which you chucklenuts support with all the blind faith of a Catholic apologist.
Let that sink in. Or don’t, the cognitive dissonance might blow the fuse in your one brain cell.
Re: Re: Re:
It’s funny how you say all those things without having a clue about what really happened or what Assange did. You are just repeating a lot of shit you read on the internet without even giving a thought about if it is true or not.
Take for example the “convenient” accusation of him being a Russian intelligence asset, you have to be particularly stupid to actually believe that’s true because if it was, why the fuck did he seek asylum at an Ecuadorian Embassy instead of going to the Russian Embassy?
And him being a rapist? He’s not, take Sweden’s laws about what constitutes rape, a feminist who felt cheated (and who had blogged about how to falsely accuse men of rape) and a prosecutor who had an axe to grind, what do you get?
And being an enemy of America? Which America is that? South America? Central America? North America? Kind of useless to have a continent as an enemy, isn’t it? Or are you talking about the America who covers up the killing of civilians and how they spy on everyone, including their own citizens.
How about you get onto the stupid train again and leave.
Re: Re: Re:2
This is something that loudmouths on both sides of the political spectrum have spouted. Rightists believe it because it supports their nationalistic rants. Leftists believe it because they genuinely believe that Assange and incels tick enough boxes together that led to the increase in far right ideology and the Trump presidency.
There’s nothing people won’t believe so long as it can be framed as something that supports their worldview, even if it’s something that falls apart with a modicum of scrutiny.
Re:
Espionage would be gathering classified information through unauthorized access (theft, hacking, deception, etc.) for the purpose that it be disseminated, as well as giving that information specifically to enemies (rather than the public at large). Unauthorized dissemination of classified information is not, in itself, espionage unless it is directed by a foreign power, the only intended recipient(s) is/are a foreign power(s), or you had any involvement in getting the classified info from the government in the first place.
Basically, the initial acquisition is espionage, but dissemination isn’t outside of certain circumstances.
Sure. One is to provide aid to a foreign power, the other is to inform the public at large about something the government is doing that they think is wrong or that the public has the right to know.
I’m still not convinced that there was any actual damage done in the first place.
But I will say that handing it straight to the Russians or the North Koreans would likely mean the U.S. government would be left unaware of the fact that the information had fallen into their hands (or at least that is the intent), meaning more information would likely get into enemy hands and more damage would be done before the government could take any actions on it.
I don’t think it does lead to the exact same outcome, but an important difference is that of intent. One is intending to aid the enemy, while the other is intended to expose wrongdoing.
The act of journalism is worthy of protection, yes. The government shouldn’t decide which journalism is worthy and which isn’t.
Burglary, phone hacking, and bugging are crimes and are not acts of journalism. Currently, there is no evidence that Assange personally hacked anyone to get the information he leaked, nor was that what he pled guilty to doing. It’s also not clear that he told Manning to do so. As such, you’re making a false equivalence here.
Ethics isn’t even the issue here; indeed, the government shouldn’t be in the business of enforcing ethical standards of journalism.
The issue in this case is whether or not it’s journalism at all. The crimes you mentioned were not journalism just because the goal was to write an article; it’s about what the actions themselves were. Obtaining documents from a third party is journalism no matter how that third party acquired it so long as they weren’t being directed to acquire it by the journalist in question. Breaking into someone’s home, taking someone’s property without their permission, and hacking someone are not part of journalism.
Re: Re: 'Of course the public is the enemy, that's why we keep everything from them unless sued!'
Espionage would be gathering classified information through unauthorized access (theft, hacking, deception, etc.) for the purpose that it be disseminated, as well as giving that information specifically to enemies (rather than the public at large).
If the government involved considers the public to be the/a enemy then you can run into a situation where handing it to the public is ‘giving information specifically to enemies’ by the government’s definitions.
Re:
Personal Opinion: I do, but that’s only because my country’s leaders have deemed it worthy to devalue my country’s sovereignty to the point of selling it to China.
Also, my country thinks it should be able to decide what is considered journalism, and sadly, it’s anything that isn’t trying to condemn the actions of the state and its “captured” organs.
Yes, we do know about Rupert Murdoch’s dirty deeds and how he was finally punished for them.
I don’t consider anything Murdoch does as journalism. He should be shot for his crimes against humanity, and the guilty verdict was the very, very least he deserved.
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Except the standard here is mens rea as well as actus reus rather than being a strict liability offense.
Kim DotCom
And on with the history lesson.
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Re:
Good ol’ Kimble, another degen3rate (with no self-discipline, hence how disgustingly fat he got). Hope he’s finally extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for his crimes.
Re: Re:
What crimes do you think he committed?
Can someone explain how the US can declare the entire planet their jurisdiction?
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A heavy dose of wishful thinking mixed with delusional American exceptionalism.
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In the US’s defense, actions directed toward a country are within that country’s jurisdiction even if the person doing them was not within the country at that time.
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That’s fucking ridiculous. Would you say the same about North Korea or Iran if they did the same thing?
The US is an out of control rogue state.
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If someone hacked Iran, I think it’s perfectly fair game for Iran to prosecute them if they go to Iran or a place that extradites to Iran.
Re: Re: Re:2
Nonsensical gibberish.
Assange is a Putin Asset
Having collaborated with Moscow sourced hackers, and having collaborated with Moscow’s propaganda arm, Assange is a Putin-loving terrorist. The fact so many became enamored by his grift, believed he was doing good things to help humanity against the evil American empire, is ridiculous. Anyone who supports Assange is either blind to reality, or refuses to grasp the threat he posed to humanity itself.
Re:
What a laughable mess of CNN guided delusion. Terrorism isn’t when leaks and information is not a threat to humanity. After nearly a decade since the 2016 election, there hasn’t been a single shred of evidence for Assange working with Russians, nor any of substantial Russian interference in the election, outside of embarrassingly bad conspiracy theories.
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Re: Re:
Why are you defending a rapist and Russian intelligence asset like Assange? Fellow traveler? Just curious.
Re: Re: Re:
Why are you a moron that can’t understand logic?
Re: Re: Re:
Is anyone defending Assange personally? Most people seem to think he is problematic. But any rapist takes thousands of other actions daily – are all of those actions rape?
If he was a Putin asset, the US government would have made a lot of noise about it
But there’s this: If an enemy, by providing you the truth, can sow discord, the enemy is the least of your problems.
Assange is a bag of dicks. He did nothing to damage US, and his being charged at all is a farce. The US, as we see daily, and as shown in endless leaks and history, is way worse than a bag of dicks.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Fuck youuuu!! The USA is the greatest country in the world!
If you’re a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident, I hope you’re deported or killed in one of the many violent crime waves plaguing Democrat-run cities.
If you’re not American, I hope we (USA!) fuck up your country by either bombing or sanctioning it (especially if you’re Canadian).
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Just because you thought they were embarrassingly bad doesn’t mean they weren’t believed by enough gullible fools to have a meaningful impact on the election results. Misinfo campaigns don’t need to convince everyone.
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Sure, but you don’t have to think Assange is a good person to think this prosecution has concerning implications for press freedoms.
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No one here is saying he’s a good person or has good intentions. That doesn’t mean that the prosecution efforts against him in America haven’t been troubling.
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Nobody is going to take you seriously when you throw around ridiculous rhetoric like “terrorist” and “threat to humanity”. Try making a rational argument for throwing journalists in jail instead.
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Re: Re:
Journalists are enemies of the People who relentlessly spread disinformation and pro-transgender propaganda. Ergo, they should be jailed (or sent to re-education or labor camps).
Re: Re:
I’ll agree that “terrorist” is probably a bit much, but given his water-carrying for Putin and Trump he’s at least a part of a threat to humanity.
Can someone fill me in on what exactly Assange did that makes him “problematic”?
I’ve seen a lot of accusations against him that turned out to be hoaxes. Examples I’m aware of:
Debunked: Allegations of smearing feces on the embassy wall (fabricated)
Debunked: Accusations that he committed sexual assault (accuser recanted and admitted that she was pressured into making the allegations by the US government)
Debunked: Accusations that Assange exposed sources and put people’s lives in danger (no one was able to substantiate those arguments).
I looked into the selective leaking of material (as that was news to me), but all I got was a result of someone attempting to “leak” public materials of Russian oligarchs being rejected for being, well, public material. Maybe Assange needed to have a separate service set up for publicly available data dumps and it wasn’t exactly the smartest idea to not do something like that?
The only thing I can think of is leaking Democrat material at a politically inconvenient moment. As far as I’m aware of, that turned out to be a nothingburger and Republican’s tried to insert completely fabricated conspiracy theories into it (ala “Pizzagate”). As far as I’m concerned, it’s an incredible stretch to sit there and say the whole situation is Assange’s fault. Of all the parties at fault for anything bad coming out of that, Assange is pretty much at the bottom of the list of entities to blame for that one. If the Democrats did something untoward, that’s the Democrats fault. If the Republicans invented conspiracy theories, then that’s the Republican’s fault.
So, after all of that, I’m not really sure what makes Assange such a bad person. All I see are “he made the political party I support look bad” which… isn’t a crime last I checked. Is there something I’m missing here?
Also, I’m totally on board with the fact that Assange shouldn’t be criminalized for a common journalistic activity. That has always been insane to me.
Re:
I tried looking into it myself, and the takeaway I got was “Assange literally led to Trump winning the US presidency, and having any neutral-positive opinion on Assange makes you a homophobe”.
Re: Re:
Glad I’m not the only one looking sideways at all of this in confusion. Honestly, there’s a MUCH stronger case to be made that Cambridge Analytica helped Trump win the presidency (and helped Brexit win no less). Assange may have given some conspiracy theorist nuts something to talk about with the Podesta emails, but Cambridge Analyitca helped micro target specific groups of people to convince them of various things in an effort to either get them to vote Republican or get people who intend on voting Democrats to stay home. The action was WAY more direct in that case.
Re: Re: Re:
Part of the argument seems to be this idea that Assange appealed to the disgruntled, angry, heteronormative, white male majority in the US, in the same way that Trump did. Trump, sure, but Assange? That’s not even going into the black and gay and other minorities who Reuters et al have interviewed who are still adamant about voting Trump, either because they were somehow convinced in 2016 that Trump was looking out for their interests, or just to spite Biden because he wasn’t Flying Spaghetti Monster’s gift to mankind.
I don’t know. Maybe the lesson to learn here is that you can get a lot of mileage out of calling someone else a homophobe.
Re: Re: Re:2
You think I don’t see what you’re trying to do, Hyman? You’re trying to make us look dumb and intolerant. Well it won’t work. Your kind might have tried to export your brand of hate here and call it a church, but not anymore. And I have grown fucking sick and tired of negotiating with TERRORISTS like you.
Re: Re: Re:3
I busted your mom’s hymen.
Re: Re: Re:3
Oh for fuck’s sake, not you again.
Not everyone who swears penance for crimes against men kissing is out to get you, my guy. If you want to turn every platform into a soapbox pride apologism, no one’s stopping you. Just don’t expect everyone to kiss the ground where you walked past.
Re:
His ridiculous, anti-American bias that blinds him to reality? His turning of Wikileaks into an anti-American outlet?
Selective editing of videos and willingness to either abet criminal acts or collaborate with enemies of the US to get what he wants?
Yes, you can say that him being hired by Russia Today has little bearing on this. But also consider who Russia Today allows on the network, and you’ll start to see why no one likes him.
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This doesn’t seem to have ever happened. I can’t find any news story that she ever recanted her accusation. It’s not mentioned on Wikipedia, and not even debated on the “talk page” for the Wikipedia article about it.
Also, yesterday she tweeted: “I have had zero power here but I’m happy that he is out and hope he can fight for transparency and human rights, without molesting women.” (translation from Reuters).
Re: Re:
Another of her tweets from yesterday (machine translation):
“Many have therefore assumed that I was in some way responsible for the locking up of the man, I have not done that, and my case has always had zero relevance to the US legal process & demands for extradition.”
Re:
You’d be right. The problem there is that it resulted in the Trump Presidency, and that’s enough to sour sentiments on Assange for a lot of people. You’ll see them cite a general lack of Wikileaks data drops on Republicans, and that’s enough to align Wikileaks/Assange with Russian disinformation campaigns.
Of course it’s debatable – nigh impossible to prove – how much effect this had on 2016’s elections. In my opinion the Dems all but handed Trump the Presidency through horrific, incompetent levels of mishandling and mismanagement. It doesn’t mean they were as bad as the Republicans who submitted one of the most bigoted, self-absorbed and corrupt candidates.
And yet, you still don’t see the same amount of vitriol given to Dems and Repubs as is given to Assange in these discussions. You cannot go into detail on the Assange case without every aspect being twisted into an unfavorable light. “He holed up in the embassy because he was guilty as sin.” Sure, you might think that “accuser recanted and admitted that she was pressured into making the allegations by the US government” means something, but that just brings up discussions on how rape victims are never believed and how prosecutions typically favor the perpetrators anyway. This is something that happens in all false rape accusation cases in general. Add the stakes involved with Assange, and the odds are conversations on the topic is general agreement that Assange hid away in the embassy waiting for the statute of limitations to tick down.
Unfortunately you and I may very well have to be the minority opinion in the room. Which these days, means we’re as bad as the people that the majority vilify.
Re: Re:
Adding to this, on the same page of Ars Technica comments discussing the whole affair:
“Also, though I can’t link to anything, it’s been brought up that Wikileaks also received dirt on Republicans but chose not to publish that. This is what people are going on about.”
“Before the sexual assault charges over stealthing, he was seeking residency in Sweden due to their strong press protections. But when the investigation over the kinds of sex crimes that are all too common from entitled men started, he fled over supposed concern of being extradited to the US. Where did he flee to? A country with a much closer relationship to the US!”
So we’ve got a lack of linking and a logical fallacy (why would Assange flee to a country with an even friendlier extradition policy?), but you’re not going to get anywhere bringing up these anomalies or contradictions.
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From the Washington Post, only minutes ago:
Absolutely disgusting betrayal of American diplomats, intelligence officers and servicemen by the corrupt Biden regime and their lackeys in the Northern Mariana Islands.
Assange never should have been allowed to walk free. Hopefully the next anti-American “journalist” who conspires to steal U.S. secrets will think twice before serving Russian intelligence!!
Assange belongs in a torture cage at Guantanamo
He works for Putin AND he’s a rapist. For both of those, he deserves to die screaming in agony.