Julian Assange has walked out of a U.S. court in the Northern Mariana Islands a free man, putting an end to his dozen years of incarceration, first in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, hiding from justice, then in a British prison, awaiting an extradition to America that will never come. Assange is now headed home to Australia, his legal troubles ended.
For more than a decade, the Australian hacktivist, who’s either a “free speech champion” or a dangerous “information terrorist” depending on your viewpoint, has played a prominent role in American domestic politics. In 2016, his “privacy” organization WikiLeaks placed Democratic National Committee emails online, to the detriment of Hillary Clinton’s presidential run with their unflattering inside information. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian military intelligence hacked those DNC emails then employed WikiLeaks as a conduit to show them to the public.
That was merely one of many of Assange’s anti-American operations. WikiLeaks has compromised thousands of Pentagon and intelligence community secrets over the past 15 years, divulging mountains of classified information and costing lives as well as causing embarrassment for multiple U.S. government agencies. He has manipulated video and imagery of incidents to present them in ways that damage American interests. Nevertheless, he has become a hero to factions, both Left and Right, who welcome Assange’s harming of democracies — but never, oddly, dictatorships.
Assange’s fondness for Russia is pronounced. WikiLeaks has hurt Washington and our allies frequently, Moscow never. Assange even had his own show on RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin channel, and reliably dispensed pro-Russian talking points. Assange played a pivotal role in getting the U.S. intelligence defector Edward Snowden to Moscow in 2013 (where he remains). That was no accident. Western counterintelligence concluded a decade ago that WikiLeaks was acting as a cut-out for Russian spy agencies.
Mike Pompeo, who served as CIA director under President Donald Trump, stated the plain truth in 2017 when he lambasted Assange as “a narcissist who has created nothing of value,” adding that “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service… It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
It was Trump’s Justice Department that in 2019 unsealed an 18-count indictment against Assange on espionage charges, leading to his five years in London’s Belmarsh Prison. The Trump White House even briefly considered abducting Assange to face U.S. justice. Which brings us to the great irony of the rollercoaster Assange affair. Former President Barack Obama did nothing to stop WikiLeaks as it attacked the U.S. military and our 2016 election to the Kremlin’s benefit. Now President Joe Biden is freeing Assange, time served. It was Trump who pursued Assange and wanted him to face justice.
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How can this be? For years, we’ve been confidently and loudly told by Democrats, including the current White House occupant, that Trump is dangerously close to Moscow and seeks to help Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then why did Trump seek to punish Assange when Obama did not and why is Biden now rewarding him.?
In truth, the Democrats have cynically exploited real-life Russian intelligence operations to beat up on Republicans ever since 2016. Their concern is partisan politics, not counterintelligence and national security. Biden’s freeing of the Kremlin’s favorite “journalist,” amid applause in Moscow, gives the game away, at last. Exactly why the Biden administration is letting Assange off the hook after he hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016 and perpetrated plenty more damage to this country is a good question. Just don’t expect the legacy media to dig deeply into it. Their interest in Russian espionage and political warfare only extends to Republicans.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.