Julian Assange Is No Hero

National Review Online

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

 

The Julian Assange saga ended this week in a federal court in Saipan, an American commonwealth in the Northern Mariana Islands. Assange pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy charge of obtaining and disclosing American national-defense information. Even to the end, Assange is dictating the terms: The plea deal drops all other Espionage Act charges; it includes a sentence of time already served, so he will be released; and the court proceeding took place in the Western Pacific, rather than in Virginia where he was initially indicted, to accommodate Assange’s desire not to set foot in the United States.

 

We are his enemy, after all.

 

Despite that, the Wikileaks founder became a cult hero for the radical Left and libertarians of an anarchist bent — and, disturbingly, for a vocal faction on the right as well. They portray him as a fearless “journalist” dedicated to exposing the seamy underbelly of American aggression and corruption. The truth is far from that. Assange and his operation are hostile actors who collaborate with clandestine agents, rogue regimes, and sundry hackers to damage the United States. They do not merely report classified information leaked by subversive agents and government officials; they aid and abet in its theft, and mass-publish it without redaction of sources situated in war zones and countries with repressive governments, heedless of the mortal peril this represents.

 

Cartoonish depictions of American national-defense operations may do for Assange and his acolytes in Europe and Hollywood. In the real world, to safeguard and advance freedom and security, a great nation that has taken on great responsibilities must be able to protect intelligence secrets and the sources who provide them — at great risk to their lives. And a serious nation deals firmly with enemies and traitors who undermine those efforts.

 

President Barack Obama, however, was utterly unserious in commuting to just seven years the well-deserved 35-year sentence of U.S. army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning — who became an icon of the Left upon identifying as a trans woman, “Chelsea,” who had raided our national intelligence files with Assange’s assistance.

 

With Manning’s assistance, Assange exposed the triggers for and limitations on American combat operations against Iran-backed terrorist insurgents in the Iraq War. Cui bono? The mullahs. Moreover, indictments against Assange and Manning establish that they jointly compromised approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq War–related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables.

 

Many of the documents were classified “secret” — meaning their disclosure could cause serious damage to United States national security. The charges describe how the willfully damaging leaks exposed to grave danger many Afghans, Iraqis, and Iranians, among others, who had provided our government with information about human-rights abuses, terrorist plots against American troops, and the inner workings of hostile regimes. In a 2010 interview, Assange conceded that this was . . . “regrettable.” The evidence indicates that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other American enemies viewed it as an intelligence banquet.

 

The curiosity is that the Justice Department charged Assange with only the Manning thefts and leaks from over a dozen years ago. Uncharged were offenses far more serious than the conduct that led to dozens of felony charges against Donald Trump under the same statute. Recall that for years we’d been tirelessly assured that Assange and Wikileaks had worked with Putin’s regime in the theft and 2016 publication of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails — the foundation of the “collusion” hoax, in which the Hillary Clinton campaign and the FBI (among other government actors) portrayed Trump, even after he took office as president, as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. Yet, although special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a number of Russians our government knew would never face trial, Assange was never charged. Such allegations would undoubtedly have helped the Justice Department convince the British government to extradite Assange . . . if, of course, prosecutors had been able to prove them.

 

Absent such charges, and with the Manning outrages discounted by Obama’s clemency and fading memories, the chance that Assange would be prosecuted became increasingly remote. He wore out his welcome after seven years holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London — mainly on the lam from a Swedish sexual-assault charge that was eventually dropped. He was then detained by the Brits in Belmarsh Prison for the past five years while his extradition was litigated. The matter became an increasing headache for the Biden administration, as Australian and European allies joined the international glitterati’s clamor for his release.

 

Hence, the plea bargain. From the courtroom in Saipan, Assange will arrive in Australia a free man. WikiLeaks hasn’t published defense secrets since 2021 as Assange and his allies worked on winning his release. They’ll surely be back in business soon enough.