To his supporters, Assange was the world’s best-known champion of the democratizing potential of the internet, and has used his platform to expose the misdeeds of world powers. To his critics, including many in the Washington establishment, his organization’s release of troves of classified U.S. military and diplomatic documents between 2009 and 2011 represented a threat to vital U.S. interests and assets.
As Assange began his journey toward a life of freedom this week, he emerged into a changed world. The digital world where he gained global fame is no longer the domain of rebellious optimists but of immensely powerful tech oligarchs and the megacorporations they control. And WikiLeaks, once an organization almost universally admired by pro-democracy liberals, is now a sideshow in polarized geopolitics, its reputation tarnished by its apparent ties to the Kremlin.
Assange himself is a declining figure and clearly in poor health, having been held in British custody for more than five years since being forced out of his Ecuadorian office in London by the right-wing government in Quito, the Ecuadorian capital, in 2019. The Swedish investigation was dropped the same year, but Assange was arrested by London police on US charges relating to breaches of espionage laws for publishing military documents and diplomatic cables relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has been embroiled in a lengthy legal battle over extradition to the US.
Get caught up in
Stories to keep you up to date
Assange arrived early Wednesday on Saipan, a Pacific island in the Northern Mariana Islands, which is under U.S. control. He is expected to plead guilty to one espionage charge as part of a tentative plea deal reached with the Justice Department ahead of his court hearing. The deal will spare him prison time. He will then depart for nearby Australia to reunite with his family, “get in touch with nature” and, in his wife’s words, “start a new chapter in my life.”
However, the previous chapter remains the source of much heated debate. Assange’s supporters see him as a de facto journalist persecuted for trying to uncover state secrets. His detractors portray him first as a reckless criminal who used illegal means to obtain secrets, endangering US on-the-ground sources in Afghanistan and other countries, and later as a Russian stooge.
“This case raises important questions, but does not provide definitive answers, about what it means to be a journalist, a publisher and a whistleblower,” explained my colleague William Booth. “Was he a non-state actor endangering U.S. national security, as CIA director Mike Pompeo once asserted? Or was he a hero, as many of his supporters, who gathered multiple times outside British courts as Assange’s lawyers argued against his extradition to the U.S., believed?”
In the US, Assange’s imminent release has caused jubilation on the political extremes, with both far-left activists and far-right politicians welcoming the news. Figures as disparate as left-leaning academic Cornel West and far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have portrayed Assange as a hero for taking on US military might and exposing a weakened regime.
“Hopefully one day this country will apologize to him for this torture,” left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore said of Assange’s ordeal. “In the meantime, let us all learn from him the courage necessary in our darkest hours of invasion and the funding of foreign genocide with our tax dollars.”
Others were more critical. “He’s a despicable Russian agent who harmed hundreds of people and then ignored them as if they didn’t matter,” former CIA analyst Gail Helt wrote on social media. She pointed to the countless on-the-ground sources in different countries who were identified in the U.S. cables published by WikiLeaks and whose lives were put at risk. Other U.S. politicians have also labeled Assange an enemy agent.
“Julian Assange endangered the lives of our soldiers during wartime and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” former Vice President Mike Pence said, blasting the White House. “The Biden Administration’s plea deal with Assange is an unfair trial and a disgrace to the service and sacrifice of our military men and women and their families.”
Press freedom advocates have long called for Assange’s release but feared the precedent he could set if he were to plead guilty. Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, worried it could “embolden future federal prosecutors who are hostile to the press” and said he was disappointed the Biden administration didn’t simply drop the case.
“Imagine what the attorney general of Trump’s second term will think when he finds out that he has already received a guilty plea from a publisher under the Espionage Act,” Timm wrote in the Guardian. “After all, Trump repeatedly said during his campaign that he wanted to jail journalists, calling them the ‘enemy of the people.’ It’s hard to believe why the Biden administration would give him ammunition.”
In Assange’s home country, the message was a little simpler. “Regardless of what people think about Mr Assange’s activities, this case is dragging on,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose center-left government has worked behind the scenes to end the standoff over Assange. “Nothing is gained by keeping him locked up. We want to bring him back to Australia.”