Isn't it great that a man who exposed governmental corruption and war crimes faced a harsher persecution and punishment than the corrupt governments and war criminals themselves?
First, no he did not. He released information relating to government officials engaging in misconduct. Hillary Clinton had been a government official for a long time, Trump had not. Of course youre more likely to get that kind of information on her and not him.
But even if he had, having a political allegiance is not a crime punishable by prison as far as I know.
Notice how you're angry at the people who released the info instead of the people who were corrupt and deplorable? PsyOps mission accomplished!
My understanding is that, while it's likely the source of those leaks was Russia, it's never been proven wikileaks withheld info about Republicans. I've seen the claims dozens of times, but never the evidence, so please share if you do... Otherwise, it's insane to hate a journalist for withholding information they don't have, just because it hurts your preferred political party.
EDIT T+2hrs: 35% downvotes and zero replies or supporting evidence. FYI I asked the same thing on Reddit about a dozen times over the last decade, and the result was always the same — If your position is "I can find no evidence for my claims, and don't know why I hate WikiLeaks or Assange. I just do." then you're probably a psychological warfare victim...
They wanted to make an example of someone. His thumbing his nose at the US government was well publicised, so they made their revenge on him very public too.
It does set a potentially dangerous precedent, but with how things are going (American newspapers declining in quality and SCOTUS selectively ignoring precedent and doing whatever), you're right that it doesn't mean much.
This might hurt future publishers of whistleblowers. Does this set the precedent that publishing info from whistleblowers can be prosecuted as espionage?
I don't know the details of how the US legal system works but isn't a plea bargain essentially the same as a settlement in civil cases?
If so, it should (at least in theory) have very little prejudicial value since the courts did not rule on the question if Assange's culpability.
I know that in the real world the US regime once again learned that it can get away with murder and journalists all over the world have already learned the lesson that the evil empire will fuck them up if they air their dirty laundry. But from a legal nerd point of view a settlement should be quite useles as a precedent.
How many years would his prison sentence have been if he was extradided the year he fled to the embassy? I feel like he would have been out by now. Wasn't he leaking early Iraq war corruption stuff? That was 20 years ago.
IIRC he had some kind of insurance file against that, I think there used to be some encrypted file you could download from Wikileaks and if he died the password would be released.
No idea what it was (if anything, it could have just been a bluff of course) but it seems to have had the desired effect so far.
Biden throwing a hail Mary to libs with a shred o conscience remaining for his trainwreck 2024. I mean it's about damn time but he should have been free years ago.