The sudden announcement that Julian Assange would be freed after a plea agreement came as a great and very welcome surprise. Assange and the Wikileaks team were targets of United States persecution and prosecution by three different presidential administrations because they revealed secrets that the state wanted to keep hidden.

Wikileaks revealed war crimes committed during the George W. Bush administration in their Iraq War Logs and Afghanistan War Logs. Private Chelsea Manning leaked the Collateral Murder video, which shows the deaths of civilians, including two Reuters reporters, as they were gunned down by a U.S. army helicopter crew in 2007.

Collateral Murder was released in 2010 when Barack Obama was president. All of the purported differences between democrats and republicans disappear when U.S. hegemony is in need of protection. Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, confirmed that Assange was under investigation. While the Justice Department ultimately chose not to indict, they laid the groundwork for Donald Trump to make Assange a political prisoner.

Obama’s unprecedented use of the Espionage Act sent other whistleblowers to jail and gave Trump license to get his hands on Assange. The Trump administration built on the work of the Obama DOJ and secured a 17-count indictment in 2018, with charges that could have resulted in a 175-year sentence. Of course criminal charges alone were useless as long as the Ecuadorian government gave Assange sanctuary in its London embassy. The Trump administration interfered in Ecuador’s election and brought a different political party to office and then secured a $4 billion IMF loan for Ecuador, just one month before........

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