Biden Blows Putin an Assange Kiss

Letting the WikiLeaks founder walk free reveals unpleasant realities in Washington

As I write this, Julian Assange is on a private jet over the Pacific Ocean, headed for the island of Saipan, a U.S. territory, on his journey to freedom. After a dozen years of imprisonment of two kinds, the “Australian editor, publisher and activist” (as Wikipedia tactfully describes him) is on his way back to his homeland where next week he will celebrate his fifty-third birthday as a free man.

Tomorrow, Assange’s long legal drama will come to an end, formally, when he agrees to a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice in the district court for the Northern Mariana Islands. There, Assange will receive his liberty, with credit for time served, in exchange for pleading guilty to a single criminal charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified American national defense information.

What Assange does next is anybody’s guess. His status as “free speech martyr” to the fringes of Left and Right alike, the so-called “horseshoe” where extremists find common ground, seems assured. The ideological essence of Assange and his fanbase has always been hatred for America and the West, alongside sympathy for authoritarian regimes. Word of Assange’s sudden release brought rapturous applause from his admirers worldwide, ranging from the dirtbag Left to MAGA superfans.

Moscow was especially pleased to hear the news. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin outlet where Assange once had his own show, pronounced she was “awfully happy” to see “the best journalist of our time” win his freedom. Other Kremlin voices proclaimed him as a “symbol of the uncovering of secret crimes of the U.S. deep state.” Moscow should be pleased, since Assange has served their interests well for many years.