“My dear brother Julian Assange is free!” West wrote on social media after news of Assange’s expected release broke on Monday. “We struggled, fought, and prayed for many years for this wonderful moment!”
Greene also weighed in on X, calling it “an incredible sight” to see Assange walking outdoors, a reference to footage showing him boarding a flight in London.
Their reactions were emblematic of others on the far left and far right of the American political spectrum — highlighting the peculiar coalition of sympathizers that Assange has drawn during the years he was either holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London or in prison.
Assange, 52, the founder of the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks, has been a polarizing figure since the site published emails in 2016 that Russian government hackers had stolen from Democratic Party servers — and that U.S. authorities assessed had been leaked by Moscow in an effort to disrupt the presidential election.
Assange was not charged in connection with those documents but was indicted in 2019 on charges that he violated the Espionage Act by publishing military documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and diplomatic cables. U.S. prosecutors accused Assange of seeking to help hack into classified systems with Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst who was subsequently court-martialed. Manning served almost seven years of a 35-year sentence for violating the Espionage Act before President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.
On Monday, news spread that Assange had reached a tentative deal to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing classified military and diplomatic documents from 2009 to 2011, according to court filings.
Assange is expected to be sentenced Wednesday in the Northern Mariana Islands, according to a letter filed by the Justice Department in the remote U.S. jurisdiction Monday evening. He will then return to his home country of Australia, the letter says, indicating he will be sentenced to the 62 months he has already spent in a London prison.
The curious mix of Assange’s most vocal supporters included independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said he was “overjoyed” at the news, and former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who called Assange “a good man.” The Green Party, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, former libertarian lawmaker Justin Amash and former Democratic presidential candidate-turned-Republican booster Tulsi Gabbard all celebrated Assange’s release.
Conservative Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) also said Assange’s “liberation is great news” — and criticized the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations for pursuing his prosecution. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) struck a more balanced tone, saying that he didn’t think Assange broke espionage laws or should have been charged in the first place, but that he was also worried the plea deal set a bad precedent. Ultimately, the Democrat sympathized with Assange.
“I’m glad this ordeal is over so he can finally return to Australia to be with his family & focus on his health,” McGovern wrote Monday.
As of Tuesday afternoon, former president Donald Trump had not publicly weighed in on the Assange news. Assange was indicted on a charge of computer hacking during the Trump administration in 2018, and Trump did not grant Assange a pardon while president. In addition, neither President Biden nor former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was the target of documents leaked by WikiLeaks, has made public statements about Assange’s release.
Members of both parties have also castigated Assange and news of his freedom. Former vice president Mike Pence slammed Assange and the Biden administration for striking a plea deal, calling it a “miscarriage of justice.”
“Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Pence wrote on X. “ … There should be no plea deals to avoid prison for anyone that endangers the security of our military or the national security of the United States. Ever.”
Many moderate Republicans echoed Pence’s sentiments — or have simply stayed silent about Assange since news of his plea deal broke. Heath Mayo, the founder of Principles First, a group founded in 2019 in response to concerns about the direction the GOP was taking, called Assange “a traitor who put American soldiers in danger.”
“The widespread glorification of Julian Assange in Republican circles is just another example of why I’m no longer a Republican,” Mayo wrote on social media Tuesday.
Former GOP congressman and vocal Trump critic Adam Kinzinger put it more succinctly: “Assange is a traitor,” he wrote on X.
In a statement welcoming news of Assange’s plea deal, Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the WikiLeaks founder’s prosecution had “set a harmful legal precedent” for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they received classified material from whistleblowers.
Frank Figliuzzi, a retired FBI assistant director and national security analyst for NBC News, said Assange was “never” a journalist.
“He did irreparable harm. He endangered lives,” Figliuzzi said.
Ellen Nakashima, Devlin Barrett and Rachel Weiner contributed to this report.
