Tucker Carlson Defends Assange, Who Enabled Espionage Against US

ANALYSIS – Tucker is wrong on this, too. Julian Assange, an Australian national, is no hero. Tucker Carlson keeps sinking lower into his bizarre rabbit hole where dictators are good, traitors should be freed and America sucks.

He has finally crossed the line where his views intersect with many on the left who for years have said the same things.

In his recent tweet, Carlson referred to the plea deal Joe Biden’s Justice Department has given Assange, allowing him to plead guilty but go free with the five years he has spent in a U.K. prison counting as time already served.

Carlson said: “A good man, finally free. The tide is turning.”

Well, as a patriot and former Marine Corps intelligence officer, I can safely say that Assange is not a good man, and there is no tide except the one where Joe Biden helps our enemies and hurts our friends.

Assange was responsible for one of the largest and most damaging publications of classified information in American history.

He conspired with Bradley Edward Manning, a mentally unstable and emotionally troubled man, who later became transgender and now goes by the name Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, to commit treason and espionage against our country.

Manning began sex change treatments at taxpayer expense while in prison.

As a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning had access to numerous highly classified databases. In early 2010, he leaked over 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents.

He was convicted on 17 out of 22 charges, including five counts of espionage and theft, and sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. He was imprisoned there from 2010 until 2017 when Barack Obama commuted his sentence.

Meanwhile, Assange reportedly spent $500,000 on a flight to the U.S. territory of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, in order to avoid stepping on the U.S. mainland. His theatrics intended to heighten his image as a victim of evil forces in the U.S. government who are targeting him.

Assange will plead guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose information related to the national defense when he reaches the U.S. federal court in Saipan.

But this is only the latest on Assange from Carlson.

In April, in an interview with Joe Rogan, he accused former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of being a criminal and claimed, without proof, that while he was director of the CIA under former President Donald Trump, Pompeo plotted to assassinate Assange.

Carlson made these allegations, after Assange published highly sensitive agency hacking tools online. The publication of the sophisticated and dangerous CIA tools by Wikileaks in 2016 was considered the ‘largest data loss in CIA history.

In response, senior agency officials reportedly requested “sketches” and “options” on how to kidnap or assassinate Assange.

These efforts likely intensified when the U.S. government learned that Assange might run to Ecuador or Russia with loads of classified information.

Considering that the CIA had labeled WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” taking extraordinary measures to intercept or capture Assange would not be unheard of.

Even while being holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for five years requesting asylum, WikiLeaks continued publishing highly damaging U.S. classified government documents under the name “Vault 7.”

Meanwhile, The Daily Mail provides a more nuanced and reasonable description of Pompeo’s reported actions:

Five weeks after the Vault 7 files began, in April 2017, Pompeo addressed WikiLeaks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, for his first public remarks as Trump’s CIA director.

He said, ‘WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.’

If the CIA could legitimize WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service, it meant they could treat it the way they treat foreign enemies. However, the CIA faced difficulty in proving that WikiLeaks was conspiring with the Kremlin, which stunted their attempts to plan Assange’s capture or murder.

A former senior counterintelligence official told Yahoo News, ‘There was a lot of legal debate on: Are they operating as a Russian agent? It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be reframed on them being a hostile entity.’

After his speech, Pompeo instructed a group of senior CIA officers to consider all options regarding WikiLeaks. He emphasized the need for operational ideas without self-censorship, assuring them he will address any legal concerns.

Of course, Pompeo has flatly denied these accusations, noting that he and other CIA leaders are “smarter than that.”

Still, even if all of these claims are accurate, I see nothing more than a CIA director asking for all options to neutralize a foreign hostile intelligence threat.

And then deciding which is the best and most legal action to take. I applaud Pompeo for doing that. Sorry, Tucker, but Pompeo was just doing his damned job.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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