During an appearance on podcaster Tim Pool's show at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention, former President Donald Trump revealed that he is seriously considering pardoning WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if he is reelected.
As Mediaite reports:
“One more big one, will you pardon Julian Assange?” Pool said.
“Well I'm going to talk about that today [during my speech] and we're going to give it very serious consideration, and we're going to have a couple of other things to say in the speech that I think you're going to love,” Trump replied.
Assange, who is currently being held in Belmarsh Prison in the UK, has recently been granted the right to appeal his extradition to the U.S., where he faces charges under the Espionage Act of 1917.
In a major legal victory, Assange won a High Court bid in London to appeal extradition after the U.S. prosecution failed to provide adequate assurances demanded by judges.
The U.S. government is seeking to extradite Assange to face charges related to the release of classified materials through WikiLeaks. A Virginia grand jury indicted Assange in 2019 for allegedly conspiring with former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer network and violate the Espionage Act by publishing documents detailing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as diplomatic cables.
In June 2020, a second superseding indictment expanded the government's case against Assange. It included allegations that he conspired with hackers from the Anonymous collective, a group known for cyberattacks in the United States to support the George Floyd protests. The indictment also detailed further alleged wrongdoings by Assange, such as exploiting a vulnerability in the Congressional Research Service's network to obtain nonpublic information from the U.S. Congress, gaining unauthorized access to a NATO member country's computer network and helping Edward Snowden flee the United States.
Trump also used Saturday's speech to promise pardons for his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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