And for his effort, he’s now a prisoner of the United States, thanks to the Ecuadoran government and a British extradition agreement with Washington.
Assange, who has been holed-up in Ecuador’s embassy in London for the better part of seven years, was led out of the building on Thursday in handcuffs surrounded by officers and looking plenty haggard. Unkempt, tussled hair, a gaunt face, and months-old white beard made it obvious that life has not been good for him in quite some time.
In the U.S., Assange will face allegations that he hacked computers to steal sensitive information — an allegation that is completely at odds with Wikipedia’s long-stated practice of publishing information that has been provided to the organization.
CNBC reported further:
The Justice Department announced a criminal charge Thursday against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, accusing him of conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a classified U.S. government computer.
“The charge relates to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States,” the Justice Department said in a press release.
Whatever did or did not actually happen, however, is apparently not very important to The Daily Caller, a “conservative” website founded by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Someone at the news organization developed a meme that mocked Assange for his appearance and his arrest — a meme that was, according to Information Liberation, traced to the site:
A Google reverse image search 40 minutes after it was published showed no other results, which suggests they made it themselves. The meme didn't go over well.
Here are some of the responses (raw language alert):
https://twitter.com/CassandraRules/status/1116325304946044928
https://twitter.com/Kybernetx/status/1116322224624087041
https://twitter.com/thing_media/status/1116327707229298688
https://twitter.com/CrosbieGerard/status/1116329251215740932
https://twitter.com/irrelevanI/status/1116327464664555522
“Pay attention to the responses to Julian Assange's political persecution if you want to know who is fake opposition,” wrote Chris Menahan at Information Liberation. “All these same clowns exposed themselves with their immediate condemnation of the boys of Covington Catholic (The Daily Caller’s Benny Johnson said the Covington Catholic boys were ‘despicable’), now they’re going to do it again.”
For the record, as The National Sentinel reports, Assange really seems to have fallen out of favor with the Left-leaning Washington establishment and Deep State after his organization exposed the manner in which Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, which her 2016 presidential campaign was essentially running, stole the nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Assange has also pushed back repeatedly on the DNC lie that Russia hacked the organization’s emails and gave them to Wikileaks.
“They’re (the Obama administration) trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House,” Assange said during a Jan. 3, 2017 interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “They are trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate president.
“Our publications had wide uptake by the American people, they’re all true,” Assange continued. “But that’s not the allegation that’s being presented by the Obama White House.”
Was it the Russians, though? “Our source is not a state party, so the answer for our interactions is no,” he said.
Later that year, Assange offered to provide the U.S. government with evidence that the so-caled "Russian collusion" and Russian hacking of the DNC narratives were both false — an offer that was not taken.
Read more about the Russian collusion hoax and the Trump administration’s handling of it at WhiteHouse.news and Hoax.news.
Sources include: