espionage
Julian Assange released from prison after agreeing to plea deal with US government
Julian Assange, Embassy Of Ecuador on May 19, 2017, in London, England
From LifeSiteNews
Following a 5-year solitary incarceration, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was released from a London prison after taking a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the publication of classified information online.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been released from prison after agreeing to a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department.
On Monday, the high-profile journalist was released from prison after agreeing to a deal in which he plead guilty for his involvement in publishing classified information received from a whistleblower working inside the U.S. government.
As CNN reported, Assange will receive a 62-month prison sentence according to the terms of the agreements. The sentence equals the time he spent in the high-security prison Belmarsh near London. The time served will be credited toward his sentence, allowing Assange to leave prison immediately and return to his native Australia.
“Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks announced in its statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE
Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a…
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 24, 2024
“This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalized. We will provide more information as soon as possible.”
“After more than five years in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars,” the statement continued, adding that “WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.”
Assange is expected to officially plead guilty in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, a U.S. territory located in the Pacific Ocean relatively close to Assange’s native Australia.
Assange faced life in prison in the U.S. for 17 counts of espionage and one charge of computer misuse related to the publication of millions of classified documents by WikiLeaks.
Assange’s legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified documents regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a video that showed a U.S. military helicopter killing several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad, Iraq. The information was provided by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. From 2012 to 2019, Assange lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London under asylum status. After he was arrested by Metropolitan police in 2019 under an extradition warrant from the U.S. government, Assange was imprisoned at Belmarsh, a high-security prison close to London, where he has been held in solitary confinement up until Monday.
According to sources cited by CNN, officials at the Justice Department and the FBI opposed any deal that did not include a guilty plea to a felony by Assange.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald warned of the danger of Assange pleading guilty to a felony for publishing classified information, which, in the eyes of many, was not a crime but a service to society, namely providing information showing that governments are deceiving their citizens.
“I never believed that the Biden administration actually wanted to bring Julian Assange onto American soil to stand trial,” Greenwald said. “Imagine the spectacle that it would have created as Biden heads into an election.”
It would put on Joe Biden’s record that he would be the first American president in history to preside over the imprisonment, not of a source who leaked information, but of someone who published classified information, which every newspaper in the United States does on a regular basis…
The goal of… keeping him in prison was to crush Julian Assange physically and mentally, and they succeeded in doing that…
They wanted to break Assange and simultaneously send a message to any future Assanges that ‘We will ruin your life if you publish our secrets.’
Drawing parallels to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden not being allowed to return to the U.S., Greenwald said, “It is a deterrent message to keep the ability to hide their own crimes through secrecy, immune from the one vulnerability that they have which is that brave people inside the government leak that information to the public or through the media and reveal what it is they are doing.”
From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, head of the new House Oversight Task Force on Declassification, called the official narrative of the JFK assassination ‘faulty’ and said she believes ‘there were two shooters.’
On January 23 President Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify and release all records of the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy, former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Fulfilling a promise initially made in his first presidential term and repeated ahead of his second, Donald Trump has issued an order “providing Americans the truth after six decades of secrecy.”
Trump’s interim Director of National Intelligence Lora Shiao was ordered to “present a plan within 15 days for the full and complete release of all John F. Kennedy assassination records…”
Following this directive, the FBI has revealed the existence of thousands more “previously unknown” files relating to the JFK assassination. As Fox News reported on February 10:
“The FBI conducted a new records search pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order issued on January 23, 2025, regarding the declassification of the assassination files of JFK, RFK, and MLK. The search resulted in approximately 2400 newly inventoried and digitized records that were previously unrecognized as related to the JFK assassination case file…”
Trump’s nominees on a ‘glide path’
In a Wednesday Senate vote Tulsi Gabbard is expected to be confirmed as permanent National Intelligence chief – described as the principal advisor to the president. She will oversee this process when confirmed.
Trump also seeks to install Kash Patel as the new head of the FBI. Patel has promised to publish the client list of notorious Mossad-linked sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on the first day of his tenure.
In addition, he intends to publish documents detailing “Russiagate” and all information relating to the origins of COVID-19.
Democrats have alleged Patel is “secretly overseeing a purge of the FBI” before his appointment has been confirmed. Senator Adam Schiff is now charging Patel with perjury.
Could this be related to what Patel says about Adam Schiff here?
“Adam Schiff is the single most responsible person for spreading disinformation on Russiagate: saying he had evidence Donald Trump colluded with Russia.”
Patel is also expected to be approved by the Republican-majority senate, with the process leading to his Thursday confirmation hearing described as a “glide path” by the scandal-hit outlet Politico. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also expects to be appointed Health and Human Services chief following his nomination vote.
New 9/11, assassination, COVID investgations
In an additional move, the Trump administration has seen the creation of the House Oversight Task Force on Declassification.
Announced by its new leader, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, the task force will not be restricted to the oversight of publishing formerly classified files.
Luna said it would be conducting new investigations into 9/11, the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations, as well as the “origins of COVID-19,” the Jeffrey Epstein case, and unidentified aerial and subsea objects known as “UAPs” and “USOs.”
As independent journalist Michael Shellenberger pointed out in the tweet above, “For decades, presidents said they told us everything they could about Covid, JFK, Epstein, UAPs and more. They lied.”
The first hearing is “set for March,” Luna announced, describing her task force as a “beacon of bipartisanship” with the participation of both Republicans and Democrats.
A break with the past
Luna stressed that this was a complete break with the past, saying this will not be “a task force that makes bold promises only to fade into irrelevance or send strongly worded letters.”
“This will be a relentless pursuit of truth and transparency and will not stop until the American people have the answers they deserve.”
Luna presented a complete shift in how the U.S. government sees its relation to governed.
“We have been treated like children for too long and kept in the dark by those we elected to serve us.”
Luna’s remarks may serve as a statement of the Trump administration’s vision for restoring America. She argued, “If we are to endure as a nation, we must restore trust – trust through transparency.”
Marking a shift from the manufacture of public opinion by the state sponsorship of news and mass culture, Luna continued, “The American people must be trusted to think for themselves, to form their own judgments from the truth they are entitled to know.”
Official verdict on JFK ‘faulty’: ‘I believe there were two shooters’
Luna also announced Tuesday night that “based on what I have seen so far” of the unreleased JFK files, “I believe there were two shooters” involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Luna described the official verdict of a “single bullet theory” as “faulty.”
The revelations from the new JFK files have already begun. What they and the other disclosures contain will be released to inform a new vision of the national interest. The Trump administration is not only saying it is keeping its promises to Americans, but also announcing it wishes to govern in the open and will trust the public to make its own mind up, in place of manufacturing public opinion for political ends.
USAID wasn’t just funding biased reporting. They were actively reshaping foreign governments.
Former State Department official Mike Benz, an expert on cyber policy, censorship, and information warfare, appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience Wednesday and dropped jaw-dropping insights into USAID’s absurd abuse of US tax dollars.
According to Benz, USAID has been funneling taxpayer dollars into so-called investigative journalism, but the real goal isn’t transparency—it is control.
“Everything they do is a hit piece about an instance of corruption that can be used by prosecutors in the area to arrest the political opponents of the State Department,” Benz explained.
USAID’s program, officially called Strengthening Transparency and Accountability through Investigative Reporting, claims to promote a free press. But Benz revealed its true purpose is to ruin people’s lives and go after political targets in order to change the policies of foreign governments from the inside.
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For a mere investment of $20 million, USAID’s state-sponsored hit pieces were able to:
• Generate at least $4.5 billion in fines against targets of these hit pieces.
• Influence over 548 policy changes across foreign governments and private sectors.
USAID justified these programs under the term “capacity building,” which Benz warned is a red flag. “Now, this is the phrase everybody has to know. Capacity building is what this is all built under. That means pumping up the Blob’s assets,” he explained.
And USAID wasn’t just funding biased reporting. They were actively reshaping foreign governments. Benz revealed 548 policy changes resulted from these state-sponsored media attacks, which he suggested were for the “furtherance of USAID’s or the State Department’s foreign policy goals.”
Think about what that means. The U.S. government is secretly funding media outlets to push narratives, destroy political opponents, and manipulate foreign policy, all under the guise of investigative journalism.
The question is – if they’re doing this overseas, how much of it is happening at home?
Watch the full conversation below:
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