Former Vice President Mike Pence criticized the plea deal reached in the federal case involving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, 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 in a post to X (formerly Twitter). "The Biden administration's plea deal with Assange is a miscarriage of justice and dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our Armed Forces and their families.
"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," Pence said.
On Tuesday, Assange reached a plea deal with U.S. authorities following a lengthy legal battle over sensitive defense information that WikiLeaks released publicly. Assange, who gained international notoriety for publishing classified military and diplomatic documents, was charged with one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, according to papers filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands on Tuesday, which were seen by Newsweek.
Assange is expected to be sentenced to the five years he has already spent in the British prison while fighting extradition to the U.S., according to the Associated Press.
Speaking to BBC Radio, Assange's wife, Stella, said her husband will plead guilty to one charge "concerning the Espionage Act and obtaining and disclosing national defense information."
Stella Assange also confirmed that her husband was on his way to the American island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, where he will be sentenced at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday.
"There is an agreement in principle between Julian and the Department of Justice, and that has to be signed off by a judge," she told BBC Radio.
Assange's lawyer Geoffrey Robertson told Newsweek on Tuesday that former President Donald Trump's lawyers "should not have brought this case."
"Assange was entitled to First Amendment protection," he said. "Besides, a U.S. court would have thrown it out because the CIA spied on my legal meetings with him in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Misconduct of the kind that freed Daniel Ellsberg. In any event, the U.K. will have a new Labour government next week, which would not have extradited him. Probably the real reason why they have conceded."
Newsweek reached out to the White House via email and the Justice Department via its website for comment.
In a statement on X, WikiLeaks said, "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 plane and departed the UK."
Robertson told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that "in the end I think partly because Mr. Biden wanted to clear this off his desk in an election year...it has been resolved," according to the AP.
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Matthew Impelli is a Newsweek staff writer based in New York. His focus is reporting social issues and crime. In ... Read more
