There's growing pressure on President Trump to pardon Julian Assange, who leaked information about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as about Democrat party corruption, and Edward Snowden, who leaked information about America's spy network.  Both caused tremendous damage and harmed many innocent people.  However, we've learned in the last four years that the American Deep State, especially in the intelligence divisions and the Pentagon, is as corrupt as Snowden and Assange said.  If we'd learned this lesson sooner, America might be in better shape now.

Many years ago, I heard a talk from my friend, the brilliant Mary Theroux of the Independent Institute.  Until then, I'd heard only the Obama administration's spin on what Assange and Snowden did.  While I never supported or trusted Obama, I believed in our war efforts and the necessity for our country to have spying capabilities.  Mary's talk was an eye-opener.

Already then, the government's electronic spying on American citizens (every email, every text message, every phone call) was so enormous that its scope was incomprehensible (it was then in multiples of zettabytes).  Not only was the scope of the government's spying huge, but it was also a gross violation of our inherent Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

Other NSA employees before Snowden had tried to blow the whistle on what was happening.  However, unlike the fake Ukraine phone call whistleblower whose information has been zealously protected even as his lies got full media coverage, Obama's government ferociously persecuted and silenced these whistleblowers.  Snowden's spectacular leak broke that logjam.

This database means that any time a citizen finds himself in the government's crosshairs, the government can go through past material to find something, anything, that will destroy him.  That's what the Obama government and the Deep State did to General Flynn with all those unmaskings.  As Stalin's infamous, sadistic, mass-murdering chief of police, Lavrentiy Beria, famously said, "show me the man, and I'll find you the crime."

We Americans have a spy network that's sitting on all our data, and those data can be used to criminalize us after the fact when the government in power doesn't like us.  In this regard, you'll do well to remember that many happy leftists have put out calls to destroy anyone who supported Trump.

Both Assange and Snowden were appalled by the United States' slowly morphing into a police state behind the scenes.  Assange was also unimpressed with the Democratic National Committee's corruption.  That's why they acted.  And yes, they did cause harm by exposing people overseas who, at great risk to themselves, had been helping Americans.  However, the two men also revealed terrible corruption in the American system, which itself is a great risk to liberty at home and abroad.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, news emerged that Julian Assange had reached out to the State Department, warning it about classified leaks:

BREAKING: @Project_Veritas Obtains Recording Of Call Between @Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange & Lawyer In Hillary Clinton's State Dept.

Warns US Government Trouble Was Coming Their Way With Unredacted Release Of Classified Cables Stolen From Wikileaks pic.twitter.com/hx5u2fSzuC

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) December 16, 2020

In other words, Assange did not act like a stone-cold renegade.  He acted like a journalist.  The Deep State's continued calls for his destruction, especially given the same actors' nonstop leaking during the Trump years, are obscene.  Trump may not have defeated the Deep State, but it's time to deny the Deep State and its arrogant operatives (Comey, Strzok, Brennan, Clapper, all of whom grow rich and continue to be powerful) the ability to destroy the lives of two people who tried to alert America to the cancer growing within it.

I'll end this post with an interview Tucker Carlson had with Julian Assange's fiancée, Stella Morris:

(Note: Because this is a fraught topic, it's important to state that the views in this post are entirely my own.  They do not represent the official editorial opinion of American Thinker.)

Image: Julian Assange in 2014 by Cancillería del Ecuador.  CC BY-SA 2.0.