Julian Assange FINALLY Granted Freedom After Pleading "Guilty To Journalism"

Julian Assange is a free man after spending 5 years in prison and 7 years at a consulate in England. And during a recent hearing for the Council of Europe, Assange made it clear that the only thing he was guilty of was performing journalism. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Julian Assange is a free man after spending five years in prison and seven years in a consulate in England. And during a recent hearing for the Council of Europe, Assange made it clear the only thing that he was guilty of was being a journalist. The only thing he was guilty of was writing as a journalist and performing as a journalist. And you know what? I agree with him.

I do too. And I think a lot of people have a lot of bad opinions of Julian Assange, just because of course, they were the ones who got the cables, the Podesta emails and made them public. And sure, before that though, it's such an interesting history of this guy. He was the hero of everyone on the left. You couldn't turn on Free Speech TV.

That we used to have a show on.

Exactly. Without seeing Julian Assange on there, everybody was talking about how great it is because he exposed the war machine, the killing machine of what we were doing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, killing civilians, killing reporters, just indiscriminately.

He could run for president in the United States and been elected by a landslide from the left alone.

Exactly.

The left loved this guy.

Until.

Until the Hillary Clinton incident.

June or July of 2016, he gets the emails and sends them out and suddenly everybody on the left hates him and now everybody on the right loves him. So it completely flip flopped from how it was, but it doesn't matter if you love this guy or hate this guy. You can have your personal opinions and they can be completely wrong. But he is doing what journalists are supposed to do. You don't have to like it. You don't have to agree with it. But you have to understand, this is how all of the major stories, the biggest stories in this country end up breaking. Watergate happened because of somebody leaking the information, Mark Felt.

Panama Papers.

Panama Papers, Pentagon Papers. All of the, especially what he did, this is how it works, because they're not going to tell you. They're going to keep it secret. Journalists can't dig into that until it gets hacked or leaked or whatever.

But, but, but you hear from the deep state, Americans are too stupid. They can't process this kind of information. When you tell 'em that the government's been spying on them. They can't process that.

No, they say, I've done nothing wrong.

When you learned that Iraq was all based on a lie by Dick Cheney.

Well, Saddam Hussein was bad.

Yeah. When you learned that there were no such thing as weapons of mass destruction. When you learned that we're in Afghanistan for reasons that he exposed that nobody even thought about. When you do that as a journalist, that should be a good thing. Okay. It shouldn't be something where you serve 12 years of your life running just to stay alive and that's what they did to him. There were times, I swear to God, I would see a picture of him in the embassy or wherever he was, I thought he was going to die. That's how bad this guy, that's what he's been through. But 46 countries that this meeting, that this assembly of human rights took place, said that he was absolutely a political prisoner, and it was driven by the NSA, the FBI and the CIA. And interestingly enough, it all started when, as you say, he broke the law. He broke the law by making public those documents about the DNC and Hillary Clinton. Right?

Right. And it's important to remember too, they got the documents. WikiLeaks got the documents. Just like they got them with what they exposed in the Middle East. They didn't hack. They are not an organization that does that. They're not out there taking the material. They are basically a depository. If you have this information, put it here. We will then help you get it out and get it exposed. That's what WikiLeaks is.