Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin added her voice to the growing chorus of conservative figures favoring a pardon of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
“I made a mistake some years ago, not supporting Julian Assange — thinking that he was a bad guy… I’ve learned a lot since then,” said Palin in a video provided exclusively to the Gateway Pundit.
WikiLeaks and Palin were once at odds, the former publishing leaked emails from the latter during the 2008 presidential campaign when Palin was the Republican candidate for vice president.
But Palin appears to have moved on from that incident, offering an unequivocal call for President Donald Trump to use the presidential pardon on behalf of Assange.
Palin said that Assange ultimately worked “on the people’s behalf to allow information to get to us so that we could make up our minds about different issues.”
“He deserves a pardon. He deserves all of us to understand more about what he has done in the name of real journalism, and that’s getting to the bottom of issues that the public really needs to hear about and benefit from,” said the former Alaska governor.
Palin joins a range of figures from across the political spectrum calling for Assange to be pardoned. These include Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), and congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican who will represent Georgia’s 14th district in the next U.S. Congress.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has also weighed in, defending the work of WikiLeaks as legitimate journalism. In a segment on Carlson’s show, Assange’s fiancée, Stella Morris, urged President Trump not to let Assange fall into the hands of the deep state.
“Once he [Assange] gets to the U.S. he will be in the hands of the Deep State. That’s why I pleaded with the President to show the mercy the Deep State will not show Julian if he is extradited,” said Morris.
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz has also argued that there is “no constitutional difference” between WikiLeaks and the New York Times, comparing the WikiLeaks case to that of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s.
The same comparison was made by the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who called the case of Assange a “First Amendment issue.”
“It is stolen property, but it has a different nature when it’s information. Let’s take the Pentagon Papers — the Pentagon Papers were stolen property, weren’t they? They were stolen from the Pentagon!” said Giuliani in a segment on Fox & Friends. “Given to the New York Times and the Washington Post. No one went to jail at the New York Times or Washington Post.”
“We’ve had revelations under the Bush administration… Abu Ghraib, all of that is stolen property, taken from the government against the law.”
“Once it gets to a media publication, they can publish it. They can publish it for the purpose of informing people.”
“You can’t put Assange in a different position than that — he was a guy who communicated. We may not like what he communicated, but he was a media facility. He was putting that information out. Every newspaper, station, grabbed it and published it.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.