Meghan McCain on Julian Assange’s Arrest: ‘I Hope He Rots in Hell!’

The View’s Meghan McCain on Thursday celebrated the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, declaring that she hopes he “rots in Hell.”

A partial transcript is as follows: 

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: After being holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for the past seven years, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested. He faces charges in the U.S. for conspiring to hack into a classified government computer. WikiLeaks tweeted that he’s won dozens of journalism awards, nominated for a Nobel prize every year since 2010, and this is just a campaign by the CIA to delegitimatize and dehumanize — I almost said dehumidify. So what do you think it is? Why is this happening? Did he break the law? Is it a problem?

JOY BEHAR: Well, remember what he did originally. He hacked into the Democrats’ computers and helped Trump get elected, basically, by exposing Podesta’s emails and then Comey went after Hillary. Remember that? That’s why Trump won, basically.

ABBY HUNTSMAN: He’s been doing it since 2010, as far as I know. And that’s when Trump did an interview in 2010 and said that he hated this guy and he thought he deserved the death penalty along those lines. In 2016, when he was hacking the DNC, he promoted him. He said he loved WikiLeaks and basically promoted information he was sharing. […] But, here’s the weird thing, though, is even after praising him, it was under the Trump administration — the DOJ, in 2017, that prosecuted Julian Assange. Obama and Holder could have done that the year before and they punted it. So, that’s where I get confused — where you hear Trump praising the guy, and under his administration, they are the ones that actually prosecuted him.

MEGHAN MCCAIN: The politics of this have always been completely hypocritical on both sides. Eric Holder under Obama decided against prosecution of Assange over concerns that WikiLeaks was a “journalistic organization that would raise First Amendment Issues.” Chelsea Manning was granted clemency. Chelsea Manning in 2010 released 750,000 classified and sensitive military documents that put our national security at risk. Under the Obama administration, she was given clemency. This is something that a lot of people who put national security first — I put myself in this category — have been warning about, and warning about, and warning about. The only time the Democrats started caring was when it started affecting them politically, and Hillary Clinton’s emails were released and John Podesta’s emails were released.

GOLDBERG: What is going to happen to him? That’s my question.

MCCAIN: I hope he rots in Hell!