🗣 “It sounds like they’re now saying every citizen on the planet is susceptible to being charged under the US Espionage Act,” said independent journalist Steve Poikonen on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program.

🗣 “He never should have been charged,” insisted cartoonist and syndicated columnist Ted Rall of Assange’s 12-year struggle against the US government. “He never committed a crime. He was never an American citizen and, therefore, not subject to American law. The Espionage Act is disgusting and probably unconstitutional and shouldn't be on the books, and certainly never should apply to journalists.”

🗣 “This idea that Julian Assange was putting lives in danger, etcetera, is completely fabricated in order to give a fig leaf of respectability to the war that has been conducted by the US government against this man who has been, by the way, let free not because suddenly Joe Biden decided to act out of the milk of human kindness,” said economist Radhika Desai.

“The [Washington Post] story is just so completely hypocritical,” she said of an article in the Washington DC-based newspaper that reported that “reactions were divided” over Assange’s release from prison. “The only people criticizing Julian Assange are the US government and all the mainstream media who seem to be taking their cues from them for whatever reason best known to them.”

🗣 “It stinks to high heaven,” agreed author and academic Gerald Horne. “I take it that's a veiled reference to organs like the New York Times, for example, The Guardian… Mr. Assange's reputation has been dragged through the mud. He has suffered unduly, and I wish him only the best.”

“Alongside Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, Julian Assange is one of the heroes of our time. They are a small band of people who have spoken truth to power and they have believed in the truth, they have fought for the truth, they have sacrificed for the truth,” Desai emphasized.