AN ASSANGE PARDON WOULD BE BLOW TO THE DEEP STATE

If Donald J. Trump pardoned Julian Assange, it would be continuing both his fight for freedom of speech and his fight against the Deep State that have sought to undermine his Presidency.

Now that a UK court has ruled against Assange’s extradition to the USA, the time is right.

Only a presidential pardon can ensure that there is no further appeal or any other action against Julian Assange by the Deep State apparatchiks ensconced within the bowels of the US Justice Department, and by the Julian Assange haters in a potential Biden Administration.

The Leftist narrative around the President is that he is a demagogue and authoritarian intent on trampling on democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Trump has been a defender of the US Constitution and, in particular, the First Amendment which protects freedom speech and freedom of the press.

Over the past four years, Trump issued no less than three executive orders defending freedom of speech from its current threats: big government, big tech and, sadly, big academia.

In 2017, when signing the Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty, President Trump exhorted us to “remember this eternal truth: Freedom is not a gift from government, freedom is a gift from God.”

In 2019, the President signed the Executive Order on Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities and this year, he signed the Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship.

By contrast, there has been a relentless attack on free speech from the Left, principally in the form of cancel culture. Say the wrong thing (according the Left) these days and you’re cancelled and that means you could lose your job – just ask the former chief curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who was sacked because he said he’d still collect art from white men.

Worse still, the Left the world over promotes laws and regulations that stifle free speech. The Left like to tell us they’re just targeting ‘hate speech’ but, like beauty, hate is in the eye of the beholder. Take Biden transition team’s Richard Stengel who, in opining for ‘hate speech’ laws declared that “all speech is not equal” and that, because of that, the First Amendment has a “design flaw”.

But the kind of speech the Left really hates is that which is against their agenda.

Remember it was Julian Assange’s Wikileaks that dumped a bunch of emails from Hillary Clinton and her Svengali, John Podesta just in time for the 2016 US Presidential election.

Those emails exposed Clinton for who she really was: a globalist, a corporate schill, a warmonger, and someone who was in thick with the crowd Trump refers to as “the Deep State”.

And neither the Democrats nor the Deep State have forgiven Assange for that.

In June this year, Assange’s father, John Shipton nominated Clinton as the reason his son had been targeted by the USA.

“The only thing I can think of is that vengeful, nasty Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an incompetent person who destroyed three countries in a row – the Ukraine, Libya and Yemen – blames Julian for her losing the election to Donald Trump who ran a better campaign,” Shipton said.

There’s no doubt Hillary Clinton has long despised Assange.

She was said to have asked “Can’t we just drone this guy?” to a room full of State Department top brass gathered in late 2010 to deal with the fact that Wikileaks was soon to release a bunch of secret US cables.

Clinton would later claim that if she said it (which she couldn’t recall) it would have been said as a joke, however State Department sources say that while the comment drew laughter at the meeting initially, that laughter quickly died off when Clinton tersely outlined that Assange was a soft target.

The Deep State crowd is said to have even considered such options at Clinton’s request, drawing up a list of “nonlegal strategies” to deal with Assange and Wikileaks.

At the same time as Clinton was joking-not-joking about droning Assange, the then Vice-President Joe Biden was upping the ante, accusing the Wikileaks founder of being a “high-tech terrorist” and, at the same, declaring that the Justice Department was beginning a process to stop Assange.

That process which began under Obama, Biden and Clinton continued to play out, firstly with an indictment in 2012 and another in 2013, and then, with the change of administration, more indictments in 2017 and 2019 and then the extradition request.

The indictments and extradition that occurred under the Trump administration have little to do with the current President and more to do with the Deep State that favoured a Clinton presidency over the Trump one that they undermined.

The Deep State has hated Trump since he declared as his inauguration that the ceremony was not about “merely transferring power from one Administration to another” but “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.” For the elite that run the show behind the scenes; the Deep State bureaucrats like those in the Department of Justice Department; their corporate grifter pals that continually milk the American taxpayer; and the fake news media that protect the status quo in DC, these were fighting words.

And fight they have. First there was the Russia hoax, then the Ukraine hoax and, finally, the failed impeachment.

If the Deep State could, they’d have Trump locked up, but it seems they’ll settle for Julian Assange who faces 175 years imprisonment for the ‘crime’ of receiving secret information and publishing it. For them, it’s also for the ‘crime’ of politically harming Hillary Clinton.

The only way the Deep State won’t be able to win is if Trump pardons Assange.

On December 12, the website www.PardonJulianAssange.com was set up so people can send a message to the President, asking him to ‘please pardon Julian Assange’.

Just two weeks later and more than 13,000 people have sent such a message, most of them being Trump supporters.

They realise the Assange fight is a fight for freedom and a fight against the Deep State. And they know the best fighter on that front is Donald J. Trump.

PLEASE NOTE: This opinion piece is freely available to be reprinted and republished in any publication as along as the following attribution is attached:

George Christensen MP is the conservative National Party Member of Australian Federal Parliament who has started the www.PardonJulianAssange.com campaign calling for President Donald Trump to pardon Julian Assange.