Julian Assange: Former CIA director urges Albanese Government to explain red-carpet welcome

Former CIA director Mike Pompeo has condemned the Albanese Government’s deal struck with the Biden Administration to enable Julian Assange to walk free from jail where he was being held to be extradited to the United States to face trial.

And Mr Pompeo, who is widely seen to be in the running to serve as Secretary of Defence if Mr Trump re-claims office, said it was up to those who publicly welcomed the “espionage agent” back into the fold to explain why they endorsed the Australian’s stealing of US intelligence.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and former foreign minister Stephen Smith spent $100,000 of taxpayer funds to escort the 53-year-old Assange to Australia in July after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese secured a major diplomatic coup in forcing the Americans to drop its request for Assange’s extradition over the publication of secret US cables a decade ago.

Mr Albanese posted a photograph of himself phoning Mr Assange to personally welcome him home when he arrived in Canberra after leaving prison and pleading guilty to conspiring to obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the defence of the United States.

After leaving the CIA, Mr Pompeo served as Secretary of State in the Trump Administration which pursued Mr Assange and sought his extradition to the US to face trial for breaching the Espionage Act.

Asked by The Nightly if he supported the plea deal that saw those charges dropped and what he made of the Australian Government’s welcome home for the WikiLeaks founder, Mr Pompeo said there was some explaining to be done.

“Yes, I was deeply disappointed to see the arrangement that was made,” he said, speaking at the Westminster-based think tank Policy Exchange.

“The fact that he’s welcomed back into the fold, by the people on multiple sides … I’ll leave them to explain why it’s okay to steal important secrets and we don’t have the right to protect those things to keep everyone safe.”

In his first comments since the plea deal was agreed, Assange told the European Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, that he had pleaded guilty to journalism.

Mr Pompeo said Assange was an espionage agent and not a journalist who put at risk a lot of important things related to the United States’ safety.

“He was an espionage agent running a hostile foreign intelligence service, a non-state intelligence service,” he said.

“He stole stuff from the United States, not for the purpose of glory and journalism but for money and fame and to undermine the West.”

Assange spent five years in a maximum-security prison in Britain while he fought his extradition to the US.

He was facing multiple counts of breaching the Espionage Act for coaching the whistle-blower Chelsea Manning to steal hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables and files published by WikiLeaks, which included a video of a US helicopter attack in Baghdad, Iraq, that showed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists being gunned down.

Assange had been refused bail because he had previously ignored a prior extradition order to be sent to Sweden where he was wanted to face questioning over sexual assault allegations.

In order to evade that police investigation he instead sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where spent seven years before he was ejected by his hosts, triggering his arrest and jailing.

Assange has repeatedly accused Mr Pompeo of waging political persecution and has referenced a 2021 report by Yahoo! that sensationally accused the CIA of plotting to assassinate him in 2017.

Mr Pompeo raised the renewed accusations unprompted during his talk overnight when he said: “I was CIA Director so I can’t deny what he said about what I was doing.”

Mr Pompeo served as CIA Director between 2017 to 2018 before being appointed US Secretary of State in 2018 until the Biden Administration’s inauguration in 2021.

Asked by The Nightly to clarify if his comment confirmed Assange’s accusations, Mr Pompeo said that as CIA Director he complied with US law that forbids assassinations.

“The United States has a law, a set of laws, they prevent assassination and every moment as CIA director, I fully complied with the United States law,” he said.

“That should comprehensively answer the question that was presented.

“But we all should understand that there are people inside trying to get after us as well, and I mention that because it’s true in my country as well.”