Some media outlets have attempted to label Julian Assange as an activist rather than a journalist or publisher, reflecting a broader debate about the role of whistleblowers and the media. [1] Assange is widely regarded as a political prisoner, with many observers criticizing his treatment and the conditions of his imprisonment. [2] John Kiriakou — a 15-year friend of Assange and a former WikiLeaks board member — describes himself as “on record as being a strong supporter of Julian Assange,” crediting him with revealing war crimes committed in Iraq and crimes committed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and arguing Assange functions as a publisher deserving journalist-like immunity.[3]
Role at WikiLeaks
Assange and WikiLeaks played a significant role in bringing whistleblower cases to light when other news outlets avoided covering them; his work led to the unearthing of the Espionage Act and its application to whistleblowing activity. [4] Assange is also credited with originating the demand for technologies like SecureDrop, which has become a crucial tool for secure communication. [5] Kiriakou stresses that WikiLeaks has never had to issue a correction or apologize for publishing something incorrect, and that major outlets — the New York Times and Washington Post among them — have landed scoops based on material Assange published.[6] He makes the same point about Chelsea Manning’s leaks specifically: “Everything WikiLeaks has released has been true, everything. And WikiLeaks has never blown the source” — a track record he calls the reason he would still trust WikiLeaks over any other outlet with a leak today, even as the organization has become “a shell of what it used to be” after fourteen years of pursuit of Assange, with most modern leaks now surfacing on Discord or Telegram or going directly to reluctant news outlets instead.[7][8][9]
Kiriakou notes that Mike Pompeo — before becoming CIA Director and later Secretary of State — praised WikiLeaks while campaigning for Trump in 2016, saying “God bless WikiLeaks.”[10] Once at the CIA, per Kiriakou, Pompeo’s public description of WikiLeaks as a “hostile non-state intelligence actor” was a carefully chosen phrase: by defining the organization that way, any senator who spoke up in Assange’s defense could be framed as siding with an enemy, which meant covert action against Assange could be classified as counterintelligence and did not have to be briefed to Congress.[11]
Transparency absolutist (HOPE 2025)
John Kiriakou — a 15-year friend of Julian Assange and a former WikiLeaks board member — rejects claims Assange works for the Russians: “He doesn’t like the Russians any more than he likes the Americans.” He calls Assange a “transparency absolutist” needed to balance government “secrecy absolutists,” and recalls WikiLeaks meetings where members put phones in a microwave — only to find they were tracked anyway.[12][13][14]
The DNC emails were authentic (Reason2Resist)
John Kiriakou stresses that the DNC emails Julian Assange published were not disinformation but “authentic” primary-source documents — and that they revealed the DNC cheating Bernie Sanders, giving someone inside the committee a clear motive to leak.[15][16]
An activist, not a journalist
John Kiriakou recounts a Zoom call, chaired by Rob Reiner, on which a colleague asked former Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel why the national-security press was not defending Julian Assange; “in unison they said that Julian Assange is not a journalist, he’s an activist,” which Kiriakou found flabbergasting.[17][18][19] He has separately said he put the same question directly to a Knight Ridder journalist, who told him he had stayed quiet on the Assange case specifically because he considered Assange an activist rather than a journalist — a distinction Kiriakou rejects, arguing that at the very least Assange is a publisher, and that no publisher has ever before been put on trial for espionage for practicing journalism.[20][21] He notes Assange won his extradition case — the British courts having refused three times to extradite prisoners to face U.S. long-term solitary confinement — yet remains in solitary pending appeal, “not been exposed to sunlight for something like nine years.”[22][23][24] Kiriakou says Stella Morris, Assange’s partner, told him his emotional state is “fragile” and his health “bad.”[24]
Persecution and the Manning “hacking conspiracy” allegation
Kiriakou has repeatedly framed Assange’s prosecution as part of a broader Justice Department pattern he experienced directly. He says that in his own case, the government similarly tried to discredit him by falsely alleging he had stolen a diary he never stole; the underlying constitutional issue, he argues, is that under Supreme Court precedent a journalist may lawfully receive stolen information as long as the journalist plays no part in the theft itself — and on that principle, he says, Assange never tasked Chelsea Manning to steal anything.[25] The indictment’s claim that Assange conspired with Manning to hack rested, per Kiriakou, on a single source: a convicted Icelandic informant, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, who had himself been convicted of making false statements to the FBI after offering the bureau false information about Assange in exchange for money and later retracting it.[26] Kiriakou calls what Assange did — publishing what Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were saying and doing — “very brave,” and does not believe Assange conspired with Manning to hack anything, contrary to the indictment’s allegations.[27]
He cites reporting by Mike Isikoff for Yahoo/Newsweek that the CIA drew up plans to kill Assange or snatch him, and separately, discussing the parallel Spanish criminal case, notes the prosecution’s star witness there has since confessed to fabricating his testimony and is, like the FBI’s source, a convicted pedophile and fraudster — a fact he says no judge in his right mind should credit.[28][29] Kiriakou also notes Assange was charged with sex crimes in Sweden that were eventually withdrawn — part of what he describes as a broader Justice Department tactic, used against whistleblowers including himself, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Matt DeHart, and the Vault 7 whistleblower, of pairing prosecutions with sexual-impropriety allegations (child pornography, sexual assault) that are quietly dropped before trial.[30][31]
Sentencing pattern
Kiriakou situates Assange’s threatened 145-year sentence within a broader pattern of increasingly severe Espionage Act sentences he says the Justice Department refined against whistleblowers before ever reaching Assange. He cites NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who received five and a quarter years for leaking a single page of classified analysis on Russian involvement with the Trump campaign, and FBI agent Terry Albury, who received three and a half years for leaking a barely classified memo describing systemic racism in the FBI’s hiring and promotion practices — each sentence, in Kiriakou’s account, harsher than the last as the department learned from earlier cases that had fallen apart in court.[32][33]
Extradition and the Eastern District of Virginia
Speaking the day before an April 2022 Westminster court hearing, Kiriakou said the court was due to decide whether to advance Assange’s extradition order to Home Secretary Priti Patel, who had already indicated she would sign it.[34] He noted the European Court of Human Rights had, by that point, set three precedents refusing to extradite British prisoners to the United States because of its use of solitary confinement, but that no law forced a stay on Assange’s case while that court’s review was pending.[35] Discussing the same precedents in 2023, Kiriakou specified that in each of the three cases the European Court blocked extradition solely because the prisoner had a documented mental illness combined with the prospect of U.S. solitary confinement, which the court had deemed cruel and unusual punishment — grounds observers hoped might also stop Assange’s case, though there was no guarantee the court would even agree to hear it.[36] He ultimately believed Assange would be extradited regardless, since the Boris Johnson government had already said it would not delay extradition pending a European Court of Human Rights decision; he separately relayed rumors of a possible face-saving plea deal in which Assange would plead to a national-security or Espionage Act charge, be sentenced to time served, and be expelled from the UK to Australia rather than face trial.[37][38]
Kiriakou draws a direct parallel to his own prosecution to explain why Assange would be tried in the Eastern District of Virginia. In his own case, his best friend’s wife’s uncle — O.J. Simpson’s jury consultant, who had also worked with George Zimmerman and William Kennedy Smith — was given a security clearance to review the 15,000 pages of classified discovery, and told Kiriakou’s eleven attorneys that in any other U.S. district he would have a real chance, but that an Eastern District of Virginia jury would likely include people who work for, or have relatives who work for, the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, DHS, or intelligence contractors — so he should take the plea deal.[21][39] Assange, per Kiriakou, has never been to the Eastern District of Virginia or the United States at all, and is being tried there specifically because it is the district where he is most likely to be convicted and to receive the maximum sentence — up to 145 years.[40] If convicted there, Kiriakou argues, every working journalist in America becomes a target, since the government has never before prosecuted a journalist — or even a publisher — for espionage for practicing journalism, and there is no evidence any Assange-published leak caused negative effects on any U.S. military operation.[41][21][42] Kiriakou has also pointed out that Assange, an Australian national with no U.S. citizenship, was nonetheless charged under the U.S. Espionage Act, and that in all his media appearances no interviewer has ever asked him about the legal basis for prosecuting a non-citizen under that statute.[43]
Kiriakou says the U.S. enlisted the UK, Ecuador, and — as later reporting revealed — Spain to spy on Assange, keeping him in conditions Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has called torture outright.[44] The grand jury proceedings against Assange were themselves secret; Kiriakou notes the fact that Assange had been charged with anything at all only became public because of an accidental Justice Department filing error in an unrelated Eastern District of Virginia case.[45] He has separately relayed a secondhand account that Assange was at one point negotiating a Justice Department deal to drop the Vault 7-related charges, which collapsed after FBI Director James Comey found out and stopped it; reading further into the episode, Kiriakou describes the Justice Department negotiating in January–February 2017, through Assange’s attorney Adam Waldman, for Assange’s immunity and safe passage in exchange for his testifying that Russia was not the source of the 2016 WikiLeaks releases — until Senator Mark Warner alerted Comey, who ordered the negotiations stopped.[46][47]
PayPal and the pattern of de-platforming
Kiriakou traces the modern pattern of financial-platform de-platforming to Assange’s case specifically: PayPal cut Assange off without a judicial order after the State Department falsely claimed he had broken the law, with PayPal saying it didn’t need a judicial judgment and would simply take the executive branch’s word for it to “un-person” him — a precedent, Kiriakou argues, that set the template for everyone who has been de-platformed since.[48]
Personal connections
Kiriakou’s own path to Assange advocacy was not straightforward. He says the initial cache of documents Chelsea Manning gave to WikiLeaks happened to include his own Social Security number — buried in an obscure cable about a Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip — which initially left him angry at Assange.[49] After his release from prison, he connected with Dr. Suelette Dreyfus, founder of the Australian NGO Blueprint for Free Speech and a co-founder of WikiLeaks alongside Assange, who asked him in 2015 why he was not an Assange supporter. When Kiriakou raised secondhand accounts that Assange had “kind of a problem with women,” Dreyfus told him she believed police had put those women up to the allegations.[50][51] He came to see the two cases as inseparable: “in a way we’re all Julian Assange” — arguing that if the government successfully prosecutes a non-U.S.-citizen publisher under the Espionage Act, journalists at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post are next.[52] He appeared on at least one whistleblower-conference panel alongside Assange, Edward Snowden’s lead attorney, and an Australian journalist who had been among the original reporters on the WikiLeaks story.[53] He also recalls, without particular sympathy, enjoying Chelsea Manning’s Twitter feud with actor James Woods.[54]
In May 2023 Kiriakou disclosed that a Twitter attorney had told him, before Elon Musk’s takeover, that the DOJ had obtained his own Twitter communications under a sealed warrant during the Biden administration — he said he did not know the nature of the case.[55] Around the same period he described Assange as being “slowly executed” in public, tempered by a glimmer of hope in a letter Assange wrote, published via his wife Stella, addressed to the new King of England.[56]
The DOJ anniversary rally and the self-immolation attempt
Kiriakou has twice described the same episode: a rally outside the Department of Justice on the anniversary of Assange’s arrest, organized by Misty Winston, at which he gave a five-minute speech followed by Jerry Condon of Veterans for Peace.[57] During the event, a young man in his mid-20s stripped naked, doused his genitals and clothes in Sterno lighter fluid, and attempted to set himself on fire while Joe Lauria of Consortium News and Ford Fisher livestreamed it; the man was so nervous he was visibly shaking and could not get his lighter to catch.[58][59] Attorney Skip Kalton House, a fellow Assange supporter, reached him first and slapped the lighter from his hand; Kiriakou then shoved the man eight to ten feet away and kicked the lighter out of reach, preventing him from self-immolating.[60] The man had a fresh, inflamed tattoo reading “Free Assange” across his stomach and was ultimately taken by police for a mental-health evaluation rather than arrested — which, to Kiriakou’s surprise, he considered the appropriate outcome.[61]
Kiriakou connects the incident to a broader decline: the U.S. had, by his account, dropped to around 43rd or 46th in the World Press Freedom Index — behind Bosnia-Herzegovina and Costa Rica — a fall he attributes in part to Assange’s continued imprisonment.[62]
The near-pardon
Kiriakou says that on Trump’s last day in office, Tucker Carlson told him Mitch McConnell had personally called and killed a planned joint pardon of Assange, Edward Snowden, and Kiriakou himself — McConnell’s stated fear being that pardoning all three together would cost him control of the Republican caucus in the Senate on Trump’s own impeachment vote.[63]
Kiriakou’s own case, in parallel
Kiriakou traces his own whistleblowing to his fifteen years of CIA service, rising to become chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, and urges other whistleblowers to hire an attorney experienced in whistleblower defense before going public, rather than waiting as he did.[64][65] He pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by confirming the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s rendition program, was sentenced to 30 months, and was released in 2015 after serving almost two years.[66]