No one was more pleased at the release of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange than Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had personally lobbied U.S. authorities on his behalf.
López Obrador considered Assange a political prisoner and had met with members of his family on several occasions.
After spending the past five years in a U.K. jail pending extradition to the United States, Assange was freed on June 26 by a U.S. court in the Northern Mariana Islands after pleading guilty to a single charge of espionage as part of a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice. He immediately returned to the country of his birth, Australia.
López Obrador noted this week that he had sent letters to Donald Trump and Joe Biden interceding for Assange’s freedom. He constantly referred to the case as a violation of freedom of expression.
Assange was indicted in 2019 by a federal grand jury in Virginia on more than a dozen charges alleging he illegally obtained and disseminated classified information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on his WikiLeaks site.
Assange spent seven years in self-exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London before his arrest in 2019 by British authorities. He had entered the diplomatic mission in 2012, after seeking asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden on a rape charge. He feared that if extradited to Sweden he might subsequently be sent to the United States.