Trump surrogate’s tweet about Biden’s 'desperate gambit' backfires when reporter brings receipts

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been released from a U.K. prison after reaching a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Assange, according to NBC News, will avoid incarceration in the U.S. by pleading guilty to a conspiracy charge.

MAGA businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran against Donald Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primary but endorsed the presumptive nominee after dropping out of the race, used Assange's release to attack President Joe Biden in a June 25 post on X, formerly Twitter. But Ramaswamy got a fact-check from Semafor's David Weigel.

Ramaswamy posted, "It's great that Julian Assange will finally be released (in what smells like a desperate Biden gambit for libertarian votes), but it's shameful that he had to spend years rotting in a foreign prison for doing what other reporters do regularly, while the government employee who leaked to him - Chelsea Manning - had her sentence commuted by Obama because she's a member of a favored political class (transgender)."

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The far-right MAGA Republican added, "Julian Assange deserves a pardon & it's long past overdue to restore one standard of law again in America."

After seeing Ramaswamy's tweet, Weigel briefly explained why his premise was misleading.

Weigel tweeted, "He was indicted by Bill Barr’s DOJ!" And the Semafor journalist linked to a May 23, 2019 DOJ press release headlined, "WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Charged in 18-Count Superseding Indictment."

The DOJ press release read, "A federal grand jury returned an 18-count superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, 47, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange's alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States…. The superseding indictment alleges that Assange was complicit with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, in unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents related to the national defense."

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