One of America’s most wanted criminals has successfully avoided justice in his years-long standoff with the U.S. government. Julian Assange, who shared via his website WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of stolen classified U.S. documents that he aided in obtaining, mostly related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will walk free now that he and the Biden administration have agreed to a plea deal.

Assange has been held in custody in the United Kingdom for the past five years in an attempt to avoid extradition to the U.S. Under the terms of the deal announced on Monday, he has agreed to plead guilty to one felony violation of the Espionage Act. In return, he will serve a five-year sentence covered by the time he has already spent in the UK and will be allowed to return to his home country of Australia.

It’s a sweetheart of a deal for a man who endangered the lives of U.S. military personnel as well as an unknown number of confidential Iraqi and Afghan sources. Furthermore, Assange damaged trust in America, as our nation’s reputation for protecting critical sources was significantly compromised. His leaks actively aided America’s enemies, including terrorist organizations like the Taliban and other Islamic jihadists.

The deal relieved a headache for the Biden administration, which has again taken the easy way out of another foreign policy issue.

Meanwhile, Assange bested the U.S. and won supporters simply by ridiculously playing up the false claim that he was engaged in legitimate journalism and an altruistic pursuit of the truth. Sadly, many Americans bought it. He engaged in lying, cheating, manipulation, and theft to get the information he wanted and justified all these crimes under the banner of “truth-seeker.”

This wasn’t a journalist receiving information that needed to see the light of day for … reasons. No, Assange assisted traitor Bradley “Chelsea” Manning in what the indictment specified as “cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a United States government network used for classified documents and communications.” This was done so that Manning could procure thousands of classified U.S. military documents, which Assange turned around and published, giving our enemies a window into our strategic operations against them. The point was to damage America, not blow the whistle on the deep state.

Barack Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence after just seven years, while taxpayers were given the bill for his gender “transition.” Biden has now finished the job.

Unfortunately, thanks to increased political polarization and the Washington deep state’s actions against Donald Trump, public sympathy for Assange has grown. Some view him not as a criminal but as a hero who dared to stand up to an abusive government. Never mind that he helped engage in the theft of classified materials and conflated this action with legitimate investigative journalism.

For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to the news of the deal by stating, “Julian Assange struck a plea deal and will go free! I am overjoyed. He’s a generational hero.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who months ago joined with her counterpart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in demanding that Biden let Assange go free, celebrated the deal with similar language: “What an incredible sight. Julian Assange walking FREE outdoors!”

On the other side, former Vice President Mike Pence blasted Biden’s action: “Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The Biden administration’s plea deal with Assange is a miscarriage of justice and dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our Armed Forces and their families.”

Much of the reason for the differing opinions on Assange can be tied to the failure of the mainstream media to engage in non-biased, genuine journalism. The MSM has lost the trust of the American public because much of the MSM has demonstrated that it is more interested in promoting a leftist political worldview than simply reporting the news.

Historically, the press has been dubbed the fourth estate, with the idea being that via its reporting of the news, specifically regarding government, it served the populace by helping to hold politicians to account. However, since the MSM has unmistakably picked a political side, its role of holding the spotlight up equally to politicians, no matter their party affiliation, has been tossed to the side and, along with it, the trust of the American people. Thus, when a figure like Assange paints himself as a “truth-teller,” he ironically ends up deceiving many who, having become so jaded by the establishment media, are eager to embrace a media rebel.

What America’s media landscape needs are more honest and principled journalists who, irrespective of personal political opinions, seek to report the news to the American public and let them decide what they think rather than being told by some talkinghead what to think.