Anyone who believes in national security would see arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a villain, not a hero, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday."
"If you believe in national security, if you believe in the safety of the United States he's a villain," Gingrich said during a Fox News' "Fox and Friends" interview. "I think it is a very good thing that the United States government is communicating that it may take a while to get to you, but if you violate our secrets, if you endanger our national security, if you put the country at risk, we're going to come after you until we get you."
He added that he believes being tough is the right approach.
"Nobody has the right to leak secrets that could endanger lives and in fact could endanger the whole country," Gingrich said.
Assange is charged with conspiring with Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. intelligence analyst, in 2010 to break into a government computer. If convicted, Assange faces up to five years in prison.
Just before leaving office in 2017, then-President Barack Obama commuted Manning's sentence, letting her out of prison nearly three decades early. Gingrich said he has no idea how Assange's attorneys will play out the case, or if the commutation will affect it.
"I think, if you look how much damage was done by all of these leaks, how many people who cooperated with us who were suddenly exposed, how many of our allies were offended, these, this is not a game," said Gingrich. "This is not somebody's right to go off on their own. At the heart of the civilization has to be a set of rules and some kind of accountability."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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