SAIPAN – The irony was almost too neat, and Jim Kingman felt it land as he sat in the gleaming, barely used federal courthouse on Saipan in the summer of 2024 and watched the United States government close the book on Julian Assange.
They had come a very long way to do it. The head of the Justice Department’s national security division flew in that morning; by early afternoon the WikiLeaks founder had pleaded guilty to a single Espionage Act count over the disclosure of Bradley Manning’s classified files, been sentenced to time served, and was gone — three hours, beginning to end, the federal lawyers not bothering to feign curiosity about the island they had chosen as the stage.
