It's odd to read what was really at stake. Pompeo's team was ready to assasinate Assange in London, and the only thing stopping them was the justice dept and only nominally the office of the President. What WL (and Snowden) did was show to the public the intelligence community, who was ostensibly accountable to them, for what they truthfully were. The news media took a bigger credibility hit for their history of spiking these stories and delivering hit pieces than the spies ever did.
Most people saw how the sausage was made and decided they still liked sausage. Not only do we tolerate what these services do, but now that we know about it and have done nothing to change it, we have acknowledged it and rewarded them for it all. Snowden's story practically created the ability for retired generals to accept pulpits from tv news where they can armchair QB the issues of the day, and they should thank him for the minor television celebrity and speaker circuit fêting they now enjoy. Whether that undermines the credibility of their institutions is still to be seen, but all that plotting to kill Assange just to sustain some lame narrative about a bureaucracy seems like it was just a fatal distraction from the real unseating of western power that we are clearly into the endgame of today.