Unless you followed the ups and downs — well, mostly the downs — of Julian Assange’s life over the past 15 years, you’ll have to wait until the last half-hour of Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary, The Six Billion Dollar Man, to understand what its title means.

By that point, the WikiLeaks founder had been holed up for over six years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he faced imminent arrest by the UK authorities. It’s then that we learn how the first Trump administration offered, via the Imf, to loan Ecuador’s government $6.5 billion if they agreed to kick Assange out. The move is not exactly shocking, especially coming from a dealmaker like Trump, and it shows just how much the U.S. authorities were willing to pay so they could nab one of their most wanted men.

Much of Jarecki’s jam-packed and informative two-hour feature, which...