Watch the full episode here:
Good evening. It's Thursday, June 8th. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble. The free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight: the true moment of truth is essentially coming to a head for Julian Assange and the Biden Justice Department. The WikiLeaks founder has been battling, since he was arrested in 2019 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the efforts by the Biden Justice Department to extradite him to the United States to stand trial on espionage charges – under the Espionage Act of 1917 – for apparently the crime of publishing top secret documents which revealed serious war crimes on the part of the United States and the British in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as corruption on the part of their allies.
Shortly thereafter, the British Home Secretary signed an extradition order ordering Assange to stand trial in the United States. Assange has spent the year invoking all of the last appeals that he has, and he is essentially out of appeals. Earlier this week, a British court rejected one of his last appeals. The only appeal he has left is a last-ditch procedural one before a British court and then possibly an appeal to a European court on the grounds that his extradition would violate European human rights guarantees. But absent some highly unexpected event, Assange will find himself in a Virginia courthouse standing trial on felonies under the Espionage Act, all stemming from WikiLeaks, his 2010 publications of classified documents that WikiLeaks did not obtain but was instead provided to them by the U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning. We'll examine these possible last-minute interventions and the reason why the Biden administration may not want Assange coming to the U.S. at all.
Then, reporting from the Twitter Files continues. The independent journalist Aaron Maté documented how the FBI worked jointly with Ukrainian authorities to pressure Twitter to censor journalists and other commentators who are deemed by Ukraine to be insufficiently supportive of the Ukrainian narrative and thus guilty of “disinformation”. Among those targeted by Ukraine and FBI access was Maté himself.
Twitter, to its credit, recognized the threat posed to core free speech and free press rights by the Ukrainian campaign. But the fact that the Ukrainians, while now for 15 months demanding an unlimited supply of American money and arms, are yet again seeking to infringe our basic rights with all of its blacklists and demand for silencing reveals the fraud at the heart of its claims that Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials are “fighting for democracy”.
As we do every Tuesday and Thursday night, as soon as we're done with our one-hour live show here on Rumble, we will move to Locals for our interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback. To obtain access to our aftershow, simply sign up to become a member of our Locals community. The red Join button right below the video player right here on the Rumble page enables you to access that show and the transcript for each show, as well as written journalism that we post there. And it also helps the independent journalism that we do.
As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form as well. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms, where you can follow us, rate and review the show, which helps spread its visibility.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
We have spent many shows reporting on the grave injustice and the serious danger posed by the United States effort to prosecute Julian Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917. As you may recall, the Espionage Act was a law first implemented by Woodrow Wilson, designed to do nothing other than criminalize Americans’ dissent to the idea that the U.S. should enter World War I and fight it as combatants. And indeed, many people were prosecuted under the Espionage Act for doing nothing other than opposing President Wilson's war policies in that European war. Efforts to overturn that law on the grounds that it is blatantly unconstitutional have produced some of the most notorious and shameful rulings in Supreme Court history and yet the court has protected this law. It is one of the most extreme and repressive laws in the U.S. Code, and it has basically been allowed to remain dormant for all of the 20th century.
The one time that it was actually invoked in a high-profile case was when the Nixon administration used it to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for the crime of leaking the Pentagon Papers, a volume of top-secret documents that revealed that the U.S. government was systematically lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. In other words, the U.S. government spent years insisting publicly that it was just a few months away from winning the war and vanquishing the North Vietnamese, all it needed was some more money, some more conscripts, some more authority, some more bombs, some more weapons. And yet, privately, as the Pentagon Papers revealed, the U.S. government and its top officials inside the Pentagon and war-making agencies in the U.S. security state had acknowledged, from the start of the war, that victory would be impossible, that the greatest and the best-case scenario – the best-case scenario – was a stalemate.
Ellsberg was somebody who started at the Rand Corporation, had been an advocate of the Vietnam War, and helped plan the Vietnam War from his position in the Rand Corporation. He had access to the most sensitive secrets that the U.S. government possessed and along the way in the mid-sixties, he realized that the U.S. government was prosecuting this war based on a lie and that it was ending the lives of thousands of Americans who it did not volunteer to go to Vietnam, but instead were drafted and was also ending the lives of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. As an act of conscience, he came forward and said, I can no longer stand by while I have the evidence in my hand that the U.S. government is lying to the American people and continue to conceal it, even though it's likely that I will go to prison for life if I reveal it.
He first tried to get senators to read the Pentagon Papers into the record because senators under the Constitution have full immunity from prosecution for anything they do or say on the Senate floor. And not a single senator was courageous enough to do it, and some left it to Ellsberg. He finally went to The New York Times and provided these documents. The New York Times reported on it, and then the next administration dug up this archaic statute from the Wilson era and tried to use it to say that Ellsberg was guilty of espionage, even though Ellsberg's harshest critics acknowledged that he was not acting on behalf of a foreign government. They tried for a while to claim he was a Kremlin agent, but nobody believed that. He went to a journalist and leaked this information in order to inform the American people what the truth was.
The Nixon administration ultimately was unsuccessful in its efforts to prosecute him because they had gotten caught engaged in all sorts of serious misconduct – this is 1971 – including ordering a break into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in order to find incriminating psychosexual secrets that would discredit him. And that misconduct resulted in the dismissal of the criminal case against him. Had that not happened, he almost certainly would have spent the rest of his life in prison. Ellsberg is now 93. He is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and has weeks if not less, to live. But that was one of the things that he did in history, was reminded the U.S. government about the existence of this very repressive law and the reason it became such a valuable tool in the hands of the U.S. government – because Ellsberg, his plan all along was he wanted to come forward and identify himself as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. He didn't want to hide behind it in the media. He decided he owed it to the American people to come forward and identify himself and explain why he leaked these documents, even though they were marked top secret. And his plan was to go to trial and convince a jury of his peers that even though the law prohibited him from doing what he had done, his actions were morally justified, he was obligated to do it, ethically, because the evil of forcing him to remain silent while watching the government lie to the population about something so significant outweighed the imperatives of the law. But what ended up happening was he went up on the stand and he began to explain to the jury, ‘Yes, I did this, but I was justified in doing so, and here's why” and the judge immediately shot him down and ruled that the Espionage Act, unlike most laws, is a strict liability statute – Meaning: it doesn't matter what motive you had when you violated it; if you are authorized to receive classified information and then you publish classified information or disclose it to someone who's unauthorized, to receive it, you are automatically guilty of felonies under the Espionage Act of 1917, and there is no defense available to you. And when the judge ruled that, it showed the U.S. government – the CIA, the FBI. Homeland Security didn't exist then, that was created in 2002, the NSA, and the rest of the U.S. security state agencies – ‘Look at this incredibly powerful weapon you have in your hand.’ It means you can take any document that exists – including revealing and proving that you've committed grave crimes or that you've lied to the American people – all you have to do is mark that document “classified “or secret or top-secret and it becomes a felony – years, if not decades in prison, is the punishment for anyone to take that document and reveal it to the world. Even if you've abused your powers by marking them secret with the intention of concealing your own crimes and your own deceit. That was the effect of that ruling and what the Espionage Act of 1917 meant.
The Espionage Act was not used after that by any president through the Ford administration, the Reagan administration, fighting the Cold War, fighting the wars in Central America, nor was it used during the Clinton years, or even by George Bush and Dick Cheney under the War on Terror. That statute was picked up and was aggressively weaponized under the Obama administration to punish and criminalize anybody who leaked information, even whistleblowers who were exposing government crimes. In fact, the Obama administration, the Obama Justice Department under Eric Holder prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous presidents combined. So, we went from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, and there was a grand total of two prosecutions under the Espionage Act, one of which was Daniel Ellsberg. We get to the Obama administration and remember, Barack Obama ran on promises of restoring transparency to government – uprooting the excesses of secrecy abuses and civil liberties abuses carried out by George Bush and Dick Cheney and the War on Terror – and instead, he did the opposite. In so many instances, he strengthened and expanded those abuses of George Bush and Dick Cheney, including by re-weaponizing the Espionage Act and using it to prosecute more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined.
That was the statute under which Edward Snowden was prosecuted and still is being charged. And I remember so well when Edward Snowden sought asylum in Russia after the Obama administration purposely trapped him there when he was transiting on his way to Latin America to get asylum. John Kerry and other Obama officials, and Hillary Clinton would constantly go to the media and say, ‘Oh, if Edward Snowden really believes in what he's saying, that he was justified in doing what he did, he should “man up” – those were the words of John Kerry – and go back to the United States and argue to a jury of his peers that he was, in fact, justified to do what he did. They were deliberately deceiving the public because they very well knew that under the Espionage Act of 1917, there is no such defense available. You cannot go before a jury of your peers and argue that what you did was justified, the way you can with so many other crimes where you can argue you didn't have the requisite ill-intent or malicious intent necessary to be turned into a criminal. The Espionage Act is a strict liability law, according to the ruling in that Ellsberg trial. And so, people charged under this law are essentially consigned, inevitably, to being found guilty, as long as it can be proven that they published classified information without authorization.
The other thing that makes the Espionage Act of 1917 also dangerous is that it can actually be used against not just whistleblowers or sources, meaning people who work inside the U.S. government and took an oath to maintain secrecy the way Daniel Ellsberg did, the way Edward Snowden did, the way Chelsea Manning did, the way all the other people charged by the Obama Justice Department did. It can also be used to prosecute people who never worked for the U.S. government in their lives and therefore are under no obligation to maintain the secrecy of these documents. In other words, it can be used to prosecute journalists, who receive information that is classified, from a source, and then publish it. If you read the language of the Espionage Act, it doesn't confine itself just to sources. It essentially says anyone is guilty of a felony if they publish classified information – not only people who have an oath to keep it secret. So, in the language of the Espionage Act, you can actually criminalize journalists.
The question has always been, if you were to try to use the Espionage Act against journalists and prosecute journalists, even though they're under no obligation to maintain classified documents in secret, would you run afoul of the First Amendment guarantee of a free press? The U.S. government has never wanted to test that because they liked having this weapon to hang over the heads of journalists. During the Snowden reporting, they constantly threatened us publicly and privately with prosecution because they were hoping that it would scare us, that we would think in any kind of difficult case, ‘Well, maybe it's no longer worth publishing because the government always has the option to prosecute prosecutors under the Espionage Act.’ Or maybe, ‘Look, we won all the awards. We've gotten all these plaudits. Maybe it's time to stop. Maybe we should just not report all the stories in the archive that the public has a right to know’ – out of fear that the Justice Department might prosecute us. They like having this weapon hang over your head, and they use it aggressively. And they don't want to risk losing it by having a court ruling where they prosecute a journalist and the journalist successfully raises a free press defense.
Now we get to the case of Julian Assange. The Obama administration desperately wanted to prosecute Julian Assange of the Espionage Act. They convened a grand jury, they spent years investigating Assange and they knew from the start that they couldn't charge Assange with crimes simply for publishing these documents because Assange worked in partnership with some of the leading media outlets in the world that published these same documents, including The New York Times and The Guardian and El País and all sorts of other media outlets around the world. So, the question always was, how can you criminalize Julian Assange and his publication of these top-secret documents but not criminalize and prosecute The New York Times, The Guardian, and all the other newspapers that published the same material? And so, the challenge for the Obama Justice Department was to find something that Assange did that went beyond merely receiving these documents from Chelsea Manning and then publishing them, to say that he somehow became part of the criminal acts themselves beyond just publication. The Obama administration has, then, searched and searched and searched for years using grand juries. They subpoenaed people. They subpoenaed documents and witnesses, and they could find nothing. And the Obama administration concluded, as a result, that even though it wanted to, it could not and would not prosecute Julian Assange and it never indicted Julian Assange under the Espionage Act because it could not find anything he did that went beyond mere publishing.
Enter the Trump administration, and especially Mike Pompeo, who was Trump's first director of the CIA and Pompeo, I think most Trump supporters now realize was completely deceitful in presenting himself as some sort of populist or some sort of adherent to MAGA ideology – he was pure neocon from the start. If you look at his voting record when he was in the House of Representatives, he supported every single U.S. war, including the Obama administration's covert war to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a war that even Ron DeSantis, when he was a member of the House, opposed, even though he had a pretty standard pro-war record as a Republican House member. And Mike Pompeo stood up as CIA director in 2017 and gave one of the creepiest and most menacing speeches I've ever heard from a top official in which he vowed he would do everything in his power, tirelessly to work to destroy WikiLeaks, he said “WikiLeaks believes they have the right to First Amendment free press and free speech rights, but they do not, and the time for them to abuse our Constitution has come to an end.’ And Pompeo worked tirelessly to get the Trump Justice Department to indict Julian Assange. And they did. And they charged him with crimes under the Espionage Act of 1917.
If you read the indictment and I just want to be clear, nothing in the indictment has anything to do with what Assange did in 2016, with publishing documents relating to the Hillary Clinton campaign or John Podesta's emails – that is the reason Democrats hate him. That is the reason the Biden Justice Department is pursuing Assange. They hate him because they still blame him for helping Hillary Clinton lose the 2016 election because Julian Assange did what is the job of journalists: to obtain material and relevant documents in the form of those emails and published them to enable us to know the truth about Hillary Clinton in her campaign – you may remember that that reporting was so convincing that it forced the top five officials of the Democratic National Committee, including Deborah Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, to resign in disgrace, in the middle of the 2016 campaign, because they got caught cheating on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the primary because they were fearful that Bernie Sanders was going to become the nominee. And it revealed all sorts of other things about Hillary Clinton, including what she was saying to Goldman Sachs – when she was making $500,000 or $750,000 in private speeches for which she refused to provide the transcript – and all the other things that got revealed. That's why Democrats hate him. That's why the Biden Department of Justice is pursuing him so much. It is a political motive, but the indictment itself is about the 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war files, which, as you may recall, included things like a video showing U.S. forces in Iraq shooting indiscriminately at civilians, including two Reuters journalists whom they killed. And when people came to rescue the dead civilians, they shot at them, and all kinds of documents that revealed other war crimes committed by the U.S. and the UK and all sorts of corruption throughout the world, including in the Arab world, on the part of American allies. In fact, Bill Keller, the editor-in-chief of the New York Times back then, credited those publications with helping to spark the Arab Spring, that it made the corruption of leaders in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and Qatar so manifest that it caused protest movements to break out all over the Arab world. That's the impact this reporting had. It was journalism more impactful, more consequential than anything anybody in the corporate media could ever hope to get close to, even if they lived to be a thousand years old. And I can assure you the fact that Assange is one of the most accomplished journalists of his generation, if not the most accomplished, is a major reason why there's so much support in the U.S. media for prosecuting him under the Espionage Act.
Now, in 2019, when this indictment was unsealed and then when it was amended, there is a claim in the indictment that Assange went beyond merely passively receiving these documents from Chelsea Manning and then publishing them. But the indictment acknowledges that at the time that WikiLeaks got all of those documents, Assange played no role in their acquisition. Chelsea Manning was court-martialed and sentenced to eight years in prison or actually longer. Obama ended up commuting her sentence after she served seven years, and the facts of how she got these documents were demonstrated in that proceeding. She went in, she had gone to Iraq, and she became very disturbed by things that the U.S. government was doing to Iraqi dissidents. She thought we were there to fight them up for democracy and she found that people were being summarily imprisoned, that media outlets were being shut down – just like Daniel Ellsberg working inside the Rand Corporation and just like Edward Snowden working inside the NSA, in the CIA – she became convinced that the mythology she bought into was actually false and that the U.S. government's actions were, on balance, a net harm. And she went in and downloaded all of those materials by herself and sent them to Julian Assange. Even the government admits that.
So how then does this indictment claim that Julian Assange did something beyond publishing? Because when Assange got these materials like any good journalist would, he did two things. Number one, he wanted her to get more so that they could report more, and he encouraged her to go back into the system and download other materials that she could send to him so that he could report on. Every single investigative journalist in the world – if you have a source come to you and says, ‘Here, I have material I want to provide you,’ that journalist is going to say: ‘Oh, but you also have this? You also have this?’ ‘It'd be great if we could have this.’ ‘Are you able to get that?’ Every single journalist in the world does that – encourages the source to give them more material. So, one of the two things Assange is accused of doing that makes him more than just a mere passive recipient of classified information, and then a publisher of it was encouraging her to go and get more. Even though she never did. And then the other thing he's accused of doing was trying to help her crack a password so that she could use the system without detection. In other words, he was trying to help her, his source, evade detection.
It turns out this password-cracking effort was unsuccessful. She was never able to do it. Contrary to what you may have heard, to what the media has tried to depict, Assange is not even accused of being the one who hacked into these files and took these materials. He didn't need to hack into them. Chelsea Manning had access to them as a U.S. Army private. That was part of her job, and she used that access to download these materials, none of which, by the way, was top secret. They were all at a very low level of secrecy designation, classified or secret. None of them was top secret because she was just a U.S. Army private who shouldn't even have access to the most secretive material the way Edward Snowden did, the way Daniel Ellsberg did. So those are the two things he's accused of doing, encouraging a source to get more material and giving her tips on how she might avoid getting caught.
The irony is, in 2019, when that indictment was unveiled, I went to The Washington Post and I wrote an op-ed, they had asked me to do so, arguing that every single journalist, no matter your views of Julian Assange, should be vehemently opposed to this indictment. And my argument was it creates a blueprint for any government anywhere in the world to criminalize investigative journalism of every kind. As I just got done explaining here, what I argued there is that every single investigative journalist does regularly, what the entire indictment hinges on, namely encourages their sources to get more information and helps their source evade detection. So, for example, if a source calls you on the telephone, on an open telephone line, and says, ‘I have very important sensitive secrets to give you that reveal high-level corruption and deceit that I think you should report,’ the first thing a responsible journalist is going to say to that source is, ‘Don't call me in an open phone line. Use encryption. Call me on Signal or Telegram or some other means. Use a Dropbox of the kind that the Freedom of the Press Foundation and other press freedom groups have given to newsrooms to enable sources not to get caught.’ Every responsible journalist not only has the right but the duty to give their source instructions on how not to get caught. If that becomes criminalized, if that makes a journalist become a conspirator with the source – to do nothing other than ask the source to get more documents and help them evade detection – it means that every single investigative journalist on this planet who really does investigative journalism, meaning something more than just writing out what the CIA told you to say – which I realize excludes most members of media – but people who do actual investigative journalism are susceptible under this precedent to being prosecuted and criminalized. And that was why I argued in The Washington Post, it's so vital to oppose it.
Ironically, I wrote that article in April 2018. It turned out to be just a few weeks before I was contacted by a source in Brazil who had hacked into the telephone chats of some of the most powerful prosecutors and judges in Brazil and sent me an archive of those materials that I then used to report – and it changed the course of Brazilian history. It revealed that the anti-corruption probe here in Brazil was actually driven by corruption. It reversed the convictions of numerous high-level politicians, including Lula da Silva, and it had a big impact. And eight months later, after I started that reporting, Brazilian prosecutors loyal to the judge, whose corruption I had exposed indicted me, and charged me with multiple felony counts. The theory they used to try to criminalize my work was a verbatim copy of the indictment filed by the U.S. Justice Department against Julian Assange, namely, they acknowledged that by the time the source came to me, they had already hacked all this information – but I didn't participate in any way in the hack – but they claim that at some point, when the source asked me, ‘Should I keep hold of the chats you and I are having?’ and I said to him, ‘You don't need to because we're going to keep copies ourselves’ that was an implicit instruction to the source to destroy the chats he was having with me. And according to the Brazilian prosecutors, that was my becoming part of the conspiracy by trying to help the source evade detection. And when I did that, according to the prosecution, I became part of the criminal conspiracy I was charged with, I don't know, 182 felony counts facing 346 years in prison. The Brazilian courts quickly dismissed the charges in the indictment because there had been a Supreme Court ruling from Brazil banning any attempt to retaliate against me for the reporting on the grounds that doing so would violate the Brazilian free press clause.
The warning that I issued in The Washington Post that this could criminalize any investigative journalist was something that just months later I experienced firsthand. And so, to describe this indictment as dangerous is to severely overstate the case. And yet, the Biden administration is very close to having Julian Assange be forcibly extradited to the United States, a country he has barely visited, I believe, one time for four days. He's not an American citizen. He never worked in the U.S. government. He has no legal duty to keep secrets of the United States government. And yet they want to physically bring him here onto American soil and put him on trial in a Virginia courtroom where they know the jury will be composed of U.S. security state agents, people who work for defense contractors and try him under the Espionage Act of 1917, which, as I said, is a strict liability law, you have almost no chance of acquittal – if you are tried under that law, you have no right even to argue that what you did was justified, as long as they can prove, and of course, he admits, that he published material that the U.S. government wanted to be kept secret.
Assange basically has been fighting this extradition ever since he was arrested in London when the Ecuadorians withdrew the asylum they had granted to him and the London police came into the embassy and dragged him out in that very dramatic footage. He's lost at every level except the first. The first court to ever hear his objections to being extradited ruled in his favor, but only on the grounds that his mental health was so fragile that it could not withstand the rigors and hardships of a maximum-security prison in the United States. The British court cited reports from human rights groups that maximum security prisons in the United States are uniquely harsh and violative of core human rights. But the U.S. government came in and provided assurances that Assange wouldn't be kept under those harshest of conditions and so the British courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of the Biden administration and ruled that Assange has to be extradited.
Last year, after the substantive appeals were exhausted, the British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, signed an extradition order. There you see, from The Guardian, in June 2020, the headline “Julian Assange's Extradition from UK to U.S. Approved by Home Secretary.” So, the extradition order is already signed. As the article says,
Priti Patel has approved the extradition of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the US, a decision the organization immediately said it would appeal against in the high court.
The case passed to the British home secretary last month after the UK supreme court ruled that there were no legal questions over assurances given by US authorities on Assange’s likely treatment. (The Guardian. June 17, 2022)
So, he had almost no chance left, but he pursued it anyway because he is very scared of going to the United States and being disappeared into the U.S. prison system, as anybody rational would be. And one of the last few appeals he had left was just rejected. This week here you see from the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, the headline, “Julian Assange dangerously close to extradition following the high court rejection of appeal.”
In a three-page written decision issued on 6 June, a single judge, Justice Swift, rejected all eight grounds of Assange’s appeal against the extradition order signed by then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel in June 2022.
This leaves only one final step in the UK courts, as the defense has five working days to submit an appeal of only 20 pages to a panel of two judges, who will convene a public hearing. Further appeals will not be possible at the domestic level, but Assange could bring a case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is deeply concerned by the UK High Court’s decision rejecting WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange’s appeal against his extradition order, bringing him dangerously close to being extradited to the United States, where he could face the rest of his life in prison for publishing leaked classified documents in 2010.
“It is absurd that a single judge can issue a three-page decision that could land Julian Assange in prison for the rest of his life and permanently impact the climate for journalism around the world.
The historical weight of what happens next cannot be overstated; it is time to put a stop to this relentless targeting of Assange and act instead to protect journalism and press freedom. Our call on President Biden is now more urgent than ever: drop these charges, close the case against Assange, and allow for his release without further delay.
Rebecca Vincent
RSF’s Director of Campaigns #FreeAssange
https://rsf.org/pt-br/free-assange-petition-april-2022
In a tweet earlier today, Assange's wife, Stella Assange, vowed that her husband will make a renewed application to the high court. She said it's going to be before two high court judges. She said she's optimistic that they will prevail, but the reality is he's almost certain to lose that appeal and he may have no appeals left or maybe just one to a European court.
So, the question now becomes: does the Biden justice department, just Joe Biden, really want Julian Assange to come in the United States standing trial outside of a courthouse where almost certainly protesters in Assange's defense proclaiming him a hero will gather? Imagine what that's going to look like to the world. The U.S. and its media outlets love to condemn all sorts of other governments for attacking journalists, and yet, right on American soil, there will be the image to the entire world that they are putting on trial and attempting to prison for life. Under an espionage statute of 1917, the most consequential pioneering journalist of his generation.
One of the only ways out of this is that Australia, the country where Assange was born, the only country in which he is a citizen, he has never been a citizen of the United States. I'm amazed when I see Liberals justifying his prosecution by saying he's guilty of treason. Treason to whom? I think they think everyone on the planet, even if you're not an American citizen, owes a duty of loyalty to the American government. Australia is a pretty subservient junior partner of the United States. It has been very meek and mute in defense of its own citizen’s rights until very recently. The Australian prime minister, who's pretty new, has been becoming more vocal about the fact that he thinks it's time for the Biden administration to stop its prosecution of Assange.
Here from Associated Press, in May, “Australian Prime Minister says he is working effectively to free WikiLeaks founder.” The article says:
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was working in the “most effective way possible” to secure the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange but declined an invitation Monday to meet the Australian citizen’s wife.
Independent lawmaker Andrew Wilkie asked Albanese if he would meet Assange’s wife Stella Assange, who was watching Parliament from the public gallery. Albanese said a meeting with Stella Assange wouldn’t help her 51-year-old husband who is in a London prison fighting extradition to the United States.
“A priority for us isn’t doing something that is a demonstration, it’s actually doing something that produces an outcome,” Albanese told Parliament. “And that’s my focus, not grandstanding.”
Albanese said he appreciated opposition leader Peter Dutton’s recent comments that he agreed with the government that Assange should be released.
“I’ve made it very clear to the U.S. administration and also to the U.K. administration of the Australian government’s view and I appreciate the fact that that is now a bipartisan view … that enough is enough,” Albanese said.
“Nothing is served from the ongoing incarceration of Julian Assange. What I have done … is to act in the most effective way possible,” he said. “What I have done is act diplomatically in order to maximize the opportunity that is there of breaking through an issue which has gone on for far too long.” (AP News. May 22, 2023)
That is a way out, but it's very difficult because imagine what would happen if the Biden administration, which kept Assange in prison for four years – starting with the Trump administration and now the Biden administration, the U.S. government – kept Assange in prison for four years, even though he's been convicted of no crime other than bail jumping for which he had an 11-month term that he long ago served and he's been kept in prison simply because they say he's a “flight risk.” – To avoid extradition. So, he's been in prison for four years with no conviction, right at the moment of truth, when it's finally time for the Biden administration to put him on trial and present the evidence that he's actually guilty, for them to come forward and say, ‘You know what? Never mind. Just let him go back to Australia. We don't really want to prosecute him.’ That would vindicate the theory that I certainly have long had, which is that the only thing the United States wanted all along was to destroy Assange, both physically and mentally, and according to Assange's positions, eight years or nine years in the Ecuadorian embassy without ever once going outside and now, on top of that, four years in a very harsh British prison that the BBC, in 2004, called the British Guantanamo has severely physically and mentally addled him. and it's possible he will never recover and that WikiLeaks will be smashed all without ever having to prove that he committed any crime beyond bail jumping.
But that is one way out for the Biden administration. I think their other option, which is to bring them to U.S. soil and to have this whole spectacle in front of the world, having to prosecute a journalist who has broken more major stories than almost everybody in the corporate media will be cheering combined it's also not very palatable. Just to underscore how rogue the United States and the UK governments are here, world leaders have called Assange a hero, and have demanded his release, but so too have almost every single civil liberty and press freedom group in the West. It's very difficult to unite them on anything but on the question of Assange, they are.
From the New York Times in February 2021, there's the headline: “Civil Liberties Groups Ask Biden Justice Department to Drop Julian Assange Case.”
A coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration on Monday to drop efforts to extradite the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Britain and prosecute him, calling the Trump-era case against him “a grave threat to press freedom.”
The coalition sent a letter urging a change in course before a Friday deadline for the Justice Department to file a brief in a London court. American prosecutors are due to explain in detail their decision — formally lodged on Jan. 19, the last full day of the Trump administration — to appeal a ruling blocking their request to extradite Mr. Assange.
Democrats like the new Biden team are no fan of Mr. Assange, whose publication in 2016 of Democratic emails stolen by Russia aided Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory over Hillary Clinton.
But the charges center instead on his 2010 publication of American military and diplomatic documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, and they raise profound First Amendment issues.
“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do,” the letter said, adding:
“News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound public significance.”
The Freedom of the Press Foundation organized the letter. Other signers — about two dozen groups — included the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Project on Government Oversight and Reporters Without Borders.
“Most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a separate statement.
“President Biden should avoid setting a terrible precedent by criminalizing key tools of independent journalism that are essential for a healthy democracy.” (The New York Times. Feb 8, 2021)
It is incredibly striking to me that the U.S. media loves to point the finger at foreign governments. Look over there, it's Russia and China and Iran and this government and that government that doesn't respect journalists, that is imprisoning journalists, that's attacking for press freedom. And yet right under their nose, their own government is poised to create one of the most dangerous presidents ever for press freedom. And in seeking to imprison, whether you like them or not, a person responsible for more major scoops than all of them combined – and yet their reaction ranges from indifference to overt support.
Whatever else is true, things like Donald Trump going on Twitter and insulting Chuck Todd or Wolf Blitzer are not threats to press freedom, but attempting to create a precedent that would criminalize the core activities of investigative journalism is the gravest press freedom I have seen in my lifetime and that is what the extradition of Julian Assange is all about. We will continue to keep you posted on these developments as they continue. It is very close to the time when Assange will have to come to the United States and we'll see how this plays out.
The Interview: Aaron Maté
Aaron Maté is an independent journalist who has been one of the leading skeptics of the fraud that became known as the Russiagate scandal. For that skepticism, he was awarded the Prize for Excellence in Independent Journalism and the Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media. You can find his work at the “Gray Zone” as well as on the “Jimmy George Show,” where he's a frequent guest host, and on his own Substack, where just this week he has reported two extremely important stories and we are delighted to have him here in order to speak to him about those and other issues as well, including Ukraine.
