The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.
System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!
Before I get to the plan of the show, I want to expel a little bit of frustration and irritation with the fact that every day now, there is a new assault on press freedom on American campuses and elsewhere in American society in the name of protecting Israel – so many of them, in fact, that we cannot possibly report on them all. We can't possibly keep up with them.
Earlier today, it was reported, for example, that a singer who had been invited to perform at Cornell University had her invitation officially rescinded by the school administration because she had in the past criticized Israel in a way that was, of course, deemed pro-Hamas or antisemitic or whatever. Remember all the right-wing grievances about cancel culture? This is actually continuous cancel culture.
There have been other pro-Palestinian speakers or other people who have come to speak about the war in Gaza who have been similarly uninvited because the climate has already been successfully created where people are afraid now to have speaking on campus anyone who might criticize Israel because they know that the hammer of the federal government will come smashing down upon them.
In the course of all of this reporting I've been doing, I've been appearing in a lot of places, doing a lot of interviews and, as usual, having exchanges with people online in good faith, trying to explain what it is that's happening. I spent a lot of time during the Biden administration talking about and denouncing the Biden administration's pressure on Big Tech to remove dissent from the internet, which was an extremely grave assault on free speech and what we have here in so many ways is so much worse.
We’re seeing people being swept up off the street by plain clothes agents and put into prison for the crime of writing op-eds that are critical of Israel, having our most important and our finest academic research institution stripped of funding, including people trying to find treatments and cures for diseases if they don't sign loyalty pledges saying they won't boycott Israel, or if there's a perception that they aren't loyal to Israel.
We have the Trump administration imposing expanded hate speech codes on campuses just to protect Israel and American Jewish students – and nobody else – and even demanding that Middle East studies programs and their curricula be put under receivership so that the Trump administration is satisfied that there's enough pro-Israel content being taught as part of this curricula and not too much pro-Palestinian content. We’re talking here not about third grade; we're talking about adults in colleges where academic freedom is supposed to reign.
And watching the number of Trump supporters who have spent the last 10 years pretending to believe in free speech and being outraged by censorship – I know I've said this before. I'm just kind of venting a little bit – hearing from them so often with the most obscene justifications for why this censorship is permissible or just making up outright lies about the people who are being deported, saying they harassed or attacked Jewish students, vandalized buildings or occupied buildings, none of which is true for the cases that we're discussing, I don't even have the words for it any longer for the level of fraud that this movement is guilty of from having branded themselves in a certain way for a full decade only to switch on a dime in the face of one of the most systemic censorship regimes I've ever seen in my life, one that threatens academic freedom and free speech throughout the country, it is really quite nauseating, really quite sickening.
And it doesn't seem like it has any end in sight because the more the Trump administration does it, every day new measures are being announced. Yesterday, of course, we talked about the new NIH guidelines designed to deny funding and grants to medical researchers if they don't sign a pledge saying they don't participate in the boycott of Israel.
Every time a new measure is announced, Trump supporters feel even more compelled to support their leader, and they invent new theories all the time, which, by the way, aren't really even new. They sound exactly like the left liberal censorship theories that they spent the last decade mocking.
You have more censorship being fortified every day from an administration that just three months ago was ushered in, based on an explicit promise to end censorship. JD Vance went to Europe to castigate them for not sharing American values or free speech, by imposing political censorship, and yet the censorship against people who are critical of Israel could not be any greater.
We're going to have on the show a journalist, Richard Medhurst, who is actually under a very serious and active criminal investigation in the EU for having reported negatively on Israel. That's something, of course, JD Vance submitted when he went to the EU to scold them about their censorship. So, it's just really remarkable to see.
We're not going to report on it specifically tonight, of all the venting that I just did on it, but it was something that I had to remark upon.
Before having Richard Medhurst on, we’ll talk about the war in Ukraine – remember that? There have been some significant, if not encouraging, new developments in these negotiations, which we want to tell you about and break down the significance of. Then, we’ll review the relevant facts on these ample Epstein files, which seemed to have disappeared from the news cycle, I think, by intention.
Let’s get back to the plan.
War in Ukraine, even though we don't talk about it anymore – and I don't mean we specifically on the show, sometimes we do, but I mean, we collectively, we as a country – it’s just a war that goes on. People are still dying every day, people are being bombed, people are being chased with drones and there are all kinds of missiles being launched continuously. The dangers of escalation continue to unfold.
And I have to say the Trump administration, despite my many critiques of much of what they're doing, deserves a lot of credit because they really are following through in a very aggressive way in an attempt to bring about an end to this war diplomatically.
The reality of the war, whether people like it or not, is that Russia is winning. Russia has been dominating the war; Ukraine has far more of a reason to end the war than Russia does and, of course, whatever diplomatic resolution is achieved will be more favorable to Russia than to Ukraine.
Yet, we're already seeing people accusing Trump of capitulating to the Russians because the proposals that they're talking about, which are the only ones that have any chance of ending the war, have terms that are favorable to Russia in them for the obvious reason that Russia is winning and Russia would never accept terms not favorable to it.
It seems as though many of the terms that Zelenskyy is going to end up having to accept are ones he's refusing to accept. Trump's frustration with Ukraine is growing and growing and we'll see where that leads.
First of all, here from CNN earlier today:
Now, as you might recall, Crimea had for centuries been part of Russia. It ended up being part of Ukraine through a series of complicated transactions that Putin regards as an error. In 2014, when the United States government with Victoria Nuland, John McCain and Chris Murphy, the whole gang, went over and helped overthrow the democratically elected government in Kiev that was more leaning toward Moscow than to the EU – and that was the reason we overthrew them and instead installed a much more pro-EU, pro-U.S. Government. In response to having the EU and the U.S. now dominant inside Ukraine, on the other side of the Russian border, even changing the government, the Russians took Crimea, an extremely geostrategically important spot. It's what gives them access to the Black Sea. The reality is, is that the people of Crimea, nobody doubts this, overwhelmingly, I'm talking about 90%, identify as Russian, not as Ukrainian. They are far more loyal to the Russians, they want to be governed by Moscow and not by Kiev. There's no possibility that the Russians will ever give back Crimea, especially with NATO so involved in Ukraine.
And so, what the Trump administration is doing is simply saying that we, the United States, will recognize that Crimea is part of Russia. Not that the Ukrainians have to, not that the Europeans have to, just that we, the Americans, will, because the reality is that Crimea is never going back to Ukraine. Yet, that's something Zelenskyy refuses to accept.
I have news for Zelenskyy. Russia is occupying and controlling Ukraine and those other provinces in Eastern Ukraine, whether he likes it or not. He may wish there were a fantasy world where Ukraine was going to control it, but there is no world in which that will ever happen. And so, obviously, the Americans are trying to work within the Russian reality and the Ukrainian reality when you try to negotiate a war.
Steve Witkoff, by all accounts, has been doing an excellent job of genuinely trying to foster an end to this war. What Witkoff and others have been saying is that you need to understand things from the Russian perspective and the Ukrainian perspective to understand what's possible in a deal, which is basic diplomacy. The Biden administration wouldn’t even talk to Russia. The EU won't even talk to Russia. The Trump administration is doing so in a way that will advance this diplomacy.
The real Russian objective was never to take over all of Ukraine. That might've been their view at the very beginning, I even doubt that. Their concern was what these Eastern provinces of Ukraine, where the vast majority of people are Russian speaking and ethnic Russian and the perception was that the Kiev government had become increasingly brutalizing and abusive of their rights, had disregarded their cultural history and their religious traditions – that was why there was a low-grade civil war, basically a war for independence going back to 2014 between these provinces in Eastern Ukraine and Kiev.
The Russians, on top of wanting to preserve and protect the rights of the people who live there, also wanted that as a buffer zone. So, if they have these four provinces, it's not as easy for NATO to go up to the Russian border. And that was always the solution: NATO doesn't go in Ukraine, and Crimea stays with Russia, and these four provinces have some sort of semi-autonomous or autonomous status, depending on what they want in a referendum, or join Russia and become part of Russia. That gives the Russians the buffer zone and the security that they need and Ukraine won't be a NATO member as well. And then Ukraine gets some sort of ambiguous security guarantee from some combination of Europe and the U.S.
This is what the kind of negotiation looked like at the beginning of the war back in March and April 2022, when the two sides were very close to negotiating an agreement that could have averted this war. That was when Boris Johnson and Victoria Nuland swept in and told Zelenskyy that under no circumstances could he agree to that resolution and they would promise to give him all the money and weapons he needed to fight the Russians until the very end. And those are the people who have all this blood on their hands.
Now, it is always strange that Zelenskyy is in this position where he depends upon the United States, depends upon the Trump administration to fund his war effort, to give them the weapons he needs, to even be able to stay competitive in this war.
And when that happens, when you're dependent, kind of a vassal state, and that state tells you, “Look, we're not going to continue to support this war, here's an agreement that we think is fair for you” as Trump told Zelenskyy in the White House, “you don't have that many cards to play” and yet Zelenskyy continues to act as though he's the one dictating the terms.
The peace plan put forward by the Trump administration didn't even require Ukraine to acknowledge that Crimea belonged to Russia, who cares if Ukraine acknowledges that or not? The peace plan was that the United States would recognize Crimea as being Russian. But the defiance of Zelenskyy, yet again, when he depends upon the Trump administration, of the United States and the American taxpayer to fund his war, was something that, to put it mildly, did not sit well with Trump, and he had one of those reactions he's had to Zelenskyy in the past.
This is what he posted on Truth Social earlier today:
Again, it is true that the United States, independent of who you think is right or wrong or what you think the right outcome is, has a very strong interest in ending this war. We're paying for the war (not all of it, the Europeans are paying for a lot of it as well); our stockpiles are being depleted, especially when we also have to feed the Israelis arms and now, we're using a ton of arms ourselves to bomb Yemen. We have this rapidly depleting stockpile.
The American government should have as its primary concern the interests of the American people and the United States and it has never been in the interests of the American People. I've said this from the very start: to fight a war with Russia, even a proxy war, over who rules various provinces of Eastern Ukraine – whether they stay under the governance of Kiev, whether they end up autonomous or semi-autonomous from the land up with Moscow, where most of the people prefer – what impact does that have on the American people and their material well-being at all?
The Trump administration seems to be reaching the end of its rope in terms of their willingness to allow Zelenskyy to act as though he has equal leverage in any of this when he clearly doesn't.
Here's The New York Times yesterday:
Given all the various conflicts taking place – the green light that the Trump administration gave to the Israelis to destroy Gaza even further, the occupation of the Israelis of increasing amounts of territory both in Syria and Lebanon, their ethnic cleansing taking place with very little attention being paid in the West Bank, the resumption and escalation of the Biden bombing campaign by Trump in Yemen, and the threats that are being issued on a daily bases now to Iran, ones that we covered at length last night, it's absolutely imperative to American national security that this war come to an end to financial security, and economic security and military national security as well.
If the Trump administration continues to perceive that Zelenskyy simply doesn't want to end the war because he has been told repeatedly by the U.S. that they will give him whatever he wants, at some point, the only solution is to withdraw that funding, withdraw that arming of Ukraine, something the Trump administration hasn't wanted to do yet, because if they did that, it would make a negotiation impossible, Russia would have zero incentive to do so. However, at some point, if the perception continues to be accurate that the impediment to ending this war is Zelenskyy, that will become the only outcome.
Remember the Epstein files? As Donald Trump spent 2024 promising to release, the Epstein files were supposedly released back in February when Pam Bondi invited a bunch of right-wing influencers to the White House, handing them big, flamboyant notebooks that said on them “Epstein's files” and they were all smiling thinking that they had an exclusive on all this good stuff that was for the first time going to be publicly revealed. As it turned out, the whole thing was a sham; all these documents had been long ago made public in a whole variety of ways through various litigations and FOIA requests on the part of media outlets. There was absolutely nothing new in any of them.
The whole issue of the client list and the like, I understand why that gets people interested and excited, but the reality is that we've already seen so much evidence of the people with whom Jeffrey Epstein was cavorting. People of the highest status and wealth throughout the world, who basically brought down Prince Andrew of the British royal family. We know Bill Clinton and Donald Trump both had extensive relationships, social relationships, with Jeffrey Epstein, which doesn't mean that they were on his island or having sex with underage girls, but we know all the people who have been associated with Jeffrey Epstein for a long time. There may be some client list, although Pam Bondi says I haven't seen anything shocking so far.
To me, the much more interesting question is the geopolitical one. Obviously, when you have the most powerful people on the planet being put into compromising positions on Jeffrey Epstein’s island, on his plane, in his mansion in Palm Beach, in his mansion in the middle of Manhattan – and we know that all kinds of tapes and recordings have been made that gives enormous amounts of blackmail power over these people – but the questions of whether foreign governments, whether intelligence agencies in our country or others, in some way, exploited that information…
There’s always been a question of what the real source of Jeffrey Epstein's massive wealth was. We're talking here about a multibillionaire wealth. He wasn't just somebody who was extremely wealthy. There are zillions of people like those. There are all sorts of ways to become wealthy on that level. We're talking about somebody who had just the kind of wealth that only billionaires have, massive jets that were private, that he took everywhere; $80 to $100 million properties all over the world, the ability to purchase a private island, to donate massive sums of money. Where did that money come from?
Nobody has ever been able to answer that. We know a couple of things, including his relationship with somebody named Les Wexner, who himself is a multibillionaire with whom Jeffrey Epstein worked. But there's no identifiable expertise that Jeffrey Epstein had. He never did anything on Wall Street that was particularly impressive. The question has always been, was there some government, some intelligence agency behind him with whom he was working, or for whom he was working to create, essentially, a honey trap? That would give these intelligence agencies knowledge of and therefore power over what a lot of people were doing.
That, to me, is the answer that we don't have any resolution on. Maybe the answer to that is no, but we really haven't had any sort of documentation providing guidance on that one way or the other.
We know for certain that these files are in the custody of the U.S. government, which has repeatedly promised to release them, pretended to release them back in February, although they didn't. Where are the answers to those questions? When will we get the answers to the questions, if ever?
What we're being told right now is that the reason we can't have them is that there are redactions that need to take place for national security purposes. I understand that some of these files would need to be redacted before being released. You don't want to release the names, for example, of victims who haven't been identified, who don't want to be identified, of some of the girls who were sex trafficked. That makes sense. Perhaps you don't even want to release the names of the people who were Jeffrey Epstein's associates, but you have no evidence they engaged in any wrongdoing because that can harm their reputation. I understand that as well.
But why would there be national security redactions unless Jeffrey Epstein had relationships with foreign governments? If Jeffrey Epstein had a relationship with a foreign government, it seems like we could probably narrow down which ones are the most likely and then that leads me to the question of whether or not it's possible that, if those answers exist within the files of the U.S. government, under the Trump administration, we will ever actually see those at all. At the very least, we ought to keep up the pressure.
Trump has been asked about this on a couple of occasions, including on April 22, which was yesterday. He was in the Oval Office, and he was asked, “Hey, what about those Epstein files?” And here's what he said.
Video. Donald Trump, C-SPAN2. April 22, 2025.
He's absolutely right about that. There was a full disclosure of the JFK files. Now, there are still some files within the CIA and other places that haven't quite been released. But the documents they released were in unredacted fashion. And that's why I have those questions about the Epstein files. Why are all these redactions necessary for this, but not for the JFK files?
Again, the thing that concerns me the most is when they start saying that their redactions are for national security purposes. What possible national security implications are there to the Jeffrey Epstein case, unless we're talking about relationships with domestic intelligence agencies or foreign intelligence agencies?
We do have some clues about some of the people, the extremely wealthy people who surrounded Jeffrey Epstein, who seemed responsible in some way for his ability to construct this very powerful network of highly connected people and what their connections are.
The Middle East Monitor published in January 2020: “Jeffrey Epstein was blackmailing politicians for Israel’s Mossad, new book claims.” The article said: The claims are being made by the alleged former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe in a soon-to-be-released book “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales” in which he said that he was the handler of Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell, who was also an Israeli espionage agent and was the one who introduced his daughter and Epstein to Mossad.
Now, let me make clear, I'm not endorsing all this or any of this. This has been out in the ether for a long time. These are very sketchy figures. But we do know for sure that Robert Maxwell, the British publishing tycoon who died under very mysterious circumstances, who was the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is Jeffrey Epstein's right-hand person who is now serving a long time in prison for helping him traffic young girls, was a huge supporter of Israel, had all kinds of connections to Israel as well.
In The New York Times, in 1994, there was this headline:
That was the end of the lawsuit heaping this kind of praise on Seymour Hersh as an author of great integrity after he had accused Robert Maxwell of having very close ties to Israeli intelligence: “In yesterday's proceedings, a lawyer for the Mirror Group, which was controlled by Mr. Maxwell before his death in November 1991, said it acknowledged that Mr. Hersh "is an author of excellent reputation and of the highest integrity who would never write anything which he did not believe to be true and that he was in this instance fully justified in writing what he did." (The New York Times. August 19, 1994.)
The person who was closest to Jeffrey Epstein was Les Wexner, a big-time Wall Street tycoon and investor, a multibillionaire who unquestionably gave massive amounts of money to Jeffrey Epstein nobody really understood why. He claimed, once it became a scandal, that it was because Jeffrey Epstein had developed these extremely innovative techniques to help Les Wexner save huge amounts of tax money. Even if that were true, the amount of wealth Jeffrey Epstein amassed would be nowhere near any kind of rational relationship to that sort of claim. Les Wexner had a very close relationship to Israel as well.
The Vanity Fair, in June 2021, had an article, “The Mogul and the Monster: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With His Biggest Client,” investigating the many mysteries that still surround the life and crimes of the notorious financier.” “His long-standing business ties with his most prominent client, billionaire retail magnate Leslie Wexner, hold the key.” n 2019, The Times of Israel’s headline is “Netanyahu again goes after Barak for ties to accused billionaire Jeffrey Epstein” (The Times of Israel. July 9, 2019.)
So, we have a lot of information here that clearly shows that people closest to Jeffrey Epstein themselves were heavily involved with the state of Israel and supporting the state of Israel and having very close operative relationships with Israeli intelligence. There's also reporting, people claim, that Jeffrey Epstein had relationships with Gulf states’ intelligence agencies, including the Emiratis, potentially the Qataris and the Saudis.
But there's certainly enough here to wonder – and again, I'm not in any way suggesting that this is dispositive. What's dispositive are the records in the possession of the Trump administration and what concerns me, aside from how long it's taking, is that we're being told that they need redactions for national security. And for me, if there's some secret client list that we haven't seen before that contains a bunch of names of people who had sex with Jeffrey Epstein's girls, of course, I guess we should see that, especially if it contains the names of powerful people. I don't think that's the sort of thing that has been concealed, given all the litigation, but I do think what is substantive and what is very possibly out there in documentation is the extent to which Jeffrey Epstein had ties to intelligence agencies, our own or others, and to what extent these operations were part of those intelligence agencies.
I guess I should say that I have some doubt, given everything we've seen in the Trump administration about the first three months and the importance of Israel and the Gulf States in everything that they're doing, that if such documents exist, they would actually ever see the light of day.
But given that people have basically stopped talking about the Epstein documents, we thought it was time to remind people that they're still out there, that they have not been released, that there was that fake showing of releasing them at the beginning of the administration that resulted in nothing, the only way to make sure that these documents get released and get released in a form that is actually meaningful is to keep the pressure up.
The interview: Richard Medhurst
Richard Medhurst is a truly independent journalist and political commentator born in Damascus, Syria. He regularly hosts live broadcasts discussing all sorts of political controversies from around the globe, U.S. politics and international relations in the Middle East, rooted in an anti-imperialist worldview. In my view, he has become one of the most knowledgeable journalists on a wide variety of issues, including multipolarity. He covered the Assange trial as well as anybody I know. He's also been someone who has covered the civil war for the last six, seven years, the dirty war from the United States in Syria, where he obviously has ties. And for the past several years, two years at least, his focus primarily has been on what a lot of our focus has been, which is on the Israeli war in Gaza. I reached out to him. We've had him on our show several times and we're here to talk about a particularly disturbing case: he is now facing not just the threat, but the very real possibility of criminal prosecution in the EU and in the U.K. as a result of the reporting that he's been doing on Israel, and not just prosecution, but prosecution under terrorism laws.
G. Greenwald: Richard, I wish we were sitting under better circumstances, but we really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us. We had you on back in August, I think it was when you were actually arrested at Heathrow Airport. Of course, there's always a little personal resonance for me because, as you know, my husband was detained at Heathrow under these anti-terrorism laws. I really got to understand how chilling they were, although his case never went nearly as far as yours have.
For people who haven't, who haven't been following your case, before we get to the most recent developments, which are even more chilling, talk about, just as a reminder, a kind of summary way, what happened back then and why.
Richard Medhurst: Yeah, thanks Glenn for having me on and when that happened to David, that was the first time that I also got to understand what this Schedule 7 was, what these terrorism laws were and yeah, so, I landed at Heathrow and they didn't let anyone just embark, they like called me to the front of the plane and I thought it was a Schedule 7, which is when they detain you and it turned out to be like a full arrest, like they put me in cuffs, they jailed me for 24 hours.
They didn't use Schedule 7, they used section 121A. So, that was like the first time they've ever used that against a journalist. The reason it's so chilling is that if you look at the law, it's very broad, it's very, very broad, so if you give the impression or, you say something that could be completely factual but makes it sound like a lawyer can twist into you supporting X or Y, they can arrest you and charge you and put you in jail for it and that's why it's so chilling for someone as a journalist to be arrested because then you're basically being in prison for doing your job.
They questioned me for about two hours the next day, so I had no idea why I was even there. I was put in this like nasty cell, and then they released me on bail, and I’ve been on bail ever and they've been extending it every three months.
So, I have to go back on May 15 for now, unless they decide to charge me, to extend it again, or to drop it. And that's almost nine months now that I've been under investigation for so-called terrorism. And it's really stifled my work, and it's stopped me from being able to do my job, because if reporting is now a criminal offense, what's next? And we saw what happened with Julian. Julian was also attacked and put in jail under a different political charge, which was espionage and I feel like they've decided to now use terrorism, which is also political, against me and try to make an example out of me because of my reporting on the genocide in Gaza.
G. Greenwald: So, there's an important distinction. I want to emphasize that you alluded to it, which is in the case of my husband, who was detained in Heathrow during the Snowden reporting when he was passing through on his way back from Germany to come to Rio, he was detained under Schedule 7. So, he wasn't officially arrested.
This was a provision that says, if you come to the airport and you have some suspicion of terrorist activity, you can be detained and questioned. They seized his electronic devices. It was supposed to be nine hours of detention; you can go to the court and convert it to an arrest, and they kept threatening that they would, but they didn't. They ended up letting him go primarily because it became such a big diplomatic scandal. But because they let him go and they didn't arrest him the way they did with you and yours became a more serious case, he was able to sue and in the course of suing, they were forced to say why they detained him and they said it was because of his work with the Snowden reporting. In other words, they had accused him of somehow being a suspect in a terrorism case as a result of the work he was doing, with me, Laura Poitras and the Guardian when it came to journalism.
Have you had any sort of clear explanation about what the basis was for your arrest and for this ongoing investigation? Do you know for certain why this is?
Richard Medhurst: No, I really don't. I mean, they obviously hinted at things that they were upset about during the questioning, which I'm not allowed to talk about. But honestly, I can't tell you 100% why I was arrested. I still think that they kind of just got mad at me because of my job. They even made a point that I have a large number of followers, and they were showing me my YouTube channel and my Twitter and commenting on how big my reach is. And making it very clear that basically this was the reason I was a menace, why else would you bring this up?
So, the point is basically that I'm a bad influence on society or something, and so I think this was really the basis of it. But I'm sure there are other things that they couldn't necessarily arrest me for that annoyed them. For example, a few weeks before I got arrested, I did this massive investigation on Israeli athletes, the football teams, the national football team, the Olympic team, because the Russians had been banned within four days of the Ukraine war, but the Israelis hadn't. And so I showed through the whole social media how all of these athletes were saying genocidal things.
So, I thought maybe that angered them. Maybe the fact that I covered this gang rape that was happening in the state’s man detention facility. I think it was all of those things. But again, it doesn't mean I deserve to be arrested, but I think in general, my reporting on that and perhaps my reporting on Julian Assange's case as well may have angered the U.K. and U.S. authorities. So, I think it's a mix of these things. And yeah, they certainly escalated it to an arrest.
I think everybody else who had come through Heathrow, even other journalists, had “only”, in quotation marks, been detained with Schedule 7, as they did to David, they forced you to answer all the questions and hand over your electronics. With me, I was able [to no comment the interview] and they nevertheless made me give my electronics. As a matter of fact, I might face a second case because I've refused to give my password.
So, this is another law, it's called RIPA [Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000], and it's just as oppressive as the Terrorism Act. If they go to a judge and they get a court order, and you still refuse to give them the passwords, you can go to prison for like two to five years automatically. And I refused to give them the passwords because they took my phones. These are journalistic tools. I'm not going to compromise the safety of sources, acquaintances and other people. I just can't. It's an ethical obligation. So, that's why I refuse.
G. Greenwald: One of the reasons I'm asking is because, well, I remember, I think I really did start watching you on YouTube, I found your show, when you still had something like 5,000 subscribers. It was really at the beginning. I mean, sometimes people come and say, “Oh, I've been reading your work since your Unclaimed Territory blog, way before Snowden, way before Salon even,” and I always feel like, oh, this is like one of the hardcore original viewers of my show. I kind of feel like that with you, and one of the things that attracted me to your show is that you are extremely passionate, you don't hold back at all, but it's always very, very fact-based. But especially on the topic that people consider sensitive, like Israel and Gaza, you use language that a lot of people would regard as intemperate, you don't really dilute what it is that you're feeling and when you were talking about something like the Israeli destruction of Gaza in particular, I think that is what is appropriate, but it means that you probably do stand out to a government like the U.K., as opposed to a bunch of other people who are speaking critically of Israel and Gaza in sort of more restrained tones.
But what's really concerning me about your case is that there is this kind of increasing tendency to equate criticism of Israel with support for terrorism. I can't tell you how often, for example, in these cases in the United States, where the students are being arrested and snatched off the street and deported, the only thing they're “guilty” of is protesting the war in Israel and in a lot of people's minds that instantly becomes equated with support for Hamas or support for terrorism, which itself is a crime. And I'm wondering whether, and I know there are some legal constraints that you're operating under because you really do have a serious criminal case pending.
But whether the theory seems to be that by being so out there, and you've now grown your audience, you have a hundred thousand subscribers, it seems to me that by being so vocally denouncing and condemning the Israeli state, that in some sense it amounts to support for terrorism.
Does it seem like that's a theory that is being used to justify your criminal prosecution?
Richard Medhurst: It is. It absolutely is. What they did to me in Austria afterward, where they continued this case, so they ambushed me again, not on a plane, but they lured me to immigration. And you know this thing they've been doing with Mahmoud Khalil in the U.S., where they threatened to rescind his green card? So, about a month before that, they started it with me in Austria. They told me to come to the immigration authorities, and I'd never been summoned there in my life.
So, I knew something was up. They threatened to take away my permanent residency because of my reporting. If that wasn't enough, they then had these intelligence agents ambush me with a search warrant. I asked them what unit they were; they told me very explicitly that they're the equivalent of MI5 in Austria.
They served you with a search warrant and they accused me in the warrant of being a Hamas member and not just like a member, but in the military wing. They specifically cited the Kassan brigades and again, when I heard that, I couldn't help but burst out laughing. I was like this must be a dream or something, this is madness, and they're not only – you'll be familiar with this, Glenn, within the U.S. legal system, I think it's called “alleged conduct.” So, when you add like a bunch of narrative in a prosecution to kind of paint someone as a villain, they're not additional charges, but they make you look bad and they could lead to harsher sentencing, that's what they did in the warrant, they added these things like about rape on October 7 and like trying to connect me to those things.
So, yeah, they basically equated all of my reporting with not just terrorism, like all of the crimes that they said happened on October 7, and they not only threaten to take away my residency, but they also accuse me of being an actual member of the organization of Hamas.
So yeah, it's actually gone that far and I'm shocked that they can even subject me to two investigations in two countries. I mean, just because of my reporting. Again, it has 100% to do with my reporting, nothing else. The examples they've cited are also outlandish. Like, one of the things the prosecutor in Vienna says in the warrant is, like, I allegedly showed a video of Hamas fighters eating triangle-shaped desserts. I don't even know what to say to all this, but I'm really starting to understand that they have a target on my back.
And just to underscore your point about the way that I'm reporting things, I think that they really just want to stop me from doing my job, put me behind bars, or just kind like wage lawfare and psychological warfare against me because I expose…
G. Greenwald: We lost Richard briefly - It just seems to be a sketchy internet connection.
But a lot of this has become normalized in the sense that I can't even count at this point how many people we've had on our show, who report critically on Israel, searched and seized; they've had their devices taken. Obviously, part of this is to create a climate where people are afraid, where they know that if they criticize Israel too, they might end up in these kinds of situations, but in your case, it seems to have really gone a lot further in that it wasn't just that you had this kind of intimidating moment at Heathrow, it is now continuing to the point where you are facing the real prospect that you could be forced to go back to the U.K. and have to actually confront an indictment and potentially a trial under terrorism laws based on a very kind of vague theory about what you might have done that might have prompted the view that you're in some way supporting Hamas. Where is the current situation and what are the choices that you are facing?
Richard Medhurst: They keep extending the investigation every quarter, every three months. The police apply for that, and they always get permission, of course. So that's one option for them is to keep me in a permanent state of limbo where I can't work properly and they still get to benefit from me being silent and them not having to take it to court and deal with the drama of an attack on press freedom and everything that would ensue.
I tried to explain that I'm Christian, they don't allow Christians in Hamas. And their response is, “We're just following orders, it's not up to us, we're just executing the warrant. And they came in here in my studio, in my home, they ransacked the place. I mean, they did everything but rob me. They took thousands of euros worth of gear, every computer I've owned, every piece of gear I've bought since I started this job. And I think that was another attempt to kneecap me, similarly to how, in Heathrow, they took my microphones, like analog wired microphones. What are you going to investigate with an analog microphone? It's just a screw with you to stop you from working. So, I think there was a very clear sequel to what they’d done in Heathrow. And now they're trying to corner me so that they either put me in jail in England or they put me in jail here or make my life hell in both countries and it's beyond an escalation. It's just madness, frankly.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, even if it doesn't end up going to those extremes and there's by no means a guarantee that it won't, just the intimidation alone, the fact that you have to constantly have this on your mind automatically detracts from the work that you're able to do. But it also, again, is intended by design to send a signal to other people who are similarly critical of Israel in a similar way within the EU that if you think you can say what you want about Israel, you better think again, because we will use the criminal force of law to harass you in very serious ways and even threaten you with imprisonment.
It's actually amazing how quickly these things get normalized and the fact that it's gotten this far in your case with very little mainstream media attention, of course, needless to say, it just gives you a kind of sense for how decayed things become on the press freedom front when it comes to this issue.
In terms of people who might want to help with your work, I'm sure you have defense costs, I'm sure you have other costs in terms of the things that they've taken, how would it be that people can help you and follow your work as well?
Richard Medhurst: I have a GoFundMe set up, I don't know the link exactly, but patreon.com/richardmedhurst, that's where people can also donate and I'll have updates about my case on my Twitter, so just look up Richard Medhurst on Twitter and you'll find my account.
And yeah, just a short parenthesis on press coverage, the British press, like six months later, haven't said a word about what happened to me. They didn't report on the U.N. letter that was sent to Keir Starmer as well, signed by four U.N. special rapporteurs. The Austrian press at least covered the raid that happened to me, and they covered it in a more or less balanced or neutral way. So, I just thought I'd say that because I think it once again underscores how sold out the whole U.K. press establishment is.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, no question about it.
All right. Well, we’re here for you whenever you need to come on, want to come on and want to talk about anything. We're definitely here for you. We are rooting for you and supporting you. I really regard your case as a serious threat to press freedom, but one that, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly common. I wish I could say it's so aberrational and so extraordinary, but it really, really isn't. And it's always great to see you. I hope you take care of yourself and stay in touch, and we'll talk soon.
Follow Richard Medhurst on X: https://twitter.com/richimedhurst
Contribute to his GoFundMe Campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-richard-medhursts-journalism
