Assange With Almost No Moves Left—US Trial Could Be Imminent. Plus: Aaron Maté on New #TwitterFiles Showing FBI Aided Ukraine Efforts to Silence US Journalists | SYSTEM UPDATE #95
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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 moment of truth is essentially coming to a head for Julian Assange and the Biden Justice Department.
He has been battling, the Wikileaks founder has, 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.
And 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 has 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 ground that his extradition would violate European human rights guarantees.
But absent of some highly unexpected event, Assange will find himself in a Virginia courthouse standing trial on felonies under the Espionage Act, all stemming from WikiLeaks' 2010 publications of classified documents that WikiLeaks did not obtain but was instead provided to them by then-U.S. all stemming from WikiLeaks' 2010 publications of classified documents that 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.
Earlier this week, 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, quote, disinformation.
Among those targeted by the 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, is 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 Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials are, quote, fighting for democracy.
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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 in 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 and it is one of the most extreme and repressive laws in the U.S. code.
And it has basically was 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.
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 best-case scenario best-case scenario was a stalemate.
And Ellsberg was somebody who started at the Rand Corporation, had been an advocate of the Vietnam War, 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-60s, 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 did not volunteer to go to Vietnam, but instead were drafted and was also ending the lives of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians.
And 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 so it left it to Ellsberg.
He finally went to the New York Times, 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 most 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 journalists 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 in 1971, including ordering a break-in to the psychiatrist's office of Daniel Osberg in order to find incriminating psychosexual secrets that would discredit him.
And that misconduct resulted in the dismissal of his lawsuit of the criminal case against him.
Had that not happened, he almost certainly would have spent The rest of his life in prison.
Ellsberg's 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 anonymity.
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 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 shut 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, The Homeland Security didn't exist then.
That was created in 2002.
The NSA, the rest of the U.S.
security state agencies, look at this incredibly powerful weapon you have in your hand.
It means that you can take any document that exists, including ones revealing and proving that you've committed grave crimes or that you've lied to the American people, and all you have to do is mark that document classified or secret or top secret, and it becomes a felony
With years, if not decades, in prison as the punishment for anyone to take that document and reveal it to the world, even if you've abused your powers by marking it 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.
Now, 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 were 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.
of uprooting the excesses of secrecy abuses and civil liberties abuses carried out by George Bush and Dick Cheney of 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 through on his way to Latin America to get asylum.
John Kerry and other Obama officials, 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, quote, man up.
That was 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.
And 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 Daniel 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 publish classified information without authorization.
Now, the other thing that makes this law so dangerous is that it can actually be used against not just whistleblowers or sources, meaning people who work inside the US government and took an oath to maintain its 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, we're under no obligation to maintain the secrecy of these documents.
In other words, it can be used to prosecute journalists.
Journalists who receive information that is classified from a source and then go and 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 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 and use the Espionage Act against journalists and prosecute journalists, even though they're under no obligation to maintain classified documents as secret, Would you run afoul of the First Amendment guarantee of a free press?
And the U.S.
government has never wanted to test that.
Because they like 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 try and prosecute us under the Espionage Act, or maybe Look, we won all the awards.
We've gotten all this, 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 to 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 under it 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 under 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 crime simply for publishing these documents.
Because Ahsan's work in partnership with some of the leading media outlets in the world that publish these same documents, including the New York Times and The Guardian and Al-Pais 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 publish 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.
And the Obama administration 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.
Now, 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 and 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 was the job of journalist, to obtain material and relevant documents in the form of those emails and publish them to enable us to know the truth about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
And you may remember that that reporting was so convincing that it forced the top five officials of the Democratic National Committee, including W. Osterman 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 a pop for speeches, 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 Justice Department 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 U.K.
and all sorts of corruption throughout the world, including in the Arab world and 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 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.
She became very disturbed by things the U.S.
government were doing to Iraqi dissidents.
She thought we were there to fight for democracy.
And she found that people were being summarily imprisoned, that media outlets were being shut down.
And just like Daniel Ellsberg working inside the Rand Corporation, and just like Edward Snowden working inside the NSA and 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, do you also have this?
Do you also have this?
Having looked at the material, 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 his source evade detection.
Now, 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 accused.
He's 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 US 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 the very low level of secrecy designation classified or secret.
None of them was top secret because she was just a U.S.
Army private.
She didn'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 his source to get more material and giving her tips on how she might avoid getting caught.
Now, 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.
Because 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 on 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 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.
Now, ironically, I wrote that article in April of 2019.
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 itself 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, charged me with multiple felony counts, and the theory they used to try and 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.
That 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's conspiracy.
I was charged with, I don't know, 182 felony accounts facing 346 years in prison.
The Brazilian courts quickly dismissed the charges and 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.
But the warning they 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 duties 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 US government wanted to be kept secret.
Now, he basically has been fighting this extradition ever since he was arrested in London when the Ecuadorians withdrew their asylum they had granted to him and the London police came into the embassy and dragged him out in that very dramatic footage.
And 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.
And 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 US 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 of 2022, the headline, Julian Assange's extradition from UK to US 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 U.S., 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 U.K.
Supreme Court ruled there were no legal questions over assurances given by U.S.
authorities on Assange's likely treatment.
So we had almost no chance left, but he pursued it anyway because he's 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 his appeal in a three-page written decision issued on June 6.
A single judge, Justice Swift, rejected all eight grounds of Assange's appeal against the extradition order signed by then UK 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 is deeply concerned by the UK High Court's decision rejecting WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange's appeal against the secretion order, bringing him dangerously close to being extradited to the United States where he could face the rest of his life in prison.
for publishingly classified documents in 2020.
Quote, 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.
That's signed by Rebecca Vinson, the Reporters Without Borders Director of Campaigns.
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, does Joe Biden really want Julian Assange coming to the United States, standing trial outside of a courthouse where almost certainly protesters in Assange's defense proclaiming standing trial outside of a courthouse where almost certainly protesters in Assange's defense proclaiming him Imagine what that's going to look like to the world.
The U.S.
and their 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 imprison for life under an espionage statue 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 of 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, owe 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 citizens' rights until very recently, where 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 of this year, quote, Assange Prime Minister says he is working effectively to free WikiLeaks founder, Wikileaks founder.
The article says Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was working, quote, 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 and her 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 her Wouldn't help her 51-year-old husband who was in London fighting, a London prison fighting extradition to the United States.
Quote, a priority for us isn't doing something that is a demonstration, it's actually doing something that produces an outcome, Albanese parliament.
Quote, and that's my focus, not grandstanding.
Albany said he appreciated opposition leader Peter Dutton's recent comments that he agreed with the government that Assange should be released.
So these are the two leading parties in Australia, both of whom are publicly saying it's time for Assange to go back to Australia.
Quote, I've made it very clear to the US administration and also to the UK administration of the Australian government's view that I appreciate the fact that this is now a bipartisan view that enough is enough.
The Australian Prime Minister said, quote, nothing is served from the ongoing incarceration of Julian Assange.
What I have done to act in the most effective way possible, he said, what I have done is act diplomatically in order to maximize the opportunity that there that there is a breaking through an issue which has gone on far too long.
Now, that is a way out.
But it's very difficult because imagine what would happen if the Biden administration Which has kept Assange in prison for four years, starting with the Trump administration and now the Biden administration.
The U.S.
government has 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 charges, or no conviction rather, 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 physicians, eight years or nine years in the Ecuadorian embassy without ever once going outside.
Now, on top of that, four years in a very harsh British prison that the BBC in 2004 called Guantanamo, the UK's Guantanamo, the British Guantanamo, has severely, physically and mentally, outlawed 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, have this whole spectacle in front of the world, have to prosecute a journalist who has broken more major stories than almost everybody in the corporate media who will be cheering combined It's also not very palatable.
Now just to underscore how rogue the United States and the UK governments are here, world leaders have called Assange a hero, have demanded his release, but so too have almost every single civil liberties 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 Asked Biden Justice Department to Drop Julian Assange Case.
Quote, 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, quote, a grave threat to press freedom.
The coalition sent a letter urging a changing 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 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.
Lots of assumptions implicitly buried in that paragraph.
But I think very importantly reveals the real motive, that that's why Democrats want him in prison, because they believed he helped Donald Trump by revealing true documents.
The Times goes on, quote, 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.
Quote, 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 they must engage in order to do the work the public needs to do, the letter said, adding, quote, news organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound significance.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation organized the letter.
That's a group of which I'm a co-founder, along with Daniel Ellsberg and Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden, who's now on the board.
Other signers, about two dozen groups, include the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Project on Government Oversight, and Reporters Without Borders.
All of those organizations.
With very disparate views of the world, have united to demand the dropping of these charges.
Quote, 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, quote, President Biden should avoid setting a terrible precedent by criminalizing key tools of independent journalism that are essential for a healthy democracy.
Now it is incredibly striking to me that the US media loves to point its 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 core press freedom and yet right under their nose, their own government is poised to create one of the most dangerous precedents ever for press freedom and is seeking to imprison
Whether you like him 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 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.
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, the Izzy Award, from the Park Center for Independent Media.
You can find his work at The Grey Zone, as well as on The Jimmy Jorje Show, where he's a frequent guest host, and on his own sub stack, We're 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.
We will have him in just a moment.
See you.
Good evening.
See you.
Good evening.
How are you?
Glenn, great to see you.
Good to be here.
Yeah, I'm happy to have you here.
So, as I said, this week you wrote two very consequential stories, one of which was from the Twitter files concerning a joint effort by the FBI and Ukraine to seek the censorship of people on Twitter, including journalists, including yourself, who they perceive as insufficiently supportive of the Ukrainian narrative.
Before we get into the substance of that story, It seems as though that at least some, if not all, of the source material you used to do the reporting were from the Twitter files.
Did you in fact have access to the Twitter files?
How did you end up getting that access?
And what conditions, if any, were imposed on your ability to work with those materials?
I was given access to the Twitter files by people who had access to the Twitter files.
I was not ever in communication with anybody at Twitter, but I did get access to the material from people who had access to them, and there were no conditions put on me whatsoever.
Right, so I don't want to like compromise any of your sources or anything like that or delve into the methods that you used to do the reporting if you're not comfortable with doing so, but just to be clear from my understanding as you're describing it, you essentially were able to speak to people who had access to the Twitter files, you asked them to do certain kinds of research or searches, they were able to do that and find materials and they gave those to you to do this reporting.
Is that a fair summation of what you did if you feel comfortable describing it?
Well, both.
I was given materials by people with access, but I also was given direct access to the emails that were in the Twitter files, which is a huge trove of material.
It's thousands and thousands of messages.
Right.
And so I've had on this show, I think, five or six people who have been involved in the Twitter files reporting, maybe even more.
And the question we ask each one of them that I will ask you, though I think you've already answered it, is, There's often kind of insinuations that Elon Musk is in control of what material can and cannot be reported from those materials or how it gets reported.
Did you have any of those limitations of any kind imposed on you in any way in terms of how you could use these materials?
After Elon Musk sort of disavowed the Twitter files.
Okay, so let's talk about the substance of the story itself.
basically shutting them down.
In short, it is no.
I had no interaction with Elon Musk.
He had no involvement at all in the story.
Okay.
So let's talk about the substance of the story itself.
As I said, it involves a campaign.
I don't know if it's an ad hoc campaign or an ongoing one between the Ukrainian government and the FBI to pressure Twitter to censor from Twitter.
I think we had an issue with Aaron's connection, so we're going to try and get him back.
So while he's gone let me just show you we can put that headline up from his sub stack there you see the headline which read FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info including
And it describes how the FBI and the Ukrainians were pressuring Twitter, giving Twitter a list of people that they wanted censored on the grounds that they were spreading disinformation, meaning they were insufficiently supportive of the Ukrainian narrative, questioning Ukraine's claims about the war itself.
And one of the people on the list was Aaron Maté himself.
So we're going to try and get him back on in order to speak to us about this reporting and a couple of other articles he published this week.
Let's just take a quick look.
All right, let me just show you actually what the reporting is while we're trying to get him back.
There's the headline itself, FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info, including journalists.
So we're going to pull up the first part of the article.
There you see it, the FBI.
Aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to ban Twitter users and collect their data, leaks revealed.
Twitter declined to censor journalists targeted by Ukraine, including Ermaty.
Do we have the text of the article?
The FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to censor social media users and obtain their personal information, leaked emails revealed.
In March 2022, an FBI special agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine, SBU, Ukraine's main intelligence agency.
Quote, the accounts, the FBI wrote, are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.
In an attached memo, the SPU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.
So the FBI, on behalf of Ukrainian intelligence, was not only demanding that particular people be censored from Twitter, the Ukrainians sitting in Kiev, on the other side of the world, reaching over and saying, we want these American and Canadian voices censored.
Because of their efforts to critique our war actions or question our narratives, but they also, through the FBI, sought user data, including the location of where these people were, the internet connection they were using in order to connect to the internet, and incredibly grave and dangerous attempt to investigate their critics.
So we have Aaron back.
Aaron, can you hear me?
Are you technically back?
I can.
Great.
So we just started reading the first part of your article while you were gone, and we just got to the part that I didn't even mention that actually amazed me, which was not only was Ukraine and the FBI jointly seeking to censor users on Twitter, they were actually seeking user data as well.
Talk about where this campaign came from and what kind of user data were they seeking on the people they had targeted.
Well, as we know from the previous Twitter files, the FBI and Twitter were in close contact to police so-called disinformation, most famously in the lead up to the reporting on the Hunter Biden story, which was censored by Twitter.
So I imagine as part of this, you know, regular channel of communications, the FBI got Ukraine involved.
And in March 2022, so a few weeks after Russia invades, this FBI special agent, agent who is working at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, sends Twitter a message saying that, thanks for talking the other day.
As part of our assistance to Ukraine, they sent us this list of accounts that they say spreads fear and disinformation for your review.
And then the attached memo from the Ukrainian intelligence service, the SPU, is a list of accounts.
And it says, we'd like you to ban these accounts and also give us their user data, which means that Twitter would be providing phone numbers, date of birth, and email addresses of everybody who signed up.
And that includes me because my name and profile were on that list, which is something that Twitter flagged in its response.
Twitter responded to this FBI special agent by saying, look, we'll take a look at this, but just, you know, we have to flag the fact that this includes American and Canadian journalists.
And they listed me as an example.
And they said, unless you can show there's some sort of deceptive tie between these journalists and a foreign government, we're not going to take action against them.
And the FBI in response to that said, yeah, we're not going to be able to provide evidence Of such a type, because of course, in my case, there is none.
But that was the exchange, and it was news to me.
The FBI was, on Ukraine's behalf, censoring Twitter accounts.
We do know from Lee Fong, you've talked to him about this before on your show, I believe, that the FBI was working with Facebook to censor posts and accounts at the behest of Ukraine.
This is confirmation that they're also doing this on Twitter.
I just want to say, like, on a personal note, I mean, I remember that time the Ukrainians issued a, what was it called, a kind of blacklist of people they claimed were acting as propagandists for the Russian government.
And I was on there, along with former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, I think Tucker Carlson, Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who was just a candidate then, but someone very critical of the Ukrainian war effort, and several other people.
And I remember being kind of enraged at the idea that the Ukrainians have continuously reached over and grabbed U.S. resources, which include my tax dollars, demanded an endless supply of weapons from my government that I helped pay for with my taxes and just demanded an endless supply of weapons from my government that I helped pay for
And then at the same time, they're creating blacklists, like McCarthy blacklists of people who are supposed to be stand accused of being Russian or Kremlin agents because we question our own government's involvement in the government.
In this war, which happens to be a constitutional right that we have to do so, just the audacity of it I remember kind of just like enraging me.
What was your reaction to seeing your name on that list?
And it's a list, not just again of the Ukrainians and the FBI trying to censor you, but to gather private data about where you are, how you're connecting to the internet, could easily reveal all kinds of sensitive information about where you are and where you work.
What was your reaction to that?
Well, to me it shows how extreme they are.
I mean, not that anyone should be on this list, but if you look at my views, I don't think they're particularly radical.
I think what I'm saying is pretty much what was used to be said by top-level U.S.
officials who criticized the expansion of NATO, who pointed out, as Barack Obama did, that it's not worth going to war with Russia over eastern Ukraine, and who pointed out, I mean, and you covered this the other night, how There is a major neo-Nazi element inside the Ukrainian military.
That doesn't mean that Ukraine's a Nazi state, but there is an influence there of powerful neo-Nazis who are in the military and in government.
And that was acknowledged once in places like the New York Times.
Now the people who say that are pushed to the margins and even get placed on these target lists for censorship.
So to me, it's a reflection of how Constrained the discussion has gotten around Ukraine and compare this to how imagine the reaction if Israel had done this So Israel is very much protected by the bipartisan establishment in the US.
There's no doubt about that.
But do you think Israel could get away with?
marking people for censorship inside the US right now and asking the FBI to censor people if like Mehdi Hassan of MSNBC who's allowed to criticize Israel on MSNBC if he was put on a list like this by Israel and Would he say that this was no big deal?
And I think he'd probably cover it.
But Ukraine is so central to U.S.
propaganda right now that even an act such as this just doesn't engender any criticism whatsoever.
I mean, you're covering this now, but otherwise there's been pretty much near silence at the news I broke about people like myself being put on a list that was passed to Twitter by the FBI at the behest of a foreign intelligence service.
Yeah, I was talking to Michael Tracy about this last night.
I think that for all the kind of repression and propaganda to which we were subjected during the Iraq War, there was actually more dissent permitted in the U.S.
media about the war in Iraq than there is about Joe Biden's proxy war in Ukraine.
And I have to say, having confronted all kinds of factions on all sorts of different issues, not just the United States but around the world, the level of rage and hostility that is directed at you, the kind of smear campaigns that immediately emerge the minute you question NATO and EU and the U.S.
CIA support for the war in Ukraine is unlike many things I've seen before.
As you say, it has become the single greatest priority of the West, and yet there's almost no debate about the extent to which the U.S.
ought to be involved in this, what U.S.
interests are at stake, because the establishment of links of both parties, as usual, as always when it comes to American wars, are completely unified.
What exit do you see, if any, to either this war and/or the seemingly endless US role in it? - That's a great question, because I think this administration is so committed to it.
I mean, you can see that in how intolerant they are at the idea of even a ceasefire.
John Kirby, the White House spokesperson, said that a ceasefire would be unacceptable.
Anthony Blinken recently said the same thing in a speech in Finland.
So honestly, I don't see a way out right now.
The only way out I see is Just more people dying because I think the bipartisan US establishment is so committed to this and right now they have a client in Zelensky who's willing to sacrifice his own people to keep this proxy war going and it's it's a tragedy and especially in it like another reason why it's it's destined to go on is because ideologically
The US media establishment is so committed to it, and is so committed to this idea that we have to fight Russia, and that's been inculcated in our culture, I think as a large part because of Russiagate.
We're also, similarly, when people like us were expressing the mildest skepticism about a conspiracy in which the president of the US was being blackmailed by Russia, Or whether or not Russia stole these emails at the heart of Russiagate.
The similar culture where we were cast as traitors and Putin lovers and banished from respectable society.
And we're just seeing that now in a much more extreme scale.
Yeah, well, it's a good segue to the other article that you wrote today you want to ask you about in terms of the Durham report.
And, you know, I remember, Aaron, early on when expressing this skepticism, there were very few of us willing to do so.
The argument I kept trying to emphasize was this wasn't just about the fact that there was some political scandal aimed at President Trump that lacked evidence, although that was true.
The much more dangerous part of it, I think the part that made it much more intentional, the reason why the scandal of Russiagate was so valued by the U.S.
security state is because it was really a geopolitical project.
What it did above all else was it just fed this extreme anti-Russian animus on the part of especially American liberals who blamed Russia and still blame Russia, along with Assange, for what they view as the most cataclysmic event in their lifetime politically, which is the election of Donald Trump for what they view as the most cataclysmic event in their lifetime politically, which is the And they created an atmosphere in Washington where it was essentially criminalized to even have conversations with Russian officials.
Michael Flynn almost went to prison for calling the Russian ambassador.
Jeff Sessions was almost charged with perjury because they forgot about two very banal kind of in-passing conversations.
They created this climate Where miscommunication is almost guaranteed because communication is non-existent.
How much do you see what's happening now in this proxy war in Ukraine, which Biden himself says has brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon at any point since 1962, as being based in or connected to the original Russiagate scandal?
Well, in another way it was connected, and this is something that you tirelessly pointed out, is that in any, you know, remotely responsible journalistic culture, we don't just accept U.S.
intelligence claims on faith.
So back then when U.S.
intelligence was insisting that Russia stole the emails and gave them to WikiLeaks, You were leading the way in saying that might be true, but we don't just take that claim and write them down.
We ask for evidence, and so far, no evidence has been presented to support that claim.
And a similar dynamic here.
U.S.
intelligence officials decree that Russia blew up their own pipeline, or Russia droned themselves, or Russia now blew up the dam, or Russia did this.
And the U.S.
media has been conditioned to just parrot whatever The U.S.
intelligence community says.
That was a dynamic that precedes Russiagate, but Russiagate really solidified it and made it anyone who dared ask for evidence was pushed to the margins.
And so now we're seeing that in a proxy war, where if you dare question U.S.
intelligence officials' claims or ask for evidence, you're again at the fringe.
And the rest of the media, those who are on cable television, are just people who are mindlessly parroting U.S.
intelligence officials' claims.
And that's very dangerous when you're in the midst of a proxy war.
Yeah, you know, the amazing thing is, you know, after the invasion of Iraq, it was obvious that not just the Bush administration, but most major media corporations in this country helped the Bush administration, helped Dick Cheney, helped the neocons peddle these falsehoods about Iraqi WMDs, about Saddam Hussein being in an alliance with Al Qaeda that led 70% of Americans to believe Saddam had personally planned the 9/11 attacks.
It's kind of a precondition for getting Americans, I think, to support that war that they had.
Saddam Hussein had a role in 9/11 since that was really the thing on Americans' minds.
Like, even Americans in that kind of state of do whatever you need to do are gonna question, wait, we were attacked on 9/11, Why are we going to war against a country that had no involvement in it?
It was really crucial to convince them that Saddam Hussein was an ally of Al Qaeda and it was Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker and the New York Times doing that.
And afterward, a lot of these media outlets, especially the New York Times, came out and said, we made a mistake.
We mindlessly repeated what U.S.
intelligence agencies told us without investigating it, without scrutinizing it, without having any idea if it was true, and we will never do that again.
And we're right back Well, we already were with Russiagate.
That was essentially how Russiagate began, was the CIA and the FBI feeding these media outlets.
to say and they would just go and say it.
Now we're right back to this with the war in Ukraine.
So let me ask you about this other article you wrote, which is about the John Durham report in which you say he kind of correctly concluded the FBI opened this investigation in 2016 with no evidentiary basis, which is a pretty strong indictment of the FBI that they acted for political motives in opening which is a pretty strong indictment of the FBI that they acted for political motives in opening this
But the criticism you make of them is captured in this headline which we just had on the screen, which essentially says, "Juram ignores Clinton role and new holes in Russian hacking allegations." You You say essentially the Durham Report assumes without any evidence that the Russians were the ones who did this hacking even though there's no evidence and there's new information in the Durham Report itself that calls that claim further into question.
What new evidence do you mean and how is this now further called into question?
Well first, and just to draw a direct tie to Iraq WMDs, two key figures in the Iraq WMD hoax were Jim Clapper and also John Brennan, who was serving at the CIA at the time, back when the CIA was torturing people into concocting intelligence that could be used to claim that Iraq had WMDs and was in alliance with Al-Qaeda.
Jim Clapper was also a top senior official who said that Iraq had probably moved his weapons into Syria.
So these liars were key figures also in Russiagate.
So it's not just a dynamic that was normalized of believing intelligence officials.
It was the same intelligence officials spreading lies and telling us to believe them.
So in this case, the core allegation of Russiagate, before even you get into all the crazy conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia, the core allegation, where this all starts, is that Russia stole Democratic Party emails and gave them to Wikileaks.
And what I point out in my article, is that while John Durham rightly faults the FBI for relying on Hillary Clinton-funded material like the Steele dossier to chase down fictional collusion, he completely ignores the fact that the Clinton campaign is equally central to the allegation of Russian hacking.
Because that allegation was generated not by the FBI, not by the CIA, but by CrowdStrike Which is a private firm that was working for Hillary Clinton at the exact same time that Hillary Clinton was paying Fusion GPS to put out the Steele dossier.
And Durham ignored this, even though he himself exposed new evidence that undermines the Russian hacking claim and raises serious questions about the Clinton campaign's role.
And this evidence is not in his report.
So that's a small correction of what you said.
It's not in his report.
It's in the evidence that were released as part of this prosecution of Michael Sussman, who was a Clinton campaign lawyer who Durham indicted for a perjury.
And during that prosecution- - And just to remind people, The perjury was he went to the FBI and he told the FBI that he was just a concerned citizen coming to report that the Trump campaign seemed to have a secret server with the Russian Alpha Bank and did not disclose to the FBI when he was there that he was doing so on behalf of his work as Hillary Clinton's lawyer.
He denied he was doing it in that capacity, even though he built the Clinton campaign for that service.
So as part of that prosecution, you say there was evidence that emerged that called into question this central claim about Russiagate.
What is that evidence that you're referring to?
Yes, and this evidence emerges because at the same time that Sussman is trying to promote this conspiracy theory about Trump and Alphabank, he's also working with CrowdStrike, the cyber firm that first accuses Russia of hacking the DNC, and he's managing their contacts between the FBI and CrowdStrike, and he's making some critical decisions.
He's pressuring the FBI also to endorse CrowdStrike's allegation of Russian hacking.
And what emerges from these exhibits released by Durham There are a few things.
They come in emails between Sussman, CrowdStrike, and the FBI.
So one thing that emerges is that I think Sussman committed perjury, or at least he made false statements before Congress.
Because in December 2017, when he testified before Congress, he was asked, did the FBI seek direct access to the DNC servers that were hacked?
And Sussman said, no, they did not.
And then he corrected himself.
He said, actually, wait, not to my knowledge.
What the emails collected by Durham shows is that Sussman directly received a request from the FBI to come in and physically inspect the servers.
And Sussman took that request, related to CrowdStrike, who promptly stonewalled it.
So that's important for two reasons.
One, it shows that Sussman gave false testimony in saying the FBI didn't come in and didn't seek direct access to the servers.
And two, it underscores the fact that the FBI, rather than conduct its own investigation of the DNC servers, relied on a Clinton campaign contractor, CrowdStrike, relied on their forensics.
Because in this email exchange, after Sussman relays this request from the FBI, CrowdStrike says, you know what, don't don't worry about coming in.
We'll mail you a copy of our imaging of the servers, which by the way, was not complete.
It was not all the servers that were sent.
So it shows the FBI relied extensively on CrowdStrike.
It also shows that Sussman, this key Clinton associate, he's Clinton's lawyer, How many crime investigations rely on the victim to conduct the investigation?
I've never heard of that happening.
For some reason it happened here.
And Jim Comey, when asked about this, he said, well, CrowdStrike's a very respected company.
Maybe.
Maybe that's true or not.
I mean, they've actually had to retract allegations before where they falsely accused Russia.
But putting that aside, even if they are respected, you still need evidence.
You still need evidence.
You can't just say like, hey, we're a prestigious, respected firm and this is what we say.
And now that becomes the basis for media outlets to go forward and make very serious claims about this incident.
The thing that was sort of the dominant story in American politics for at least five years.
Especially when, by the way, especially when, especially when, just one thing, CrowdStrike admitted under oath in December 2017, oh actually, by the way, we don't have concrete evidence of Russian hacking, and that admission by CrowdStrike's Sean Henry was buried throughout the entirety of Russiagate.
We only learned about it in May 2020, one year after Mueller closed up shop, and no establishment media outlet has ever reported it, but that admission was made.
So all the more reason why we shouldn't be relying on this Clinton campaign contractor for such an explosive allegation.
You know, Aaron, listening to you, I do have the same reaction as you said you had when getting called a kind of radical or a pro-Kremlin propagandist for your claims on Ukraine, which do nothing really more than just track what had been conventionalism in Washington for a long time about Ukraine.
which is this kind of skepticism that you're expressing, which is we shouldn't be believing these claims, especially from the CIA and the FBI, without evidence, gets treated as though it's some sort of radical conspiracy theory, you know, type of mentality that justifies your being excluded from type of mentality that justifies your being excluded from mainstream precincts, when in reality, it is the core value of investigative journalism.
You cannot have investigative journalism without that skepticism.
And this is the kind of skepticism you've been doing for a lot of years now that you do at your Substack.
I hope people will read that reporting, support your work there, because it really is, it shouldn't be, but it is just all too rare in our media.
So I appreciate your doing that work, and I appreciate your coming on the show to talk about it.
I draw a lot of inspiration from you, Glenn, so thank you for the kind words, and thanks for having me.
All right, Aaron, thank you.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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