Neocon Nikki Haley Passionately Defends Biden’s War in Ukraine—Like She’s Supported Every US Intervention. Plus: Julian Assange’s Father, John Shipton, on Ending Son’s Political Persecution | SYSTEM UPDATE #138
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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.
As many of you know, we were traveling last week to attend the Republican presidential primary, where we interviewed several people as well.
I made several podcast appearances last week on large podcasts.
You can look for that.
But we are now back in our studio and will be on for the entire week and the weeks to come at our regularly scheduled time.
Now, tonight, I am not surprised that Nikki Haley turned in a confident and forceful performance at the first Republican presidential debate held last week in Milwaukee.
Haley is a shrewd and effective politician.
That's how she got elected to three terms in the House, representing South Carolina, and then became that state's first female governor in 2010.
Re-elected in 2014 and then weaseled her way into becoming Trump's ambassador to the United Nations for about a year and a half despite explicitly advocating the exact warmongering neoconservative ideology that Trump insisted he intended to vanquish.
Nikki Haley is ambitious, calculating, and deeply careerist and she says whatever powerful people want to hear in order to help advance her political career and at that she's quite skillful.
But being an effective and calculating politician does not mean one is an honest politician, or a good person, or that one will exercise power for any ends other than ones that are malignant and destructive.
And all one needs to do to understand Nikki Haley's actual ideology and her actual agenda, as is true of most politicians, is simply look at who is most important in financing and promoting her campaign.
When one does that, the picture is anything but ambiguous.
When Haley left the Trump administration after just two years, she immediately converted herself, what she had spent her entire adult life being, a debt-ridden, barely middle-class political official, to someone who, in less than three years after leaving, amassed a vast personal fortune of at least $8 million, solely by speaking to and offering various services for pro-war, neocon, and corporatist groups.
Haley's candidacy seems to be based largely on two and only two goals.
Number one, cheerleading the signature policies of the Biden administration's foreign policy, namely fueling the war against Russia and Ukraine with no one in sight and with hundreds of billions of dollars of Americans' money.
And two, encircling China in order to promote a decades-long Cold War that will serve her corporate donors in the military-industrial class.
Now, domestically, she tosses in a few culture war bromides and cliches to excite conservatives, but what she's really doing is championing the agenda of the big corporate donor class that finances her campaign and is desperate to win back control of the Republican Party and make it as it was prior to Donald Trump's election
In 2016, for example, at the same time that she insists that endless sums of money be sent to President Zelensky and the Ukrainians, she wants to cut the social security of Americans who aren't nearly as wealthy as she is.
Haley is now being promoted by some of the nation's worst but most influential voices, and it is therefore vital to look at who and what she really is.
Then, as is true of Julian Assange's wife and his brother, his father, the Australian citizen John Shipton, has been traveling the world attempting to drum up support for his son, both among world leaders and populations around the globe.
Assange's father last week and this week is traveling in Brazil.
We were able to meet with him and sit down with him for an in-studio interview which we filmed yesterday.
The persecution of Assange by the U.S.
security state and the British government is certainly something this audience is well familiar with.
We have reported on it extensively and will continue to do so, given that we agree with the consensus view of every press freedom and civil liberties group in the West that the attempt to imprison Assange for WikiLeaks' publication of true and authentic documents in 2010, the attempt to imprison him for life as punishment for that, is the single greatest threat to press freedom.
But Assange's father is as smart and sophisticated as the WikiLeaks founder himself is.
I didn't know that until I met him for the first time yesterday.
And he provided some genuinely fascinating and new insights about recent developments in this case, including the reason the Australian government has finally become very vocal in demanding the return of its citizen.
Why the Biden administration is under more pressure than ever to find an exit out of the crisis that it created, and what solutions are now not just possible but plausible, and finally obtaining freedom for Julian Assange.
We were honored to meet Assange's father for the first time and are excited to show you what we think is a very illuminating and even newsmaking interview about the case of this brave pioneer of transparency and confronting the evils of the U.S.
security state.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Every generation or so in American politics, there is a transformational figure, meaning somebody who changes both the shape of their own party and, if they're successful, the shape of the country as if they're successful, the shape of the country as well.
Barack Obama often talked about the fact that Ronald Reagan was clearly such a transformational figure in the way that he reshaped Republican Party ideology, and when he won, reshaped the country for better or for worse, depending on your perspective, and he talked about how he wanted to be That kind of a transformational figure, but I don't think anyone believes Barack Obama was.
He was, if anything, a harmless status quo guardian.
Donald Trump, however, is without question, in my view, the most transformative political figure of this generation because he did something that no politician has ever been able to do in my lifetime, which is explicitly run against the establishment wing that controls one of the two political parties.
That's something Bernie Sanders tried to do in 2016.
And got crushed when the Democratic Party simply cheated and rigged the election, in the words of Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile, to ensure that Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate, vanquished Bernie Sanders.
And immediately after that, Bernie Sanders returned to captivity into the Democratic Party and that conflict was done.
There was no transformation of any kind.
The Democratic Party, other than some culture war issues, is basically the same as what it has been since Bill Clinton.
Revolutionized it into a party of corporatism and militarism in the early 1990s the Republican Party however underwent a very radical transformation ideologically when Donald Trump vanquished the establishment candidates first who was Jeb Bush the Florida governor and son of one president brother of another president who was backed by tens of millions of dollars in establishment PAC money
Trump brushed him aside and ran him over and then did the same to Marco Rubio when he became the establishment choice and by seizing control of the Republican Party and creating space for beliefs that had been completely heretical and anathema to that party.
Questioning the veracity of the FBI and the benevolence of the CIA Vowing not to involve the United States in a new war and then becoming the first president in decades Not to involve the United States in a new war even railing against the corporatism that has long Dominated the Republican Party saying that entitlements will be off-limits that he won't cut Social Security and Medicare simply to serve the
Wealthiest class of corporate donors who have controlled the Republican Party forever were all revolutionary in the Republican Party.
And that sentiment had been brewing in the Republican Party before Trump.
If you go back and look at Ron Paul's presidential campaign in 2008 and 2012, Despite having almost no establishment support, corporate PAC support, and going to the reddest districts in places like Iowa and South Carolina and delivering messages that were long deemed to be completely off-limits to Republican Party politics, such as railing against neoconservatives and the doctrine of imperialism and endless war,
And arguing that we shouldn't seek confrontation and domination of other countries, but trade and coexistence peacefully with them.
That wars only serve the interest of a tiny elite class.
Arguing against the war on drugs and the injustice of imprisoning millions of Americans simply for the substances that they choose to consume resonated with huge numbers of Republican voters.
Ron Paul, despite being laughed at and barely taken seriously as a Republican candidate, and despite not really being a very articulate or effective communicator, to be honest, Finished second, both in 2008 and 2012, to John McCain in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012.
He had the second most delegates in both of those Republican primaries, and that to me indicated, and I wrote about it a lot at the time, that there was a change taking place within the Republican Party.
As a result, neoconservatives recognized those changes, that rising sentiment of anti-interventionist belief that Ron Paul had exploited.
I may sneeze.
Excuse me.
It's embarrassing to sneeze while you're live, but sometimes you can't control it.
Hopefully that'll be the last one.
So Ron Paul exploited these beliefs.
He was able to give voice to this ideology, and neoconservatives read the Broomed very well in terms of which party was becoming hostile to their ideology and which party was becoming hospitable to it.
There was a 2014 op-ed in the New York Times by one of the historians of the neoconservative movement, Jacob Heilbrunn, that talked about how neoconservatives, led by people like Robert Kagan, also known as Victoria Nuland's husband, and Bill Kristol's most devoted partner for years in trying to bring America into all sorts of endless wars,
was maneuvering neoconservatives to support Hillary Clinton because he knew that Democrats and Hillary would be the much better vessel, the more reliable vehicle for the neoconservative ideology in 2014 than the Republicans would be.
And that was well before Trump descended down that escalator and became a serious candidate at The neoconservative Democratic Reliance was not motivated by Trump.
It began prior to Trump.
It was accelerated by him.
But these neocons saw the changes taking place in the Republican Party that Donald Trump, being the communicator that Ron Paul wasn't, being the charismatic politician that Ron Paul never could be, was able to give voice to and win with.
And as a result, the Republican establishment has lost control of the Republican Party.
It is obvious from polling that the only candidates Republican Party voters are willing to consider are ones who heed closely to Donald Trump's ideology of despising neoconservatives, of opposing endless war, of denouncing the use of American money to fund what is intended to be, intended to be not a war that Ukraine wins, but an endless war in Ukraine.
Not to save Ukraine, but to destroy it.
At the altar of, for some reason, destroying Russia, things that benefit a tiny sliver of the population, politicians who stand up and advocate for the 2008 or 2012 version of Republican Party ideology like Mike Pence and Tim Scott and Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson and Nikki Haley have been struggling to gain any traction at all because it's not the same Republican Party that it was
For all those years under George Bush and Dick Cheney and then John McCain and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and the rest of those corporatists and militants, the reality is the Republican Party has changed.
And now if you look at polling data, as we've shown you many times, it's Democrats who support the CIA and the FBI and the Union of State and corporate power to censor while Republicans oppose that and the war in Ukraine.
So the Republicans are desperately searching for somebody to take back the Republican Party, not just from Donald Trump but from his movement, and reinstate it as a party that loyally serves the class of its large donor base.
Now, Donald Trump did not perfectly adhere to that agenda at all.
One of the very first things he did, in fact, that the Congress let him do was sign into law a gigantic tax cut for the largest corporations and wealthiest people.
While doing very little at first for the middle class and the working class that he had vowed to serve, but rhetorically he heeded to that ideology and in many cases followed through on it, though not always.
He's saying he realizes his mistakes, that he's more determined than ever to cleanse out of the swamp of Washington the neoconservatives and globalists and militarists who have been ruining the United States and who ruined his administration because he let them in.
And we'll see if he actually means that if he wins.
But clearly the Republican Party is doing everything possible to win back control.
And they put their hopes at first in Ron DeSantis.
But the combination of his lack of charisma combined with his hardcore culture war stances, which do not please most Republican donors who tend to be cosmopolitan and don't want to hear about LGBT causes or contempt for trans people or abortion issues even.
And who are starting to become uncomfortable with Governor DeSantis for his refusal to criticize Trump as harshly as they want to are looking for an alternative.
And yet you see the people who are thriving and who are attracting attention, like Vivek Ramaswamy, who we interviewed as part of our trip to Milwaukee last week.
You can watch that interview if you haven't already.
It was a very interesting interview.
We interviewed him the day after his performance in that presidential primary.
It shows that the people who are attracting support are people with this anti-establishment mindset, or at least claim to have the anti-establishment mindset that Trump personified and gave voice to.
And it seems as though the alternative that a lot of these establishment Republicans and neocons are now placing their hopes in is former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, in part because she did have a very strong performance at the debate.
I was there.
I watched it.
I heard the applause from the Republican donor base, who are situated right behind the Fox News microphones, and the entire center stage of the floor of the debate is reserved for the Republican Party.
Rumble was a sponsor of the debate, or at least had exclusive rights to stream it online, so we had very, very good seats.
Because I was part of the Rumble contingent, I sat right behind people like Donald Trump Jr., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz, and other people of that kind who were also there as part of Rumble.
They all have shows on Rumble.
But the real seats, the best seats, are all reserved for Republican Party donors, for establishment donors, to ensure that the people who's cheering and booing you're hearing most Our Republican establishment donors.
Now, there are also people on the sides who are huge fans of IVAC or Governor DeSantis, and he has a lot of support among establishment voters as well, so you hear from them too.
It's not entirely that, but they ensure that a huge part of how the debate is shaped is through the reaction of establishment voices.
That was what Donald Trump pointed out in 2016 when he was being booed by the audience in the Republican debate for criticizing Jeb Bush, somebody who had no support among most Republicans, and yet you would have thought Jeb Bush was the most honored and revered figure in the world based on the audience reaction because, as Trump pointed out, the audience was filled with Republican lobbyists or Republican donors who are backing Jeb Bush and who hated Donald Trump.
Now, one of the ways Nikki Haley tried to distinguish herself, I think her most dramatic and effective moment was when she clashed with Vivek Ramaswamy and specifically stood up to defend Joe Biden's signature foreign policy, which is US support for the war in Ukraine against Russia.
Now, I think it's extremely weird that somebody would run For the Republican presidential nomination when it seems like the signature of their campaign is agreement with the signature foreign policy views of the other party's incumbent president.
Usually, if you're somebody who really supports the foreign policy of the Democratic Party, Go be like the Bill Kristol and David Frum and almost every other neocon in the United States and go join the Democratic Party or support Joe Biden's candidacy like most of them are doing.
Why run and be Joe Biden's opponent only to agree with him?
on core foreign policy and even economic policy issues and only have mild classes on the culture war.
Yet that seems to be exactly what Nikki Haley is doing.
So here's the clip of her in the debate where she clashed with Vivek specifically on the war in Ukraine and foreign policy generally.
"I said of Governor DeSantis that They need to know the difference between right and wrong.
called it a territorial dispute.
Why? - First of all, the American president needs to have moral clarity.
They need to know the difference between right and wrong.
They need to know the difference between good and evil.
When you look at the situation with Russia and Ukraine, here you have a pro-American country that was invaded by a thug.
So when you want to talk about what has been given to Ukraine, less than 3.5% of our defense budget has been given to Ukraine.
Okay, just to be clear, the United States spends more on its military budget than the next 14 nations combined.
And in fact, it spends even larger than the $850 billion figure that we're given when you add on to that the budget for the intelligence agencies.
It's probably closer to $1.5 trillion.
So when you're talking about 3.5% of the defense budget, you're talking about an enormous sum of money.
In fact, just to give you one example, in 2016, the Obama administration With the Republican Congress signed a deal with Israel, a 10-year deal, to provide Israel with what the New York Times just this week called a vast sum of money, $38 billion in American money that is transferred to Israel each year for 10 years based on the view that Israel is an important ally in the Middle East and therefore we have to support it.
You know those arguments.
Nikki Haley is a big believer in that.
In just the first 18 months of the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration and the Congress under it, the bipartisan Congress, has authorized more Then what the United States devoted to Israel for that 10-year package that was a record-setting package that Netanyahu, despite his differences with Obama, was genuinely grateful for.
It's unprecedented in terms of the amount of support that one country gives to another.
That's because of this special relationship that both parties insist on supporting between Israel and the U.S.
Now just this week, in fact today, President Zelensky said he wants and expects The United States to have the same relationship with Ukraine that it has with Israel, namely that it provides Ukraine with all the money that it needs to maintain a sophisticated and advanced military, and that it isn't dependent on which party wins.
So Americans can't vote against it, just like you can't vote against aid to Israel because they'll get it if Democrats or Republicans win.
Zelensky wants that kind of guarantee from the United States as well.
And so Nikki Haley is trying to say that 3.5% of our budget Our military budget is a tiny amount at the same time she wants to cut Social Security and Medicaid and make Americans have to work longer and harder to be eligible for those benefits to vote more of their life to their pointless jobs because now she doesn't need Social Security and Medicare nor do her children because she's enriched herself
With millions and millions of dollars of personal wealth by serving the very corporate and militaristic interests that are now financing this campaign so that she goes on stage and says these things.
Let's listen to the rest.
If you look at the percentages per GDP, 11 of the European countries have given more than the U.S.
But what's really important is go back to when China and Russia held hands, shook hands before the Olympics, and named themselves unlimited partners.
A win for Russia is a win for China.
We have to know that.
Ukraine is the first line of defense for us.
And the problem that Vivek doesn't understand is he wants to hand Ukraine to Russia.
He wants to let China eat Taiwan.
He wants to go and stop funding Israel.
You don't do that to friends.
What you do instead is you have the backs of your friends.
Ukraine is the front line of defense.
Putin has said, once Russia takes Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next.
That's a world war.
Somebody show me where Putin said that after he's done conquering all of Ukraine, he's going to go to Poland and the Balkans next, even though Poland is a NATO country and that would instantly mean war with the United States and all of Western Europe.
This is a complete lie and fantasy that neocons always say in order to get you to continue to support wars, to try and scare you.
That if you don't support this war, the new Hitler is going to come and invade every other country.
But she's defending the Biden administration's policy in the last 45 seconds that she had an opportunity to speak and express what she wants Americans to hear about her campaign.
She stood up to say, I'm here to support the Biden administration and the views of liberal Democrats when it comes to the war in Ukraine and our confrontational posture toward China and not what conservative and independent voters want, which is no more of their money being sent to Ukraine.
What is the point of a campaign like this?
Who was she representing?
Whose views?
Obviously not the Republican Party's voters, who are against the war that she's so enthusiastically defending, along with Joe Biden.
Look at what Putin did today.
He killed Pergozhin.
When I was at the UN, the Russian ambassador suddenly died.
This guy is a murderer.
And you are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country.
Okay, so before we hear from Vivek, I just need to say this.
You probably remember that clip early in President Trump's administration when he was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly, who at the time was in that 8 o'clock spot on Fox before Bill O'Reilly was fired and Tucker took over.
And Bill O'Reilly was pressuring Trump on Trump's campaign pledge to have a constructive relationship with Putin and Russia and not an antagonistic one.
Saying that we should work with Russia on defeating ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Syria and other priorities that there's no reason to consider Russia an enemy of the United States.
And Bill O'Reilly said, but how can you say that?
Putin is a killer.
He's a murderer.
And Trump turned around and said, oh, you don't think we have our killers as well?
You think we're so innocent?
Look at what we've done in our history.
Let's assume that it's true that Vladimir Putin killed Prigozhin three weeks after he led a battalion of 25,000 soldiers onto Moscow threatening a coup against his government.
What do you think the U.S.
government would do?
To somebody who gathered 25,000 extremely well armed troops and marched on Washington, threatening the government, shooting down American military helicopters and planes the way Purgosian and the Wagner Group did.
Look at what the United States government is doing.
To a bunch of Facebook warriors who never brandished weapons, who entered the Capitol for three hours for a largely peaceful protest that turned into a riot, putting them into solitary confinement.
You don't think the United States would take military action against somebody who led a coup, a real coup, not a fake one like on January 6th, inside the United States?
The United States sent special forces into Pakistan without the knowledge or consent of that government on a mission not to capture Osama Bin Laden, but to kill him.
Not to arrest him, not to put him on trial, not to show evidence to murder him, to kill him.
Israel did the same thing after the 1972 Olympics when Palestinian terrorists abducted Israeli and other athletes.
Golda Meir ordered the Mossad to hunt them down and kill them because she didn't think international institutions were acting quickly enough.
And as for being a thug for invading other countries, there's not a single war in the last 20 years that Nikki Haley hasn't supported.
Invasions of countries like Iraq and regime change wars in places like Libya and Syria and in Afghanistan.
And so these Republicans who are cheering for her do not represent, as you can just look at polls and see, the foreign policy views of the Republican Party.
They represent the foreign policy views of the Republican donor class that wants these endless wars, that believes in neoconservatism and wants to return to the pre-Trump ideology of the Republican Party.
First of all, I wish you well in your future career on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon.
But the fact of the matter, Boeing came off of it, but you've been pushing this lie all week, Nikki.
Okay, let me address that.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I'm going to address each of those right now.
This is the false lies of a professional politician.
There you have it.
So the reality is- So the reality is- You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.
And you know what?
The foreign policy experience that you already have shows in the pointless wars we've gotten into.
I've progressed that.
So that is that weird dynamic.
I was there.
I couldn't believe it.
You hear these cheers for a person articulating views that the entire party, the actual voters of this party, reject.
That's why they elected Donald Trump in 2016 while he denounced everything Nikki Haley just defended.
This is a theater put on by large Republican donors and by neoconservative institutions to try to revitalize those ideologies that are now fully vibrant and supported in the Democratic Party and ensure that they're also supported by the other parties so that you have no choice.
That's the project here.
That's why she's defending Joe Biden's foreign policy because she wants to ensure that foreign policy once again becomes bipartisan.
So just like support for Israel and how Zelensky wants there to be a bipartisan package for aid to Ukraine, you can't vote.
Your vote won't matter because the two parties are identical.
They'll be the Unawar party.
That's her, the project of her campaign.
That's been the project of her entire political career.
Now, When she was in the Trump administration, and then when she left, she often conflicted with Donald Trump on his foreign policy and acted to sabotage it.
When she left, she often denounced it, precisely because Donald Trump was elected to expel the Nikki Haley's from the Republican Party.
So here, just as one example, is a CNN article in 2019.
Nikki Haley says Trump's Syria decision means leaving U.S.
allies, quote, to die.
In other words, Trump said exactly what he said when he was running in 2016 when Republican Party voters made him the nominee.
Why do we have troops in Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad?
We should work with Assad and the Russians to kill Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
But once we do that, we have no more reason to have troops there.
And his view was ISIS was vanquished.
There was no more reason to keep troops in Syria.
Trump wanted troops out of Syria, but the Pentagon just ignored him.
They would move them around, the troops, and lie to him and say that they had carried out his orders.
And the media would cheer these people who were sabotaging the orders of the Commander-in-Chief Because they believed the military had the better ideology of keeping troops deployed, even though civilian rule, the elected official who was the commander in chief, ordered them not to do so.
They constantly applauded the people inside the government, subverting the elected president's policy and the name of democracy.
That's how propagandistic they were.
And Nikki Haley was one of the people constantly doing that.
So here she is condemning Trump's decision attempt to try and leave Syria.
Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump's former ambassador to the UN, issued strong criticism, stinging criticism, of her former boss on Monday, saying Trump's decision to remove U.S. troops from northern Syria as Turkey plans a military offensive in the region means the is leaving Kurdish allies, quote, to die.
The White House announced Trump's decision Sunday night following a phone call between Trump and Turkish President Erdogan.
The move marks a major shift in U.S.
foreign policy, and of course Nikki Haley has spent her entire career serving establishment ideology and foreign policy, and so she was there to say, even though I was Trump's appointee who was there to carry out his foreign policy, I'm condemning any attempts to leave countries Where we have troops deployed, even though that's what the Republican voters and ultimately the American people wanted when they elected Donald Trump based on his promises to do that.
That's who Nikki Haley is.
She does not care in the slightest about what ordinary Americans want.
She cares only about what her donor class wants.
They enrich her and they fund her campaign pack.
And that's whose interests she's serving.
Here's Nikki Haley.
She went on to Fox News, on to Fox & Friends.
All their hosts also support Joe Biden's Foreign policy, both in China and Ukraine, and here is Nikki Haley being questioned very favorably by these Fox & Friends hosts, where she talks about her clash with IVAC, criticized Governor DeSantis for his very tepid statement that he too thinks we shouldn't keep sending money to Ukraine.
But here's what she said while on Fox.
European countries have given more than us.
So let's focus on real facts and not scare people into this.
The truth is a win for Russia is a win for China.
Fact.
The other thing is we have to understand that the way we win is make sure Ukraine finishes this.
Look at what they've done.
Look at how far they've gone.
And don't underestimate the fact that Putin is a murderer.
We saw that with Pergosen.
We know what he's capable of.
He, I worked with him in the UN.
He and China made no bones about the fact that they want to destroy us.
Let's not take our eye off that ball.
So that's basically the same thing she said in the debate.
By the way, this attempt to pretend that she's some sort of like Henry Kissinger figure with her like vast foreign policy experience.
Where does that come from?
She was in the House for three terms.
She then ran South Carolina.
And then she had this like very decorative position where she went to the UN.
She had a scandal that Vogue magazine reported that the State Department paid $55,000 for the curtains in her State Department penthouse at the UN.
But other than that, that job basically consists of just raising your hand.
She wasn't negotiating with Vladimir Putin.
Over anything.
She was there to carry out Trump administration policy by raising her hand and voting as she was told.
That's the job of the ambassador to the UN.
That doesn't best anybody with foreign policy experience, but more than that, And this is something President Obama said.
It was a very effective political tactic he used when he ran in 2008.
It was criticized by Hillary Clinton for not having foreign policy experience.
He was in the Senate for all of two years when he announced his presidential run.
Before that he served in the Illinois State Senate.
He didn't have foreign policy experience and his argument was the U.S.
foreign policy establishment in the United States is responsible for so many debacles and bloodshed and lies That not being part of the US foreign policy establishment is not a liability when running, it's an asset.
I would honestly rather have some randomly chosen person from the phone book run foreign policy for the United States than have these people who have been responsible for all of these American wars, who sit in meetings with Victoria Nuland and Bill Kristol and John Brennan planning and James Clapper and Michael Hayden and Dick Cheney.
That is not something that recommends somebody to run for president.
That is something that should disqualify somebody for running president, being part of the foreign policy disaster that is the United States.
But I really don't understand what...
Makes her someone who can claim to have some great foreign policy experience, vast foreign policy experience.
Now, the New York Times loves Nikki Haley, in part because she's somebody who's willing to run against Donald Trump, but also because she is the kind of Republican that the New York Times likes, somebody who also spews establishment doctrine and does not rail against the evils of the establishment.
So Nikki Haley gave a CNN town hall in June of this year.
The New York Times called it a mild CNN town hall.
And you can see how they're describing it in a way that they obviously consider positive, but it's an accurate description of who Nikki Haley is and what ideology she's pushing.
Quote, on policies both foreign, like Ukraine, and domestic, such as Social Security, Ms.
Haley's positions were a throwback to typical Republican Party stances before its populist takeover by Mr. Trump.
Let me read that again because that's actually completely true and it's so important.
That's all you really need to know about her whole candidacy.
And the one run by Tim Scott and Mike Pence and Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson.
And we'll see about Governor DeSantis, but quote, on policies both foreign, like Ukraine, and domestic, such as Social Security, Ms.
Haley's positions were a throwback to typical Republican Party stances before its popular takeover by Mr. Trump.
If you're somebody who liked the Republican Party pre-Trump, the Republican Party of Mitt Romney and John McCain and George Bush and Dick Cheney and Paul Ryan, I hated it.
But if you're somebody who liked it, that pre-Trump Republican Party, you should vote for Nikki Haley.
That is exactly what she is.
She's a throwback to the 2004, 2008, 2012 Republican Party before Trump took it over.
That's precisely who she is, what the New York Times said.
It went on, quote, Ms.
Haley also carved out differences with Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on foreign policy issues, as she has had in the past.
The former U.S.
ambassador disputed Mr. DeSantis, who has called Russia's invasion of Ukraine a, quote, territorial dispute, a characterization he has since walked back.
And she dismissed Mr. Trump's refusal to say whether Ukraine should win the war.
She said both positions represented a naive trust in Russia's President Vladimir V. Putin.
Quote, if Ukraine pulls out, Ms.
Haley said, then we're all looking at World War.
Asked by Mr. Tapper about Mr. Trump's congratulating North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, for recently ascending to the leadership role in the WHO, Ms.
Haley called Mr. Kim, whose flattering letters Mr. Trump once praised, a quote, thug.
So she goes around talking tough, threatening other countries, exactly what John McCain did, exactly what Dick Cheney and George Bush did.
If you think those led to positive things, you should absolutely vote for Nikki Haley.
What has Nikki Haley been doing since she left the Trump administration?
First of all, when she left the Trump administration, the New York Times celebrated her as one of those people who heroically subverted the ideology of George Bush.
They had all these people, like General Mattis, and John Kelly, and H.R.
McMaster.
You probably remember these were the military guys, the adults in the room, and they were there to restrain President Trump, to prevent him From carrying out the foreign policy revolution and the domestic policy priorities that he had promised to usher in when running.
In other words, they were there to thwart American democracy and ensure that establishment dogma prevailed even though voters rejected it.
And so when Nikki Haley left the Trump administration, the New York Times celebrated her as one of the officials who Who actually subverted her, who subverted those policies.
Let me see if we have that.
Here is the New York Times article from 2018, Nikki Haley to resign as Trump's ambassador to the UN.
Now, here is how the New York Times heralded Nikki Haley's role inside the Trump administration.
Quote, President Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, said on Tuesday that she would resign at the end of the year, marking the departure of one of the few high-profile women in the Trump administration.
Ms.
Haley, a former Republican governor of South Carolina, had been an early and frequent critic of Mr. Trump, but he named her to the U.N. jobs weeks after his election.
As ambassador, Ms. Haley has been an outspoken, often forceful envoy, someone whom foreign diplomats look to for guidance from an administration known for haphazard and inconsistent policy positions, who emerged as something of a star amid the dysfunction of the president's first national security team.
So if you are encouraged by the New York Times praise for Republicans, if you want the kind of Republicans that the New York Times, the guardian of establishment ideology, thinks is one of the few stars of Republican politics, you should definitely also vote for Nikki Haley because that's exactly who she is.
Now, the reason Nikki Haley left After less than two years, and apparently developed extraordinarily profound foreign policy experience in those one and a half years where she raised her hand elegantly at the UN, is because she had all kinds of opportunities to enrich herself.
And that's what she told President Trump is the reason she was leaving.
She wanted to join what she called the private sector.
And boy, did she join the private sector.
I mean, she thrived within it.
Here from Forbes, In August of this year, how Nikki Haley built an $8 million fortune and helped bail out her parents.
Quote, Haley stunned Washington by resigning her role in the Trump administration in 2018, less than two years after taking office.
A spokesperson for Haley claims that the family financial troubles had, quote, no bearing whatsoever on Ambassador Haley's decision to leave her position.
So the Forbes article prior to this paragraph detailed all the debt in which Nikki Haley and her family had long wallowed, which is not at all a mark against her.
That is very common for Americans.
She was middle class.
She was in a lot of debt.
She had no real personal wealth.
And she recognized that once you're something like the UN ambassador, there's tons of people waiting to hand money to you.
And she wanted to go and collect those checks.
And that's what she did.
Okay, so that wasn't her motive, the fact that there were millions of dollars waiting for her from the military-industrial complex and from neoconservative think tanks, but...
Whether that was her motive or not, she certainly was eager and efficient about sweeping up those millions of dollars, quote.
But the same letter also suggested that Haley may have had money-making ventures on her mind.
Oh, you don't say, quote.
As a businessman, she wrote to Donald Trump, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down, but a step up.
If you measure somebody's character by net worth, Nikki Haley definitely took a step up.
When she left the Trump administration for the, quote, private sector.
The article continues, quote, Indeed, since then, Haley's net worth has ballooned from less than a million dollars to an estimated eight million.
How did she make so much money in so little time?
By following a tried and true playbook for politicians looking to cash in on their fame.
Speeches to companies like Barclays and organizations such as the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs provided more money in a day than Haley had previously earned in a year.
It's not clear how many talks she gave from 2019 to 2021, but Haley hauled in $2.3 million from just 11 events in 2022.
She became a director of Boeing in 2019, then stepped down the next year, collecting over $300,000 in cash and stock.
So when Vivek said to her, congratulations on your future as a member of the board of directors of Boeing, he was not really predicting the future, but just describing the past.
Just like Lloyd Austin came right from the board of directors of Raytheon to run the Defense Department, Nikki Haley left the Trump administration to go sit on the board of Boeing and now is using her campaign to support policies of endless war and cutting back entitlement programs for Americans that many Americans subsist on in order to feed Boeing and the other companies that made her rich.
Isn't that so inspiring?
My former colleague at The Intercept and a frequent guest of our show, the great investigative reporter, Lee Fong, on his Substack, which I hope you'll read and subscribe to, did his own investigation of some of the ways Nikki Haley became very wealthy.
The former UN ambassador went from virtually no savings in 2017 to a small fortune, in part from defense contracting and war advocacy ties.
Wow, what a surprise!
It's amazing, isn't it?
And a huge coincidence that the very companies that ensured she became extremely wealthy in a very short period of time are the exact policies, interests, and agendas she's now serving in her presidential campaign, which is being funded by these same interests through her extremely well-funded pack of large donors.
Quote, Vivek Ramaswamy, as the only candidate directly against any escalation in the Ukraine-Russia war and against any additional U.S.
funds, argued that the conflict represented, quote, another no-win war like the wars in Iraq and Vietnam.
The biotech investor favors a quick negotiated end to the fighting and an alliance with Russia to help contain China against any future aggression, as well as a greater focus on domestic issues such as immigration.
Several candidates in contrast bitterly argued that supporting Ukraine is a moralistic necessity.
Nikki Haley, who also backs more American funds for the military support for the conflict, made similar remarks.
Quote, look what Putin did today.
He killed Prigozhin.
When I was at the UN, the Russian ambassador suddenly died.
This guy is a murderer, said Haley.
But the debate turned personal a moment later as Haley charged that Ramaswamy is, quote, choosing a murderer over a pro-American country.
Quote, I wish you well on your future career on the boards of Lockheed and Raytheon.
Ramaswamy shot back.
Oh, so he was actually not describing her past, where she sat on the board of Boeing, but her board, her likely future with Lockheed and Raytheon.
Quote, you would make America less safe, you have no foreign policy experience, and it shows, Counter Haley.
You just watched that.
The incendiary exchange, which instantly became a viral made-for-television exchange clip, shared widely, belied a deeper divide in foreign policy and the curious background of Haley, who went from near negligible wealth with virtually no assets or investments other than a bank account with less than $15,000 in 2017 and up to $1 million in debt to a sizable fortune.
Over the last year, Haley and her husband reported a vast investment stock portfolio and $12 million of income.
Along the way, Haley became wealthy in large part from her ties to a network of defense interests and hawkish advocacy organizations tied to U.S.
and Israeli intelligence officials.
In one of her first reported private sector jobs after leaving her last government post, Haley joined the board of Boeing.
So we just heard that.
And she still owns up to $250,000 in Boeing stock.
Michael Haley, Nikki's husband, also launched his own defense contracting firm in recent years.
Michael, who previously served with the National Guard along with Stinson Human Resources and at a high-end clothing store, earns up to $500,000 from a company called Allied Defense.
That's who Nikki Haley is.
It's not hard to See exactly what she is and what she's about and why she's there.
Now, in case you have any doubts, any lingering doubts, despite this mountain of evidence I just presented to you, let's look at the people who are most excited about Nikki Haley's campaign.
They're the exact neoconservatives who Trump expelled from the Republican Party, who turned into Democrats, We're now in a project to ensure that voters have no choice because the Republican Party is exactly, once again, like the Democratic Party when it comes to foreign and economic policy.
One of her biggest fans is the neocon scumbag Bill Kristol.
We devoted an entire show to his sociopathic, bloodthirsty, monstrous record.
And in 2018, as the CNBC report demonstrates, he was actually pushing her and in talks with her About running against Donald Trump in 2020 as a Republican primary challenger.
That's who Bill Kristol wanted.
I remember him announcing that that's who we hope challenged Donald Trump.
Resigned as the U.S.
ambassador in the U.N., she made it clear she has no intention to run for president in 2020.
She was very busy making a lot of money.
That's not stopping Republican operative Bill Kristol from approaching her to see whether she would run against President Donald Trump in a primary.
Quote, when she leaves the administration, I'd be happy to buy her lunch and see what's happening with Trump, the economy, Bob Mueller, and whether she wants to run in 2020, Kristol said in an interview on Thursday.
Quote, I'll hope to speak with her.
as well as many other people.
He added, "What we are doing is laying the groundwork "and showing there's a path and helping create that path "for anyone who would choose to run.
"That decision is obviously up to them." Now, nobody is more responsible for all of America's words over the past two decades than Bill Kristol.
He is a conniving, amoral, warmonger who wants to re-create the Republican Party as a mirror of the Democratic Party.
That's why he loves Nikki Haley.
The same is true for the New York Times columnist David Brooks, who before he was hired by the New York Times worked for Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard.
And wrote one pro-war article after the next in 2002 and three leading up to the invasion of Iraq and you'll be unsurprised to learn that he quote regards Nikki Haley as the best Trump alternative.
Here's what the neocon David Brooks said quote Wednesday's debate illustrated the cancer that is eating at the Republican Party.
It's not just Trumpian immorality.
The real disease is narcissistic hucksterism.
The real danger is that he's creating generations of people like Vivek Ramaswamy who threaten to dominate the Republican Party for decades to come.
This is exactly what they fear.
That there will be a party that offers an alternative to democratic neoliberalism and militarism.
That's what they want to stop more than anything.
That's why Donald Trump is indicted in four separate jurisdictions on felony charges.
And you're going to see what's being done to Cornel West, too, now that polls are starting to show that if he stays on as a third-party candidate, he's going to eat into Joe Biden's support in a way that is making Trump's lead, which he already has over Biden, now slight even bigger.
Quote, if Trump emerged from the make-believe world of pro-wrestling, Ramaswamy emerges from the make-believe world of social media and the third-rate sectors of the right-wing media sphere.
His statements are brisk, in-your-face provocations intended to produce temporary populist dopamine highs.
It's all performative shows.
Ramaswamy seems as uninterested in actually governing as his idol.
Republicans have been unable to take down Trump because they haven't been able to rebut and replace the core Trump-Ramaswamy ethos that politics is essentially a form of entertainment.
No, that's bullshit.
The core Trump-Ramaswamy ethos is that the Republican and Democratic Party and the bipartisan power centers they formed and the establishment dogma they serve that have ruled Washington for decades is fundamentally and radically corrupt and serves a tiny sector of the American lead at the expense of everybody else.
That's the ideology David Brooks supports and he wants both parties to support it, but that is the Trump-Ramaswamy appeal.
Quote, but time and again Haley seemed to look at the Trump-Ramaswamy wing and implicitly say, you children need to stop preening and deal with reality.
She showed total impatience for the kind of bravado that the fragile male ego manufactures by the boatload.
Haley dismantled Ramaswamy on foreign policy.
It was not only her contemptuous put down, you have no foreign policy experience and it shows.
She took on the whole America first ethos.
That sounds good as a one-liner, but that doesn't work when you're governing a superpower.
Why does David Brooks need the Republican Party to support neoconservatism when Joe Biden already does?
Again, why are they excited about Nikki Haley taking over the Republican Party if all she's doing is supporting Joe Biden's core signature foreign policies?
Because they want to take away your choice.
They hate populism.
They hate anti-establishment ideology.
They are the establishment.
And so, of course, they're swooning for Nikki Haley.
Quote, gesturing to Ramaswamy, she said, quote, he wants to hand Ukraine to Russia.
He wants to let China eat Taiwan.
He wants to go and stop funding Israel.
You don't do that to friends.
All of that is a lie, as Ramaswamy was trying to say.
He does not support a cutting off aid to Israel.
He supports a transformation of the Israeli-US relationship.
He also believes, and I think this is clearly true, that we committed the cardinal sin that we always avoided during the Cold War, which is driving Russia and China together by making Russia unnecessarily an enemy.
And he thinks resolving the war in Russia will enable us to tear Russia away from China's fear.
So none of that is even true.
But you see who's so excited by Nikki Haley's presidency.
It's the people most despised by actual Republican Party voters.
The New York Times has this truly revolting segment where Gail Collins and Brett Stevens, another neoconservative columnist of the New York Times who loved the Iraq War and Bush-Cheney neoconservatism, etc., have this sort of conversational Back and forth, it's supposed to be endearing because they're supposedly ideological opposites.
She's a liberal, he's a conservative, but needless to say they have full agreement on everything regarding Donald Trump and therefore pretty much agree on everything that matters.
They both hate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Here they are talking about him under the title Vivek Ramaswamy is suddenly part of our political life.
Gayle Collins, quote, Just for diversion, make believe that Trump drops out of the race for any of a million reasonable reasons.
The other option in his party looks pretty appalling to me.
Do you still think you'd wind up voting for Joe Biden?
Or would you feel free to go back to your Republican roots?
Brett Stevens.
Neocon.
Quote, the only Republicans in the current field I could definitely vote for are Chris Christie and Nikki Haley.
Otherwise, I'll be pulling the lever for Joe and lighting votive candles every night for his health.
And then in a separate segment, she said, Gail Collins, Brett, we haven't talked since the Republican debate.
This was this week after the debate.
Can't say I fell in love with any of the contenders, but your fave, Nikki Haley, was certainly the most moderate voice on stage.
And Brett Stephens said, moderate, insane, but also cutting and sharp, particularly when it came to her vivisection of Vivek Ramaswamy's neo-isolationist, Putin-kowtowing foreign policy.
So that is the distinction, the very vibrant ideological debate that exists in the Republican Party that the Democratic Party is completely devoid of.
There is no ideological debate in the Democratic Party.
They're completely unified.
That's why Bernie Sanders and AOC have become the earliest endorsers of Joe Biden.
Even though he has two primary challengers in Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr., and a left-wing challenge in the Green Party candidate Cornel West, because they are completely united.
There's no internal dissent whatsoever in the Democratic Party.
They march in the lockstep.
But Trump's Republican Party is radically and fundamentally different than the pre-Trump Republican Party of Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson and Mike Pence and Nikki Haley and all of these neocon scumbags and that's why they love Nikki Haley.
So there's your choice.
If you want to vote in the Republican Party and you want the Republican Party to turn into something that looks like the Democratic Party again, the Mitt Romney, John McCain, Dick Cheney, George Bush version, absolutely vote for Nikki Haley or one of those other Throwbacks.
But if you actually want to keep the Trump Party and fortify the Trump Party, the Republican Party, as a populist party and anti-establishment party, then You should vote for one of the people who supports that ideology.
Now, just to underscore how traditional of a Republican Nikki Haley is, you just heard her, I showed you many times how she was saying she wants to send huge amounts of your money to foreign countries to fight all sorts of wars.
And what she also wants to do is take away your money for you to not be able to retire, for you not to be able to have health care access as you retire, for you to have to work longer hours at your unsatisfying job because she says there's for you to have to work longer hours at your unsatisfying job because she says there's no money for you, only for Zelensky Listen to what she said about Social Security and Medicare on August 26th.
Well, you know, you've got multiple candidates on that stage that said they wouldn't touch entitlements, including Trump.
And any candidate that says they're not going to touch entitlements means that they're basically going to go into office and then leave America bankrupt.
Social Security is going to go bankrupt in 10 years.
Medicare is going to go bankrupt in eight.
So the way we deal with it is we don't touch anyone's retirement or anyone who's been promised in.
But we go to people like my kids in their 20s when they're coming into the system and we say the rules have changed.
We change retirement age to reflect life expectancy.
Instead of cost of living increases, we do it based on inflation.
We limit the benefits on the wealthy and we expand Medicare Advantage plans.
What's the right age there then, Ambassador?
Well, I think we have to do the numbers.
We've got to figure out what it is.
But what we do know is 65 is way too low and we need to increase that.
We need to do it according to life expectancy.
Just as a side note, I absolutely despise this practice.
Of calling American politicians by titles that they haven't actually had for years.
Like Governor Christie?
He hasn't been the governor of New Jersey for almost a decade, if not more.
Ambassador Haley?
What are these aristocratic titles that you learn for life?
Secretary Clinton, they used to constantly call her that in 2016, even though she stopped being Secretary of State in 2012.
Anyway, that just irritates me and I think says a lot, even though it seems trivial, about how the political class thinks.
They are like this landed gentry.
But maybe you're somebody who thinks that the United States is too much in debt and has to cut Social Security and Medicare.
If you're simultaneously saying that and always finding enough money to send to every foreign war and scoffing at people who say we shouldn't be spending huge amounts of money on these endless wars that never produce any benefits for American people, Then it's clear whose interests you're serving.
That Oliver Anthony, who became overnight, found overnight fame with his song, Richmond North of Richmond, seemed extremely irritated that they played that working class anthem to start off the Republican debate, Fox News did, and then many people on that stage, like Nikki Haley, purported to have empathy for his grievances, and he basically said, I'm not a fan of Joe Biden.
He's certainly somebody I was singing about but a lot of those Republicans on that stage were also people I was singing about because those are exactly the kind of rich men north of Richmond who believe in the same thing.
So Nikki Haley is not a rich man but she is a very rich woman north of Richmond.
And she's somebody who wants to serve the interests of the very rich people who made her rich.
And that comes at the expense of people like Oliver Anthony.
and the reason his song resonated is because most Americans know that.
So yesterday we had the opportunity to sit down with Julian Assange's father, John Shipton.
I have met Julian Assange.
I've spoken to Julian Assange many times over the years.
I have reported on WikiLeaks since the very beginning, since even before the 2010 I've read publications that have led to his indictment and attempt for the United States to extract him from Great Britain, his prison imprisonment for several years, and I've gotten to become friends with Julian.
I certainly admire him a lot.
He's someone I regard as extremely heroic and pioneering and I consider his prosecution, as I've said many times, to be one of the gravest attacks on basic, not just press freedoms, but the ability to dissent in the West.
That's really what they're destroying him over, is the fact that he was so effective as a dissident.
Especially to the U.S.
security status.
Chuck Schumer said on Rachel Maddow's show, everyone knows in Washington you don't anger the CIA because they have six different ways to send data to get back at you.
And that's what the Julian Assange case, like so many other things, including Donald Trump's scandals and indictments demonstrate as well.
But I've known Julian over the years.
I've become not just impressed with his courage and integrity, but also his intellect.
He's one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life.
And I was very pleasantly surprised when I sat down with his father yesterday, who's traveling around Brazil as part of Julian's entire family's global effort to drum up support for his cause among world leaders and populations, that I now see exactly where Julian got his analytical sophistication and his intellect from.
I found this conversation very enlightening.
He offered some new insight into some recent developments in this case that offer, I think, more promise and potential than ever for Julian to be free.
It's far from guaranteed.
Obviously, there are people in the U.S.
security state who consider him still public enemy number one.
But there's a lot of pressures now being brought to bear and he did a great job analyzing those pressures and it gave me new insight into this case and I am excited to show you the interview we conducted with him yesterday because I think it will provide you with that same insight.
So here is John Shepton, the father of Julian Assange.
So I know you've been in Brazil for a few days, but let me nonetheless give you a belated welcome to Brazil and thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Thanks Glenn, it's been a real pleasure.
I've known your work and face for many many years and of course had long conversations with Julian about Glenn Greenwald and the contribution and how to work together and so on.
Yeah, that's very nice of you to say, and obviously I'm very supportive of the cause of having Julian's persecution stop, and that's one of the things on which we wanted to focus.
So, other than getting some time to see this beautiful country, what is it that you've been doing here?
What will you do here with the rest of your time in support of Julian's cause?
Well, principally we're following events of the film Ithaca, which is about the The activism for Julian Assange worldwide.
So we just do a Q&A and develop arguments that are suitable to the clarity that you're showing the film in.
So for example, in the United States, we speak in the strongest of terms about the defence of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
In Brazil, we speak equally firmly about the BRICS and the rising, well, the sunrise of the Latin American states.
So the president of Brazil, the current president Lula da Silva, has been a longtime defender of your son.
He, going back to the earliest major leaks in 2010 when Lula was still president, praised those leaks as vital evidence of the war crimes of the United States and its allies around the world.
He has been an outspoken defender in between the time he served as president then and ran for president successfully again now and continues to depict Julian's prosecution as persecution, very strongly condemning the Biden administration and the British government for keeping Julian locked up.
Have you been able to have contact with his government, with officials in his government, either in Brasilia or around the country?
And if so, what have you been able to hear from them?
We met with the Minister for Foreign Affairs who was very helpful and took half an hour for the meeting and then engaged in photo opportunities which he pumped out into the internet and to the news services through his facilities.
So that was very good.
The principal thing is to generate support, crystallise support.
Within the population, because we understand that politicians and politics rest upon the will of the people, so to speak, particularly in the sense of votes and Julian's The affection for Julian in Latin America is profound.
We also have President Obrador of Mexico as a very strong supporter.
Together those two men have moved the persecution of Julian up and now it's become a diplomatic matter between nations.
This is a story I've been covering for a long time.
Obviously, I covered WikiLeaks almost from the very beginning, even before those leaks I just mentioned.
It enabled me to develop a real sense of admiration for Julian and his work and ultimately a friendship.
So it's something I've been very interested in on numerous levels over the many years.
And the thing that seems to me at least to be most significant in terms of what has changed is that your government and his, the Australian government, people forget Julian has never been a citizen of the United States, nor is he one now.
He's a citizen of Australia.
Finally is speaking out in defense of the rights of its citizen.
The Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese several times has said things in pretty strong terms like enough is enough.
It's time for this to come to a conclusion.
How sincere do you think those public objections are on the part of the Australian government and how much do you think they're doing in reality to pressure their American allies to free Julian?
Terrific question.
Well, in the first place, the last election which elected Anthony Albanese and the Labor government, the left government, into power, we used the no-name creature that it was an Assange election.
Such as the support for Julian, it's around about 88% of the population in Australia want him returned home.
So Anthony Albanese's job to a certain extent depends upon saying positive things about Julian.
We understand that in politics, words are actions.
So when he says that he expects this thing to be brought to a conclusion and wishes so, I understand that that becomes a diplomatic matter for the relationship between the United States and Australia, to the extent that Carolyn Kennedy
He has had a meeting with a delegation of Australian parliamentarians and at that meeting said, there's not really a diplomatic matter except I'm here as the representative of the United States talking to you.
It's a legal matter.
But as I understand it, this is quoting, as I understand it, Maximum Julian can receive for computer intrusion is 60 months and he has more or less served that time now.
So we from that understand that somebody is offering a deal.
Someone inside the U.S.
Justice Department is offering a kind of plea bargain, which is something I've heard as well.
I was going to ask you about it.
I don't know how reliable that was, but is that essentially what you're referring to, that there's a plea deal for Julian to plead guilty in exchange for essentially being declared to have served the maximum time already for that crime?
Yes, but I formulate it a little bit different than a plea deal.
I see it as a diplomatic arrangement between the United States and Australia to run with something that gets them both out of the diplomatic circumstances of conflict between Australia and the United States and puts the weight on the victim to accept Before I ask about that, I want to probe that a little bit.
The amazing thing is the relationship between the United States and Australia has actually become much more important now than ever before as a result of the United States' focus on China.
And the Pacific, Australia has become, I was just reading an article this week in The Economist, central to the US military posture with regard to China.
They want to build military bases, they are building military bases in fact on Australia, promising Australia all sorts of things.
So there's very serious negotiations, very serious trading going on between those two countries at the highest priority in terms of both governments.
You would think Just as a matter of kind of national dignity, that Australia would have more than enough leverage if they were serious, and that's why I'm asking how sincere this is other than just a need to assuage the population politically, to extract that as a kind of victory that the Australians can show to the population that we're not just a vassal state to the United States, that it is an actual partnership of equals.
Yeah, I take that point but again I look at it slightly differently.
That these arrangements take a while to put in place and the United States over the last 13 years has put so much effort into the persecution of Julian and the profile of that effort and also the usefulness of the threat and intimidation and oppression of potential publishers and journalists.
Also, I instinctively see that certain sections of the United States Administration want to remove the capacity of the First Amendment to protect publishers and, well, protect everybody within the United States on free speech matters.
So let me get back to that issue of the potential plea bargain as a way out for both the US and Australia, where Australia gets to say we got our citizen back, the US gets to say we convicted Julian Assange of crimes to which he's pled guilty, and that vindicates what we were doing all along.
I don't think anyone can judge whatever Julian does.
He has been in effective prison in the Ecuadorian Embassy for eight years first, and now he's been in a very harsh prison in Belmarsh for, what is it, going on four plus years?
More than a decade of his life consumed by this battle.
At the same time, I visited Julian, I believe, in 2018.
And although he was definitely, that was the last time I spoke to him and saw him in person, he was definitely affected by what was going on.
He was also very, very determined and principled at the same time.
He's obviously somebody who made a choice in life to confront the world's most powerful people and understood what that would likely entail.
Is that something you think he would be willing to do, namely plead guilty to crimes that, having known everything that I know about this case, he actually did not commit, as a way of finally getting out of detention and prison?
Well, I can't say.
Glenn, I can't say.
It's very difficult to answer that.
I mean, I only can answer it from within my own personality, character and imagination.
However, what I...
What I can say is that the circumstances of placing the onus of solution on the victim are not comfortable.
And the second is that every single human right, due process, conventions of asylum, Have been abrogated in the case of Assange.
The person, Julian Assange, is now offered an arrangement whereby he has to entrust the United States, after his experience, after 13 years of experience of the United States and its Department of Justice, trust them to their word.
Well, this is really very difficult.
But by that do you mean the arrangement would be he would go back to the United States, stand trial, or appear in a federal court in the United States, and order a plea guilty, and then trust their word that based on that plea deal he would then be released back to Australia?
Is that the trust element you're talking about?
Well, that's one of them.
You know, travel to the United States is just out of the question.
You can't put yourself in the hands of people who are obviously trying to kill you.
But that's one.
The second one is that they say, oh, OK, you can go home to Australia.
Off you go.
And then the minute you get to Australia, oh, but we forgot this charge.
We neglected to do this, and so on and so forth.
They continue to hound you to the end of your days.
And the only, the, what Julian Well, I imagine what is possible for Julian to utilise is that the support for a solution to this matter continues to grow, a diplomatic arrangement, so a little bit of patience may bring a benefit.
I mean, other people say to me, oh you know, there's a window, well they use a door, there's a door opening or there's a window opening and it'll close soon.
You have to make a decision and all this sort of stuff.
Activity by President Lula and President Obrador, in concert with the interests of Australia, will bring a proper solution.
I don't mean by that that the United States apologises and says we're terribly sorry we made a mistake here.
But I see this possibility that the White House requests the Department of Justice to review the espionage charges under the auspices that it endangers and embarrasses the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
The hypothesis I've had for some time now, and I'm wondering what you think of it, is that there is no interest at all that the Biden administration has in bringing Julian Assange to American soil, putting him on trial in a federal courthouse in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is where he would be tried,
Allowing that media circus to distract from everything that Joe Biden would want to be doing, enabling Julian to go on the stand, having the world know that Joe Biden is trying to become the first ever president to prosecute a publisher under the Espionage Act, allowing every foreign leader, as they already do, to point to this case whenever the United States tries to use this soft power to criticize those other governments, that Yeah, very much.
really wanted is what they've gotten, which is the destruction of WikiLeaks, the incapacitation physically and mentally of Julian for all these years.
And they actually want a way out.
They've been very happy with it winding its way through the British court system where Julian's just kept there and not brought.
But I can't envision a scenario where they actually want to bring Julian to the U.S. and have him stand trial.
Do you agree with that?
Yeah, very much.
Very much.
I mean, there's a firm of attorneys in Washington that charged, you know, $1.2 million to $1.2 million to Wow Holland, which is a free press and charitable organization based in Germany.
Now, should Those firm of attorneys find a solution.
They get paid 1.2 million, okay.
But the government will give them contract after contract in the hundreds of millions.
So we understand that those that find a solution to this matter for the government will be given benefits here.
So I agree with that scenario, except this.
We look at the United States as destroyed over the last 21 years.
Seven and a half countries.
Brown University says 4.6 million people direct deaths.
Brown University other study says 38 million refugees.
We cannot in any way allocate good conscience or good faith to certain aspects of that administration.
Those aspects of the administration, the deep state if you want to call it, the FBI, the CIA, NSA, are the people who are bringing this persecution.
So they are very capable, imaginative, and in some cases, malign natures.
And they would find a way to exercise their desires.
That's the counter-argument that they really do want a way out of this bloody mess that they've made for themselves.
But other actors see the way out of the messes that they continue to make, or the tragedies that they embark upon, the catastrophes that they administer.
They see the way out as raising the ante.
I'll tell you a story that always made such an impression on me, and at the time I wasn't even entirely convinced of it.
This was before I had my own entanglements with the United States government that proved how true it was, but one of the earliest participants in the WikiLeaks project, one of the people who worked on that 2010 Release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war lives diplomatic cables was a true believer in the cause Visited Brazil.
He was a citizen of a European country and he told me he had decided that he was going to step down and no longer Participate in what WikiLeaks was doing not because he in any way believed less than the project to the contrary He believed in it more than ever and its power to bring transparency like But he told me he wasn't at all afraid that one day his government was going to knock on his door and say, we have a lot of problems with what you're doing.
He was worried that one day his government was going to knock on his door and say, the United States government has a problem with what you're doing and we're here to bring you to them and to put you into their custody.
And I think sometimes American citizens, even people in the West, have a hard time understanding that when you say things like they're capable of doing anything, it sounds like a sort of conspiratorial or kind of hyperbolic assessment of the United it sounds like a sort of conspiratorial or kind of hyperbolic assessment
But as somebody who is a member of Julian Assange's family, who has seen that up close, as myself who has seen it up close with my source Edward Snowden and the kinds of things I know they didn't just do but were planning on doing to both of them, Do you see them as such a rogue kind of entity that you don't trust anything that they say or do even if it's kind of seems like it's consecrated by law?
I'll just return to your strong point about the strategic nature of the relationship with Australia and Australia's strategic position in the unfolding competition between the United States and China and that is significant and that matter will bring the United States to the, sorry, certain
There's really good people in the United States, so I don't want to say that.
The administration to the understanding that finding a way out of this to the satisfaction of the Australian populace and government is a good idea.
If we take just one example, all of the strategic lines of communication which service Indonesia, China, and India, and Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, all of them travel across the Indian Ocean.
Australia, as a stable ally of the United States, or if you want to say a stable vessel, ...sits on the Indian Ocean and monitors the entirety of those strategic lines of communication.
This is a profound advantage to the United States in its competition with those three nations.
So under the power politics understanding which you delivered your mind to earlier in our conversation, I think the solutions are within that.
Making those arrangements clearly and the White House simply saying that, oh well, we must give consideration, an election coming up, we must give consideration to the efficacy and profound
A benefit of the First Amendment to the people of the United States, so we're asking for a review of these charges against Julian Assange and that will simply make it fade away.
Some people will jump up and down and say, you could have done that ten years ago.
However, the circumstances, they would say, the circumstances hadn't unfolded to the extent that we understand now that the First Amendment needs to be supported.
Last question, the alleged source for the publications that Julian is charged with having participated in, Chelsea Manning, received a very lengthy prison sentence and after eight years in a really harsh prison facility, I visited her there in the There have been reports from Julian's doctors over the years that he has deteriorated physically, he has deteriorated mentally.
They have questions about whether he could survive a U.S.
prison.
She had served such a harsh time.
It was kind of time just to let her out on humanitarian grounds.
There have been reports from Julian's doctors over the years that he has deteriorated physically.
He has deteriorated mentally.
They have questions about whether he could survive a U.S. prison.
They have said they have real doubts about whether or not they could.
What do you think, given everything Julian has been through, the way in which I wouldn't, I don't like saying that they've broken him because knowing Julian, I don't think they have, but they've certainly done a very good job of strongly impeding WikiLeaks and Julian's work.
Needless to say, what is the motive, do you think, of the part of the government that continues to insist that he be pursued and punished and imprisoned and broken until the very end?
It's pretty clear they don't want Glenn Greenwald to take up a position with the eminence of let's say the New York Times in the distribution of information and knowledge into the United States and as a consequence being in English to reverberate around the world.
They want you to worry.
Which I think has been pretty effective.
In corporate media, really effective.
You don't mean effective in terms of me specifically, you mean effective in terms of media in general.
To make it clear, in terms of corporate media, they've repressed corporate media.
We see that all the time.
However, there's 50,000 others now that turn out information and there's high points in that 50,000, Gren, Gleenwell and others, say Matt Taibbi and so on, who are making the running now.
And just the other day I saw Tucker Carlson got 195 million views of his conversation.
He never got more than 6 million on Fox.
That's the new will that's appeared before our eyes, and I hope that Julian can be welcomed back into it.
I hope so too, and I don't think I've ever been more optimistic that we're coming to a resolution.
It sounds like, at least with caution, you have that same view, so hopefully Julian will be out and free and doing what he does best.
Shortly, I hope your trip here in Brazil helps that cause as well, and I Let me just ask you, because there is usually an attempt by people who hear this, and most of the viewers of our show by definition support independent media, support the idea that people are supposed to be adversarial to the US government, people who do support Julian's cause, what is it that they can do to help?
Well, just two things.
One is the logos.
Continue to speak about the matter, in particular the ...attempted destruction of the First Amendment of the United States in relationship to Julian Assange.
That's one.
The other is to speak to Congress people.
I mean, they depend upon citizens of the United States for their living, and they must adjust their policies to circumstance.
Well thank you again for the great work you're doing and thanks for taking the time on a Sunday to sit down and talk to us.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks Glen.
Just the wrong man sitting in the chair, it should be Julian.
