U.S./Russia Tensions Escalate to Most Dangerous Levels Yet; Julian Assange Finally Free; PLUS: Journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson on Israeli Influence Campaign on U.S. Campuses
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Dangerous Escalation (6:12)
Plea Deal Reached (32:56)
Interview with Lee Fang & Jack Poulson (52:35)
Continued: Plea Deal Reached (1:24:40)
Outro (1:27:02)
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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...
Very little attention is paid these days to the war in Ukraine.
Remember that?
That would be, I suppose, somewhat understandable if the war were static or had become a frozen conflict or were in some kind of retreat or were winding down, but none of that is happening.
The opposite is.
From the perspective of escalatory risk between the United States and Russia, Who just happened to be the nations with the two world's largest nuclear stockpiles.
The war in Ukraine is more dangerous today than ever.
That's what makes the relative indifference toward it, the silence about it, so mystifying and so dangerous.
Three weeks ago, the Biden administration announced that it was lifting restrictions on the use of US-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia on Russian soil.
Over the weekend, a horrific airstrike launched by Ukraine, which the Russians insist was carried out with U.S.
weapons, took place on a beach inside of Crimea, which Russia has governed since the U.S.-supported coup in Kiev in 2014, and whose residents are overwhelmingly Russian.
With far more allegiance to Moscow than to Kiev, the strike, aimed at a beach popular among area residents, killed at least four people and injured at least 150 more, including many children.
The reaction from the highest levels of the Russian government was as clear as it was ominous.
They said they do not hold Ukraine responsible for the attack and the death of those civilians, but instead they hold the United States government responsible, given that the U.S.
military, they say, played the key role in the launching and targeting of the bomb sites.
Unsurprisingly, the Russians not only blamed the United States, but vowed retaliation, not against Ukraine, but against the U.S.
And thus, as we spiral to greater and greater risk of escalatory dangers, All over the question of who rules a few provinces in eastern Ukraine or whether NATO will be permitted to expand right up to the most sensitive part of the Russian border, very few people in the U.S.
seem to care very much and are barely discussing these grave dangers even as they escalate.
It is really worth examining how the main objective of the U.S.
and Russia during the Cold War Avoiding direct combat between the two and avoiding risk of nuclear conflagration, whether through intentional choice or miscalculation and misperception, really seems to have almost no weight these days in Western capitals or among American liberals and their neocon allies in the Republican Party.
Then, CNN is hosting the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on Thursday night in Atlanta.
It will be hosted by CNN personalities Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.
The Trump campaign, for whatever reasons, decided to hand CNN an unprecedented level of control over how the debate proceeds.
Earlier this morning, CNN host, someone named Casey Hunt, invited onto her show the Trump campaign's press secretary to talk about that debate.
And Hunt then proceeded to have a remarkable on-air meltdown that culminated in her cutting off that interview with the Trump campaign spokesperson.
We'll examine exactly what happened, not only because of how deeply entertaining this was, but also because it reveals so much about the character and function of U.S.
corporate media.
Finally, an independent journalist, Lee Fong and Jack Paulson, working in collaboration with The Guardian, published an investigation today about the extent of Israeli influence operations in the United States.
There you see it on the screen.
In the words of the article, the investigation reveals, quote, a hardline and sometimes covert operation by the Israeli government to strike back at student protests, human rights organizations, and other voices of dissent inside the United States.
We'll speak to both of those journalists about their findings and try to understand the full gravity and extent of Israeli influence operations in the United States including their connection to some very serious laws that abridge the free speech rights of Americans in the name of protecting Israel.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Anytime the United States gets involved in a new war, it is always of a massive risk, Wars, in general, have a history of spiraling out of control.
You can rarely predict them.
And the history of getting involved, either as a funder of the war or using it as a proxy, is that oftentimes the original mission, as limited as it's intended to be, has a way of spiraling far beyond the original vision.
And exactly that is what's happening with the war in Ukraine, the one that is now basically a war between the United States and NATO on one side and Russia on the other, using Ukraine as their playground and their battlefield.
And the problem from the start has always been this lingering question, which is what possible interest do American citizens have in getting involved in a border war between Russia and Ukraine?
The demands of Russia before the war were that Ukraine has to agree not to join NATO.
They have to be a neutral country, kind of a buffer between the West, which keeps expanding eastward toward Russia and Russia itself.
And that the U.S.
has to, along with NATO, cease military operations and other political influence campaigns inside Ukraine.
That it would be a neutral country, neither pro-Russia nor pro-Western in terms of its alliances.
Since 2014, when the United States backed a successful coup that removed the elected president of Ukraine, Russia has also annexed Crimea, which is full of almost entirely people who identify as Russian, they're Russian-speaking, they're ethnic Russians, their loyalty is to Moscow and not to Kiev.
And they have also done the most that they could to protect the Russian ethnic speaking people who dominate the eastern provinces of Ukraine, which has been waging a war of separation or a civil war against the government in Kiev since 2014.
Now, the question from all of this has always been, If you're an American citizen, what possible interest do you have in whether Zelensky or Putin governs Crimea and whether the people of Crimea want to be governed by Russia or by Ukraine?
And what possible interest is it of American citizens to fight a war over who governs various provinces in the eastern part of Ukraine where, again, most of the people in that part of Ukraine Have far more connection and identification with being Russian than they do with being Ukrainian and being loyal to Moscow than they do to Kiev.
But there was this fairy tale sold, as usual, the same fairy tale that gets sold for every American war, that we are the leaders of the free world.
And as a result, our obligation is to go and protect democracy against the advance of totalitarianism, wherever it may emerge.
And we were there benevolently to protect Ukrainian democracy from Russian aggression.
Now, we have spent Many, many shows over the last two years documenting and demonstrating why that propaganda is on multiple levels blatantly false.
And I'm not going to repeat any of that tonight.
But I do want to emphasize that also since the beginning, in addition to deconstructing the propaganda, what has really motivated our coverage has been a concern about what is obviously a proxy war between the countries that have the two largest nuclear stockpiles on the planet.
And even though there is no more Soviet Union, the Russians have full control over that nuclear arsenal.
And it is all based on archaic Cold War systems where each country has thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear tip missiles, aimed at one another's major cities.
And there are all sorts of ways with Russian nuclear submarines lurking off the coast of Cuba.
Or with US missiles stationed in Eastern Europe to launch nuclear weapons through misperception or miscommunication or intentionally in a way that would give the world maybe five minutes to try and save itself at the same time that Russiagate and all of the hoaxes surrounding it have made contact between Washington and Moscow almost non-existent.
Far less so than During the Cold War.
Now, that has always been the two-fold concern.
It's of no interest to the American public.
The only people who benefit are arms dealers and the U.S.
intelligence community and Ukrainian oligarchs and corrupt Ukrainian government officials and the risk of real danger, escalation between the U.S.
and Russia, which always brings with it the risk of nuclear war.
Now, as serious as those dangers have been from the beginning, they have gotten much worse over the last several months, in part because of Joe Biden's announcement that he was lifting a very important restriction, namely the restriction that had been in place since the beginning of the war, that the weapons the United States was providing to Ukraine could not be used to attack Russian soil inside Russian territory.
And we have now lifted that restriction and we told the Ukrainians you're free to use our weapons, including to attack on the other side of the border if doing so is necessary for military ends.
But something far worse from a perspective of escalation took place over this weekend.
Here you see the reaction of the Russian embassy.
I believe this is in, yeah, it's in the UK.
And here's what they report.
Remember, this is the Russian perspective, so it doesn't mean that you should take everything in this as true.
The point here is to understand what the Russians are thinking, saying, and doing to understand the gravity of the risks.
Quote, five people, including three children, were killed and 124 civilians were injured as a result of the Ukrainian Armed Forces attack on Sevastopol.
That's inside Crimea.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, today at 12.15, a terrorist missile strike by five US-made ATACMS Operational tactical missiles equipped by cluster warheads was deliberately delivered to the site.
The American specialists input all flight tasks in the U.S.
made ATCOMS operational tactical missiles on the basis of data of the U.S.
satellite reconnaissance.
That is why Washington is mostly responsible for the deliberate airstrike at peaceful residents by delivering this weaponry to Ukraine as well as the Kiev regime from the territory of which the strike was launched.
They go on quote such actions are not going to be left unanswered The video shows the moment of the attack.
And then here's the video.
There's the beach on Sevastopol, which is commonly used by, it's used as a beach the same way beaches in any other country are, by civilians.
It's a popular site for people in that area to go and sunbathe and take their kids to play on the beach.
And here is what happened in a attack that the Russians are blaming the Americans for having launched.
Now, just to emphasize the dangers here from the BBC, and this was from earlier today, there you see the headline, Russia blames and this was from earlier today, there you see the headline, Russia for Crimea death and vows response.
So regardless of what you think about the validity of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the fact of the matter is that the Russians have been in fact governing Crimea since 2014 and then for centuries before that.
And the people in Crimea, everyone acknowledges, want to be part of Russia and not part of Ukraine.
That is the sovereign desire of the people who live there.
Which was the rationale we used to justify why Kosovo should be broken off from Serbia in the war in the Balkans in the 1990s by saying, oh, look, the people in Kosovo have no allegiance to Belgrade.
They want to be a separate, independent country.
And we recognize them as such.
And Putin at the time warned that is a very dangerous precedent because of how Europe is constructed.
All sorts of countries have provinces and parts shoved into them.
Who don't identify with that country, but instead identify with other countries, including Russia.
And if that's the precedent, namely that the people of a certain province like Kosovo can break off and declare themselves independent simply because the majority of residents want to, he warned that a lot of Europe would end up being mapped a very different way.
And the Russians have run Crimea, where the strike took place, and they considered the people who lived there and the people who died there Their own citizens and so of course when they see the United States playing a major role in an attack on what they regard as Russian soil that killed what they regard as Russian citizens of course they're going to respond the way we would.
If Russia or China or anybody else launched missiles or played a major role in an attack on what we regarded as American soil.
Here the BBC says, quote, Russia's defense ministry said the missiles used by Ukraine were U.S.
supplied Atacams missiles and claimed they were programmed by U.S.
specialists.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the strike, quote, barbaric and accused the Russians of, quote, killing Russian children.
He pointed the comments by President Vladimir Putin, who recently vowed to target countries supplying weapons to Ukraine.
Russia's defense ministry claimed on Sunday that the missiles are all programmed by U.S.
specialists and guided by American satellites.
That's their rationale for blaming the United States, not only that these missiles were provided to Ukraine by the U.S., but also that the U.S.
necessarily plays a critical role in programming where they're targeted and launched.
Quote, former Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated the claim during a meeting in Minsk on Monday, saying that the system, quote, cannot be used without the direct participation of the American military, including satellite capabilities.
The U.S.
has been supplying these missiles to Ukraine for over a year.
This system allows Ukrainian forces to strike targets up to 300 kilometers, 186 miles away, according to manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
In case you're wondering who actually is benefiting from this war.
Now, if you want, I guess you can just dismiss all of this and say, oh, the Russians are bluffing.
They're not going to really do anything.
They don't really care if the United States attacks what they regard as Russian soil and kills what they regard as Russian civilians, including Russian children.
They're not going to do anything about it.
It's all fine.
Don't worry about it.
Don't pay attention to it.
That kind of indifference, that mentality, which has been deliberately cultivated, as we'll show you, in the West by the Western press, is the definition of madness.
If you don't think that the risk of nuclear annihilation, once the two countries with the largest stockpiles are engaged in a conflict of this kind, then you either know nothing about the nuclear systems that each country has in place and the doctrines that govern their use, or
You're so obsessed with hatred for Russia because you believe that they are the ones who caused the defeat of Hillary Clinton or for whatever other reason that that hatred is binding you to the risks that are very, very real and obviously very consequential.
Now, if you think this is hyperbole, I just want to show you what Joe Biden himself said in October of 2022, almost two years ago, a little under two years ago.
About the Ukraine war.
Remember, the war in which he decided to involve the United States.
This was Biden's own statement.
Quote, Biden says the nuclear risk is the highest since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
If we could put the BBC article, the headline on the screen so people can read it.
There you see Russia.
That's not it.
All right, we'll get that up on the screen for you.
But that was Joe Biden.
We've gone over the statement before, where he said, quote, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, there you see the article, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to the use of nuclear weapons.
If, in fact, things continue down the path they've been going, Mr. Biden told fellow Democrats, we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
What in Ukraine is worth that risk?
And this is October of 2022, at a time when there were all sorts of limitations.
The Americans vowed they would never relinquish, almost all of which have been given up one after the next.
And now lifting the restrictions on the use of American weapons to strike inside Russia.
That was all after Joe Biden in October 2022, said the risk from the war in Ukraine and the US involvement, the involvement of the US and Russia brought the world to the brink of or closer to nuclear exchange than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
And for those of you who don't know much about that, the world came about six minutes away from blowing itself up.
Because the Cubans asked the Soviets to place weapons, nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles on Cuban soil after the United States tried and failed to invade Cuba and overthrow the Cuban government.
And the position of the US was, we can't tolerate nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles off the coast 90 miles from our shore.
And the position of the Russians is the same one that Americans like to use for Ukraine, which is, look, Cuba is a sovereign country.
They can ask any other country they want to station missiles there if those countries want to.
But it was a standoff.
And there were at least two moments, one of which has been well documented, where a Russian submarine, a nuclear-armed submarine, believed erroneously that it was under attack, that the United States had decided to launch a full-on war against Russia.
And the commander of that submarine made the decision to launch the nuclear weapons that submarine was carrying onto US soil, believing that the US was doing that to Russia.
It was just misperception.
Which is the most likely way a war of this kind and nuclear exchange is going to happen.
Otherwise, you basically have to have a psychopath, a suicidal psychopath or sociopath in power, who decides he doesn't care about blowing up the world.
The more likely way is misconception.
And that almost happened.
It was only when a senior official thankfully overrode that commander's decision, basically a person, a Russian military official who saved the world from nuclear annihilation in 1962, are we here to talk about any of this.
But there has been a deliberate effort inside Western media to encourage people to stop caring so much about the threat of nuclear war.
It is shocking to watch.
Here from CNN is an article by the former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger and Ben Hodges, the title of which was, Time to Call Putin's Bluff.
Time to call his bluff.
Quote, the idea that Russia would use nukes has been shown not to... I just have to underline this part because it is actually kind of remarkable to read.
The idea that Russia would use nukes has been shown not to be a real concern, says Adam Kindinger and Ben Hodges.
Don't worry about it!
Quote, just as we slowly ratchet up pressure, so could Russia slowly increase its pain tolerance and have chosen to react at any point.
As any military expert or general or sergeant for that matter will tell you, destroying the enemy is, of course, the most important element of victory, whether in direct combat or where they are grouping, planning, or executing the war.
The idea that as of today, Russia can essentially consider its own territory, quote, a safe haven against U.S.
weaponry runs counter to the objective of a Ukrainian victory.
What they're saying is, Full Ukrainian victory, which they have defined as the expulsion of every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, which I am absolutely certain the Russians would use nuclear weapons in order to prevent because they regard U.S.
control of Crimea through Ukraine as an existential threat to their security.
And if you look at a map in the Black Sea and the history of Russia, the reasons for that are obvious.
But what these maniacs, and they are absolute maniacs, are trying to convince you is that the goal of victory in Ukraine, absolute total victory, which we are farther away than ever, is so paramount that you shouldn't worry about the possibility of nuclear war because the war itself is so worth it to win.
Here in the Atlantic, Ann Applebaum, a standard neocon who is responsible for every deranged and grotesque and destructive foreign policy of the United States over the last 25 years, one of the people advocating every one of those destructive wars, yet of course maintains her standing in mainstream corporate media.
This is what she said in the Atlantic in 2022.
And by the way, her husband is a Polish official.
I believe it was the former Prime Minister of Poland, or the Deputy Prime Minister.
And so obviously the Polish have a very heavy stake in this war, and she's a fanatical supporter of the war in Ukraine.
And her article was, fear of nuclear war has warped the West's Ukraine strategy.
Leaders shouldn't give in to Putin's nuclear rhetoric.
Again, ignore the risk of nuclear weapons.
Quote, our self-imposed limitations may well have encouraged Putin to believe that American support for Ukraine is limited and will soon end.
Our insistence that Ukraine not harm Russia or Russians in its own defense might explain why he keeps fighting.
Perhaps our nuclear anxiety actually encourages him to carry out non-nuclear mass atrocities.
He does so because he believes he will not face consequences because we will not escalate.
Given the growing popularity of the word restraint, we must consider how that concept might not only prolong the war, but lead to a nuclear catastrophe.
What if calls for peace actually reinforce Putin's deep belief, one he has expressed many times, that the West is weak and degenerate?
The less fear we show, the more Putin himself will be afraid.
The game these people are playing is absolute madness.
And I know that it has become normalized, this rhetoric, and so it might not strike us as insane and sick and dangerous as it should, but it is all of those things, no matter how accustomed you become to hearing it.
One of the things I've been doing over the past several weeks is going through the Richard Nixon Presidential Library Foundation, which has a page on YouTube with some of his most important speeches and interviews, including interviews he gave in his post-presidential period after he resigned the presidency in 1974 due to the Watergate scandal.
And like most politicians, he became much more candid and much more able, free to say what he really thinks when he no longer had the responsibility of running the US government and the need to ensure political victory in elections and the like.
He was just a private citizen.
He was nearing the end of his life.
And he wanted to speak about all the things that he had seen.
And whatever you think about Richard Nixon, he was an incredibly complicated figure, to put that mildly.
He was really at the center of almost every major 20th century event that drove post-World War II history in the latter half of the 20th century, starting when he was a vehemently anti-communist congressman from California who was aligned with Joseph McCarthy, and then he became the vice president at quite a young age for the entire administration of Dwight Eisenhower.
So he was Dwight Eisenhower's young vice president during all the 1950s.
He ran for president in 1960 and very narrowly lost to JFK in an election that was decided by Illinois that many historians believe to this day was decided by fraud in Chicago by the Daly machine.
He ran for Governor in 1962 of California and lost.
That was when he gave his famous speech, you don't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore, but then he came back and ran for president in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson was forced out of the Democratic primary by anti-war activists in his own party, and he ended up facing Hubert Humphrey and won, and then he won re-election in a massive landslide against George McGovern in 1972.
And so Nixon, one of the things he did despite being a vehement anti-communist, in fact probably because of that, was he met constantly with Soviet leaders going all the way back to the 1950s when the whole world was driven by animosity and Really hatred between the US and the USSR.
He still vehemently believes in the necessity to sit down with Russian leaders to understand them, to make Russian leaders understand the American perspective, to keep those lines of communication very open.
And that very controversially, especially among people in his own party to the right, He opened up relations with Red China in 1972 by visiting China along with Henry Kissinger.
And that was what opened the relationship between the United States and China that endures to this day.
And there's a part of this interview where he explains in really interesting ways why he did that, but really prescient ways as well.
But I want to show you the part of the interview Where he talks about why he thought it was so important for the United States and Russia to, even when we had irreconcilable ideological differences between capitalism and communism, And all the things each side thought about the other to keep these lines of communication constantly open to have personal relationships between American leaders and Soviet leaders.
Here's what he said.
And so under the circumstances then, Sputnik meant that we were moving into the missile age, where you wouldn't have any warning time, maybe 30 minutes before any kind of a war could come about.
So I would say that what Sputnik meant Is that it made even more vital the necessity of having very close communication, the hotline, everything else, between the two superpowers.
Even though they totally dislike each other, they totally disagree.
Because you're not going to have the time to have long conversations and so forth prior to a confrontation that could lead to war.
Right.
We must have a great sense of urgency about that situation.
It seems to me that it's even intensified now, Mr. President, by the new generation of missiles, which, if I understand it correctly, can hit the Soviet Union within eight minutes, and they're putting ones in that can hit us within eight minutes.
I don't know what you can do in eight minutes, it seems to me.
Time has run out almost.
The Pershing missiles, for example, that will be in Europe can hit the Soviet Union in eight minutes.
Yeah.
And the missiles that the Soviet Union has on their submarines can reach us.
That's right.
And assuming that they put them into Cuba again, which they very well might, they might even have them there now, I wouldn't be surprised.
They could get here in five minutes to Miami or less.
So under the circumstances, It does indicate the urgency of having maximum contact to avoid the possibility of war by miscalculation.
Because one little miss, one button pushed by some sergeant someplace could set the whole thing off.
So there you see the attitude of Richard Nixon.
That has been completely lost by Western liberals, which is that no matter how much you hate another country, it's vital, especially when that other country is a nuclear power, to keep communications open in order to prevent a nuclear war.
Now, some of you may have heard, but we just got word within the last minute or so of a major story involving Julian Assange that we wanted to tell you about.
We're doing our best to analyze it as much as possible.
The news just broke about a plea deal that Julian Assange has reached with the United States under which he would agree to plead guilty to One felony charge and in return, prosecutors will seek a 62-month sentence, which is the amount of time he already has spent in prison.
So it would essentially allow him to be released from prison and return to Australia with no further constraints immediately.
And I'm going to take a little bit, we're going to take a little bit of time just to analyze that.
But do we want to do this ad first before we do that?
All right, let's cover this right now, given it's important.
So I just got word of this.
I'm going to be looking at this with you, the CNN report.
And we have been talking about the likelihood or at least the hope and the possibility that this could happen for a lot of reasons, which I'll go over in a second.
But I'm going to be reading this with you from CNN.
Julian Assange agrees to a plea deal with the Biden administration that would allow him to avoid imprisonment in the United States.
Quote, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge related to his alleged role in one of the largest U.S.
government breaches of classified material as part of a deal with the Justice Department that will allow him to avoid imprisonment in the United States, according to newly filed federal court documents.
Under the terms of the new agreement, the Justice Department prosecutors will seek a 62-month sentence, which is equal to the amount of time Assange has served in a high-security prison in London while he fought extradition to the United States.
The plea deal would credit that time served, allowing Assange to immediately return to Australia, his native country.
The plea deal still must be approved by a federal judge.
Assange has faced 18 counts.
from a 2019 indictment for his alleged role in the breach that carried a maximum of up to 175 years in prison, though he was unlikely to be sentenced to that time in full.
Assange is being pursued by U.S.
authorities for publishing confidential military records supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 11.
U.S.
officials allege that Assange goaded Manning into obtaining thousands of pages of unfiltered U.S.
diplomatic cables that potentially endangered confidential sources, Iraq War-related significant activity reports, and information related to Guantanamo detainees.
President Joe Biden in recent months has alluded to a possible deal pushed by Australian government officials to return Assange to Australia.
FBI and Justice Department officials have opposed any deal that didn't include a felony guilty plea by Assange.
People briefed on that matter told CNN.
Last month, a U.S.
court ruled that Assange had the right to appeal his final challenge against extradition to the U.S., dealing a win to him in his yearlong fight to avoid prosecution in the states for his For his alleged crimes.
Okay, so this is something that we're doing some reporting on now as we are on air as well about exactly what the release would look like and what dates it would be.
But let me give you my impressions of this deal, which as I said, I've talked about before the possibility of something like this happening.
So let's just go through a few points.
First of all, on a personal level, Julian Assange has now spent almost 15 years in various forms of detention.
When he faced accusations of sexual assault in Sweden, his position was, I'm willing to go to Sweden, get on the next plane to Stockholm, Provided that Sweden doesn't use my presence, exploit my presence on Swedish soil to turn me over to the U.S.
That was always his biggest fear, was being turned over to the U.S.
And at the time, British pundits and American pundits mocked him for paranoia.
And as it turned out, it was anything but paranoia.
It was absolutely true.
The U.S.
government did want to nab him and get him to the United States so that he can put him in a U.S.
dungeon for the rest of his life.
And as a result, he sought asylum, which is a legal right recognized by every country in Ecuador, and Ecuador granted it.
And even Ecuador said to Sweden, we'll release the, we'll lift the asylum if you agree that if he comes to Sweden to answer or to be interrogated about these sexual assault allegations filed by two women,
And their allegation was that they had consensual sex with Julian Assange but that during the sex he didn't wear a condom and they had not consented to him not wearing a condom and that was a form of rape or sexual assault under Swedish law.
His argument was that the position of Ecuador was, we'll lift our asylum and he'll go to Sweden the next day.
And the Swedish government said, no, even though they had the full power, we will not give you that guarantee.
And as a result, Ecuador gave him asylum.
And he stayed inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
From 2010 to 2018 and I know that may sound like some grand place but I visited Julian there and it was basically a tiny little two-bedroom apartment and a high-rise building in the middle of London.
that had no outdoor space, had no place to go and absorb sun.
It had windows, but that was about it.
He was spied on.
He was detained in this tiny little space that he could not leave.
The British had 24-hour police surrounding the building so that if he took one step out of that embassy, he would be immediately arrested.
So he was detained from 2010 to 2018 without having been convicted of any crime.
And then the Trump administration, under Mike Pompeo, succeeded in coercing Ecuador through a combination of threats and bribes, promises of benefits, to lift that asylum, which Ecuador then did in 2018, and that allowed the British police to go in and arrest Assange, and they put him in a high-security prison in London.
Belmarsh Prison, which has terrorist suspects and the worst criminals there is, The BBC calls Belmarsh the British Guantanamo, and that's where he has been for the last six years almost now.
So you have eight years of detention, effective imprisonment inside the Ecuadorian embassy, another five plus years in a high security, maximum security prison inside the UK, and the only crime
Of which Julian Assange was ever convicted during those 14 years of captivity was a charge of bail jumping, a misdemeanor charge that he was convicted once the British police arrested him.
And the charge was when you didn't show up for your court date back in 2010 and instead sought asylum with Ecuador.
You were guilty of bail jumping, and therefore we're going to convict you of that.
And his prison sentence was 51 months, which was the maximum under British law.
It's a misdemeanor, so it couldn't be here.
He obviously served that sentence long ago.
He served it out as of 2019.
And then right when he was about to get out, that was when the Trump administration, under the Trump Justice Department,
Indicted Assange and then argued to a British court that he had to remain in prison while the extradition process unfolded because Assange had already proved that he was a flight risk if you let him out on bail and the British court agreed and said you have to remain in prison until this extradition process is resolved and the extradition process has now taken six years.
It's not really all that close to the end.
And there have been Assange's doctors and psychiatrists who have warned that both his mental and physical health were in extreme danger through this 15 year detention.
And on a personal level, I'm of course disappointed that he pled guilty to a felony count because I believe he vehemently that he's guilty of nothing.
And that if anything, he was owed a lot of compensation for unjust imprisonment.
That was why they want a 62-month sentence so that he can't claim that even one day in prison was unjust.
But on a personal level, he's married.
He has two children who are now growing.
I think they're seven and eight.
And the ordeal that he has been subjected to over the last 15 years is Almost impossible to express, so whatever Julian felt like he should do and his family felt like they should do to get him out of prison and finally end this nightmare and make him be free, I totally support that.
I have a few points to make about the Assange thing.
The reason why I've been saying that this doesn't surprise me is because I never believed that the Biden administration actually wanted to bring Julian Assange onto American soil to stand trial.
Imagine the spectacle that that would have created as Biden heads into an election.
Imagine the risks to the U.S.
government of allowing Julian Assange to go on the stand and speak about the things that he believes he has discovered and wants to say.
And it would put on Joe Biden's record that he would be the first American president in history to preside over the imprisonment, not of a source who leaked information, but of someone who published classified information, which every newspaper in the United States does on a regular basis.
The goal of putting Julian Assange and keeping him in prison was to crush Julian Assange physically and mentally, and they've succeeded in doing that.
And they never cared if he came and stood trial in the United States.
They wanted to break Assange and simultaneously send a message to any other future Assanges that we will ruin your life if you publish our secrets.
The same reason why they won't let Edward Snowden come back to the United States, why they want to put him in prison for the rest of his life as well.
It is a deterrent message to keep their ability to hide their own crimes through secrecy immune from the one vulnerability that they have, which is that brave people inside the government leak that information to the public or through the media and reveal what it is that they're doing.
And then finally, there was a lot of pressure in Australia, which remember is the only country that he has ever been a citizen of.
He is not a citizen of the United States.
He barely has stepped foot inside the United States in his life.
He was here for three days.
And the Australian citizenry started to get very angry at the subservience of the Australian government saying, how is it possible that you are not standing up to the United States and demanding the release of our citizen?
And coming back to Australia and so the Australian government pressured by that growing citizen anger has been insisting that the Biden administration agree to Assange's release and that would let him go back to Australia.
And so I've been hoping for and even speculating about the arrival of a deal of this kind.
We have an update on it as well.
Let me just see what this is.
It's actually a detail from the WikiLeaks account about exactly when Assange's release date would be.
We're gonna have that up for you in just a second.
I got this deal by the way, still has to be approved by the federal judge who's presiding over this case.
But given that these federal judges in Northern Virginia and Eastern Virginia are completely subservient to the U.S.
government, my guess is they'll rubber stamp whatever U.S.
prosecutors want.
Maybe instead of waiting this long to get the tweet up on the screen, we can just, you can tell me what it says.
Okay, so here's the update and we're just doing this because it's all happening live as we're on the air.
None of this happened until we went on the air.
This is from the official WikiLeaks account and it says the following, Julian Assange is free.
Julian Assange is free.
He left Balmarsh Maximum Security Prison on the morning of June 24th after having spent 1,901 days there.
He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead Airport during the afternoon where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grassroots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators, and leaders from across the political spectrum all the way to the UN.
This created the space for a long period of negotiation with the U.S.
Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalized.
We will provide more information as soon as possible.
After more than five years in a two by three meter cell, isolated 23 hours a day, He will soon reunite with his wife, Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the government accountable for their actions.
As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles and for the people's right to know.
As he returns to Australia, We thank all those who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.
Julian's freedom is our freedom.
So that makes the story even better, that although a federal judge still needs to rubber stamp this deal, obviously there was a lot of coordination between the US, British, and Australian governments, whereby the prosecutors conveyed their willingness to enter this deal.
Once Julian agreed to it, even though it has to be approved by the judge, the British court was willing to let him out on bail.
And he is now out of the UK that has served as the place of his detention for the last 14 years.
He's back with his wife and kids.
Although the WikiLeaks account doesn't say, and I understand the reasons, presumably he is headed to Australia, which is the country of which he's a citizen.
And he will hopefully be able to find as many days as possible of peace and happiness with his family.
And if he wants, return to the work that he did.
But what they say there is exactly right.
There are a few people who have paid a higher price to join Assange for their extremely brave and courageous commitment to providing to the public What we have the right to know, which is transparency about what our own government is doing in the dark.
And Julian was a pioneer and a prophet because he was the first person to see that the digital age meant that the main vulnerability of the US government was leaks by large digital leaks and that he created the system using his knowledge as a hacker to enable sources to bring those leaks to the public And stay anonymous and protected.
And obviously we'll talk a lot more about this, but this is a personal friend of Julian's and also somebody who has been championing the cause of WikiLeaks and Assange for a long, long time.
I've been hoping this day would come for a long time.
I'm thrilled for him and his family that it is here.
But as the WikiLeaks account says, it's not just Julian's freedom, but the freedom of everybody who believes in the cause of a free press, of free speech, of standing up to the U.S.
security state and security states around the globe and bringing transparency to citizenry and populations about the dark and criminal acts of their own government.
And I'm sure we'll have more on this tomorrow and throughout the week.
But that is my reaction for now.
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As we said at the very top of the show, there was a incredibly entertaining but also highly revealing meltdown by a CNN host that we wanted to cover, Casey Hunt, in part because of there was a incredibly entertaining but in part because of how entertaining it was, but because of what it says so much about the mindset of these kind of journalists, which is a very important topic as we approach the presidential debate, the first one run by CNN on Thursday,
but because we had to cover and wanted to cover that much more important break news about Julian Assange's but because we had to cover and wanted to cover that much more We're going to go ahead and postpone that segment until tomorrow night and instead go to another breaking story of independent reporting and original reporting, very important reporting that was published today about the extent of the Israeli influence operation machine inside the United States and it was done by
Two highly accomplished independent journalists.
Lee Fong is one of them.
He was a colleague of mine back at The Intercept and after wisely leaving that outlet before it completely sunk into the sea, he is now doing that work at his own substack where he regularly breaks big stories using standard and tireless investigative techniques, which is why he is so often on our show because he's constantly breaking those kind of stories through just sheer hard investigative work.
His co-author on this story is Jack Paulson, who is an independent journalist who focuses on the intersection of technology and the military.
He completed his PhD in computational and applied mathematics at UT Austin in 2012, before serving as an assistant professor of computational science and engineering at Georgia Tech, and then an assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
The duo teamed up to publish a journalistic investigation That was published today in collaboration with The Guardian into the extent of the Israeli influence campaign aimed at the United States.
The article there you see on the screen is entitled quote Israeli documents show expansive covert U.S.
influence campaign.
Israeli government officials closely coordinate with advocacy groups Shaping Congressional and State Legislation, Social Media, and Campus Discourse.
Now, this is obviously a topic that we have been covering quite some time.
We think it is of the utmost importance that there is a foreign country who is working very hard with a lot of money to not only influence public opinion in the United States, but also the laws that the states and our federal legislature enact that have a very direct relationship with that foreign government, and we are delighted to welcome both of them to the show.
Good evening, it's great to see you guys both.
Congratulations on this story.
And I just wanna kind of dive right into these questions because I do have a fair number of them, and I guess you guys can decide amongst yourselves who's gonna answer.
If you want, I can just direct them.
But let me just ask, let me ask each of you actually, and Jack, you can go first.
As I said, there's been a lot of reporting recently, over many years, but as well as recently, about the extent of what the Israelis are doing to influence American politics, the lawmaking process, American public opinion.
What is one or two of what you think are the most significant new revelations in the story that you published?
Yeah, so there's a U.S.
nonprofit called the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy, which is a bit of a mouthful.
They're pronounced ISGAP, typically.
It was originally a center within Yale.
It was kind of kicked out in 2011 for not being sufficiently rigorous.
And what I think hasn't really been paid attention to Is that they have publicly claimed credit for the hearings that led to the firings of the several university presidents, for example, in particular, claiming credit for the December 5th hearings in front of Congress, where Elise Stefanik really grilled Harvard President Claudine Gay.
And basically, we trace out what led to that.
In particular, there are reports on alleged Qatari influence on U.S.
student campus protests, and then how that fits into broader kind of formal public-private partnership that's pretty widely reported.
It's really a way for the Israeli government to chip in half the money, and then for philanthropists in the U.S.
kind of uses all of them interchangeably to this day.
Originally, it was Kela Shlomo, then it was Concert, and now it's Voices of Israel.
And it's really a way for the Israeli government to chip in half the money, and then for philanthropists in the US and around the world to chip in the other half to fund kind of pro-Israeli nonprofits to advocate and lobby on behalf of the Israeli government.
So Lee, if you want to pick out one or two nuggets of the story that you think provides kind of new revelations about the influence campaigned by this foreign government inside the United States, please do so.
But also let me just add to that the kind of broader perspective of what the significance is of the fact that Israel is doing this.
Well look, just a few weeks into the Gaza War...
There was a discussion in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, about what to do around all of these students at universities, particularly elite universities, where there's a lot of influence in American society, that were critical of Israel.
And there was a government minister, Amichai Chikli, who said, don't worry, we're going on the offensive, and I'm paraphrasing him, and we're going to do it in a concert way.
And he's referencing what Jack was just talking about, this kind of semi-covert organization that's controlled by the Israeli government that's run these kind of covert PR campaigns in the past.
You know, they were set up to be a, quote, PR commando unit to control kind of troll armies on social media, to lobby in the U.S., to actually help pass laws in the U.S.
They were partially responsible for the passage of anti-BDS laws over the last few years in state capitals around the country.
Well, after October 7th, there was a relaunch of this unit, and it's partnering with a number of groups, Some of its partners are doing outreach to Black Democrats.
They have a partner organization in the U.S.
that's mobilizing support from lawmakers from the African-American community.
Many of their former leaders are working with a That's an Israeli NGO but very active in the U.S.
that's helping Meta, that's Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as TikTok, censor media.
They're using the same rubric that many other NGOs use, Media Matters and ADL and others.
saying that, you know, we're just here to provide assistance in stopping misinformation, disinformation, hate speech.
But they're very clearly working with the Israeli government and censoring it and content moderating speech that's critical of Israel.
In addition to all of that, just as this same entity that worked to pass anti-BDS laws in the past, and that's been well documented, what we're documented here that's completely new is that they are openly discussing their strategy to pass laws what we're documented here that's completely new is that they are openly discussing International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism and to basically encode that into U.S. law, state law, federal law.
We saw the passage of the bill in the House last month on education policy.
But there are similar laws around the country that basically say that a form of illegal discrimination, of anti-Semitism, is certain forms of harsh criticism.
You know, it's saying terms like or slogans like Israel is a racist country.
That's now that's that can be viewed as a as a hate crime or as an illegal form of discrimination.
That's a big part of their agenda, redefining the term anti-Semitism to stifle certain criticisms of Israel.
And we were able to obtain exclusive documents showing that even the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been in touch with these local state lawmakers in Florida to pass this type of legislation.
They're openly talking about it in the Knesset, saying this is their top priority.
They're very clear in discussing their strategy, and we looked at transcripts.
We looked at various business filings, public documents, government contracts.
We really blend together a lot of sources to tell the story.
Yeah, absolutely.
I really encourage people to read it on their own.
We're not going to be able to do every part of it justice.
Here tonight, I want to kind of highlight the important parts and then draw out the implications.
See, I just want to add one thing, which is the very first story that I ever reported in my entire life on the question of big tech censorship at the behest of governments was at the end of 2015, maybe the beginning of 2016, when there was a document that was released showing that the Israeli government when there was a document that was released showing that the Israeli government had an ongoing relationship with the top leadership of Facebook, where they were able to submit lists of Facebook pages that the Israeli government alleged were promoting terrorism where they were able to submit
And that basically means any page run by Palestinians that were critical of Israel.
And in something like 98% of the cases, Facebook was taking these requests and approving them and banning whatever accounts the Israelis Indicated, and of course this has been going on since then, where they've been meeting, Israel has, with big tech companies and saying we demand that you remove quote disinformation.
And one of the things they listed as disinformation was the idea that the Israeli military actually killed some of their own citizens on October 7th, something that is now proven beyond any shadow of a doubt is true.
The Israeli government even acknowledges that.
So they're trying to prevent, and again not in Israel, but in the United States, The ability for Americans to express certain views and yet another example where the right has been, parts of the right have been indignant about this sort of government big tech collaboration to censor and this is one of those areas where magically the pro-Israel part of the right seems to have no problem.
Jack, let me ask you, and actually I want to hear your view on this as well.
There's been this kind of obsession on the part of certain segments of the American punditry with what's going on in American colleges for quite some time.
And there's always been this kind of Strange you could even say creepy dynamic where like 45 year old writers for like the New Republic like, you know New York Magazine and those kind of places are just constantly focused on what 19 and 20 year olds are doing and writing articles about that on college campuses like one of the arguments you could make is that well the reason you have to focus on that is because these people and those trends become in the future the leaders are shaping our our culture, but I
One of the things I've started to believe over the last kind of 18 months to 24 months, a lot of those pundits who have been focused on colleges happen to be among the most vocal supporters of the Israeli government in all of U.S. media.
They justify this focus on colleges under an anti-woke banner, like people like Barry Weiss and Ben Shapiro, that whole crowd.
And at the same time, At the same time, there have been strategy documents from the Israeli government saying the most important thing that we need to do is focus on American college campuses and prevent the growth of anti-Israel sentiment on American college campuses because that is such a threat to our national interests. there have been strategy documents from the Israeli government saying
What have you been able to discover in this new reporting about the priority that the Israeli government has been giving to try and control or influence American citizens or American college campuses?
I would say that that's actually been pretty consistent since the start of CONCERT or KELO SHLOMO, as it was known before.
I think this was actually pretty well, the focus on campuses was pretty well documented by some undercover footage collected by an Al Jazeera journalist that was actually lobbied not to be formally released in the United States, but eventually was through the electronic intifada.
And the wording that was used was really that, hey, every politician at some point was in college.
And so if you really want to impact future leaders, you should do this.
In terms of the methodology for how that's being done, I think the focus has really been on pushing for reports in a sort of pseudo-academic way.
That Qatar is secretly bankrolling and behind all of the protests, and then to push through closed-door congressional meetings for investigations into the financing of these student groups.
One of the lines in this article was linking to a May I believe May 7th meeting between the head of this non-profit ISGAP with the House Oversight Committee and then the next week there's a letter submitted to Janet Yellen demanding an investigation into these students and then ISGAP claims credit.
And so to some degree I would say lawfare is a central component of this and kind of mapping out how that lawfare works is part of the interest.
Lee, I wanted to ask you about that as well.
The kind of obsession of the Israeli government and a lot of pro-Israel pundits inside the United States with what's going on on campus.
And you have this paragraph in your article That relates to this because I think a lot of the, I'm going to read in a second, but I think a lot of the concern on the Israeli government is that the boycott, divestment and sanctions activism that brought down or helped bring down the apartheid government in South Africa in the 1980s might also do the same to the Israeli government or to the Israeli occupation.
And a lot of that activism came in the 1980s from colleges and now is coming again from colleges, as we've seen with the protests against the Israeli war in Gaza.
So one of the things that I've been most disturbed by are the enactment of these laws in 24 American states that basically require as a condition for having contract work with the state that you sign a pledge that you don't believe in and will not participate in any boycott of the state of Israel.
You can boycott any other country you want.
You can boycott American states.
Just not the Israeli government.
You have to sign a pledge.
About this foreign government in order to get a job inside the United States with a state.
And here's the paragraph that you have that I'm interested in.
You said, quote, the concert remark referred to a sprawling relaunch of a controversial Israeli government program, initially known as Kaya Shlomo, designed to carry out what Israelis called, quote, mass consciousness activities, targeted largely at the US and Europe.
Concert, now known as Voices of Israel, previously worked with groups spearheading a campaign to pass so-called, quote, anti-BDS state laws that penalize Americans for engaging in boycotts or other nonviolent protests of Israel. anti-BDS state laws that penalize Americans for engaging in boycotts
You know, it was bad enough when I thought that, you know, like Israel-obsessed politicians in the Democratic Party or evangelical-obsessed politicians, evangelical politicians obsessed with Israel and the Republican Party were passing these kind of assaults on our free speech rights inside the United States.
But it turns out that the Israeli government is playing a major role in that.
What is that role?
Well, historically, and now what's continued on to today with the post-October 7th campaign, there's this kind of duality where the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and previously the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in Israel, they set up these public benefit corporations that are used to funnel Israeli and some private money to certain organizations to carry out these legislative
So, previously it was a focus on these anti-BDS laws, very successful in that.
And now it's the IHRA.
But, you know, just in terms of reporting this story, it's fascinating because, you know, we were going into the minutiae of the Knesset hearings where government ministers and experts Openly, you know, they have public broadcasts and transcripts to their credit discussing strategy of what they're doing.
And, you know, they're saying that we really need to focus on these elite colleges.
These elite colleges, as Jack said, will become the leaders of tomorrow, but also they are kind of the opinion setters of More mid-tier or lower colleges, they mimic what the elite colleges do.
It influences the culture, so they are laser focused on shaping what happens on these college campuses.
In addition to what I mentioned earlier, they're providing money through a sister kind of public benefit corporation called Mosaic United that funds major Jewish and pro-Israel student groups.
That's Hillel, that's Chabad on campus.
And they're asking them to provide intelligence reports, essentially, monitoring the Palestinian student groups, lobbying the university administrators to kick out certain pro-Palestinian or groups that are critical of Israel.
They're taking kind of a really expansive role in influencing these campuses.
And just to back up a little bit, in terms of how they pass these laws, we've seen from really important investigative reporting from Israeli journalists in the past, looking into these very similar programs.
There was money sent from the Israeli government to certain Christian Zionist groups in America.
The Israeli Allies Foundation, which is supported by Mike Pence and many Republican lawmakers, Christians United for Israel, that's Pastor John Hagee, who's close to Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley.
These groups were supporting the push for the anti-BDS laws.
They lobby Congress.
They lobby the state legislatures every day.
They're lobbying, again, for this same round of laws that attempt to curtail speech that's critical of Israel.
So it's a lot of the same playbook that was documented five or six years ago with the BDS campaign.
We've just compiled the documents and other forms of evidence to show that it's been relaunched.
There's been a new injection of money and a new push that's, again, focused in Congress, focused on these college campuses.
Yeah, there was this article in The Atlantic from a couple months ago by T.O.
Baker, who, sort of like the embodiment of a Nepo-Mabian journalism, his father, I think They identify as non-binary with the pronouns they, them, so let me try and respect that.
Their father is Peter Baker, who's the New York Times Chief Washington Bureau Correspondent, and their mother is Susan Glasser, who has worked with The New Yorker and Politico, and of course, lo and behold, they get the opportunity that almost no other 20-year-old gets to write this major article for The Atlantic, edited by Jeffrey Goldberg,
In which Theo Baker describes being a student at Stanford, he kind of paddles on all the different activists, anti-Israel activists, things they've said, things they've done.
It's exactly this kind of like student-to-student surveillance and creating dossiers of people who are critical of this foreign country on American campuses.
Now, Jack, let me ask you, because Lee mentioned Hillel and, you know, When I was in college, Hillel was a very influential group.
It's generally a group of Jewish students whose main cause is Israel.
And Lee was describing the part of your reporting in this article that linked the Israeli government and its funding to Hillel and the encouragement of Hillel to kind of be the arm of the Israeli government on American college campuses.
One of the things, one of the people you mentioned was someone named Adam Lehman, who's the chairman of Hillel.
And this visit that he made to the Knesset, the Israeli legislature, in February of 2024, where he eventually reported to them or boasted of the kind of surveillance activities in which they're engaged in the United States on behalf of Israel.
Let's show this part of this speech that he gave to the Knesset.
The great American Jewish community.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
I'd like to give Adam Lehmann.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Chairman Ford.
Thank you to the other esteemed members of the committee.
We're honored to be here.
I want to talk about what's happening on college campuses.
Isolated incident from more of an epidemic, and this truly has become that epidemic.
What are we doing about it?
Very importantly, We have great partners in Israel, and I want to give credit to the Jewish Agency for Israel through our partnership of having 80 shakim on our campuses.
That's been fundamental.
Our Mosaic United partnership, supported through the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, has been very important as well.
very important as well.
Our fighting back is legal and we cannot fall short of using every legal channel available.
Our fighting back is legal, and we cannot fall short of using every legal channel available.
We have been, as Harriet pointed out, lobbying aggressively with the United States government to make sure that they are enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
We have been, as Harriet pointed out, lobbying aggressively with the United States government to make sure that they are enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
That is making an enormous difference.
That is making an enormous difference.
We have more than 60 investigations now publicly announced and that matters.
We have something called the Campus Anti-Semitism Legal Line, which is a partnership with the Brandeis Center and ADL, where we've had more than 400 students be able to report the issues that they have encountered and receive direct legal advice so they can bring action.
We are working with university administrators to get them to change policies to protect Jewish students and to make sure that Israel is not demonized on campus and that Jewish students can be safely Jewish and Zionist at the same time.
We have 75 universities now who are part of what we call the Campus Climate Initiative doing that work.
And finally, we are educating.
We are an educational institution working in educational environments, and we need to continue to break through the horrible propaganda which demonizes Israel.
We have something right now, a teach-in tour, that's going Okay, so, Jack, I mean, someone might hear that and say, I don't know, that seems pretty benign to me.
from Israel as well as from North America doing that work.
I'll close just by pointing out a few signs of hope.
Of course, we have to take seriously the issue.
Okay, so Jack, I mean, someone might hear that and say, I don't know, that seems pretty benign to me.
You have a chairman of a group, Hillel International, that operates on American college campuses, and he went to Israel to kind of report on their successes in promoting the cause of Israel on Why is this something that ought to be of concern to us?
Well, right after you cut off the clip is where Wayman claims credit for MIT's president disbanding their chapter of what he refers to as SJP or Students for Justice in Palestine.
Let me interrupt you because I did accidentally do that.
Let's just hear him saying that part quickly and then I'll go, I want to go back to you.
But we are going to prevail on campus, just like Israel will prevail in its war here.
We are changing administrations.
Just last week, MIT, the same president who was lambasted in front of Congress, took the step of fully suspending her Students for Justice in Palestine chapter for crossing lines and for creating Alright, so there are a lot of seeming successes they've had that he's reporting to the State of Israel about their ability to influence American college campuses, but when I interrupted you, I was asking you, what's wrong with that?
All right, so there are a lot of seeming successes they've had that he's reporting to the state of Israel about their ability to influence American college campuses.
But when I interrupted you, I was asking you, what's wrong with that?
Why should people be concerned about that?
These are fundamentally nonprofits in the United States being funded by and working hand in glove with the Israeli government to shut down the free speech of college students.
I would say that's kind of the bottom line, but in terms of the mechanism, Obviously, the redefinition of anti-Semitism has, if you listen to the words of Natan Sharansky, who's a central figure in our reporting, who's the former Minister of Diaspora Affairs circa 2003 to 2006, very famous for being arrested by the Soviet Union, allegedly for working with the CIA.
And if you listen to his actual history of the definition of IHRA, it's actually the entire purpose was to oppose a call at the UN in 2001, right before 9-11, in fact, that referred to Israel as an apartheid state.
And then over time, it ramped up specifically to oppose BDS.
And so I would say the entire purpose of this redefinition is to shut down the free speech of these college students.
And so, yeah.
All right, Lee, just to wrap this up, because we do have a couple more updates on the Julian Assange story that we want to cover before we sign off for the night.
And again, I really encourage people to go and look at your article.
I believe it's on the Guardian site, but also on your substack, where people should, I hope, would go and read it and would support the work that you're doing there, because this is the kind of work you do regularly.
And we'll put the link in the notes to the show as well.
But I just wanted to raise this issue, which is the question of AIPAC's influence inside the United States.
We did a show on that last night, or the other night, in terms of their attempt to remove Jamal Bowman from Congress for his refusal to be sufficiently supportive of Israel and the kind of singular power they have to do things like that inside the United States.
There's always been this question.
That, you know, we do have laws in place that require groups that are advocating for the interest of a foreign country and getting financing in order to do that, that they have to basically register as an agent of a foreign country.
People have gone to prison for failing to do so.
That was one of the laws called FARA that they used to try and prosecute some of Trump's associates, claiming that they were acting on behalf of foreign governments and didn't disclose it.
And the argument has always been from AIPAC, Well, we don't have to register as agents of a foreign country because we're not agents of Israel.
We're American citizens who just happen to believe that it is in the interest of our country, the United States, and our fellow citizens to do everything possible to support Israel, to pay for its military, to finance all of its wars, to isolate ourselves on the world stage in order to protect Israel.
What is your reporting, what kind of light does it shed on that question?
Not necessarily with regard to AIPAC, but this entire universe of pro-Israel organizations operating in the United States based on the claim that they're operating independently of and not as agents of the Israeli government.
You know, just before I answer that, I want to add one point to your previous question to Jack.
No, you have to just answer that.
I'm not interested in your separate point.
No, I'm just kidding.
For the Hillel statement, you know, protecting Jewish safety and fighting anti-Semitism on campus, you know, I don't see any problem with that.
That's great.
That's an important cause.
But you see what he does there.
With the strategic guidance of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, with funding from the Israeli government, he's saying that we're also pushing back on student groups that are criticizing Israel, and we're fighting to say, you know, That we're fighting to protect Israel from criticism on college campuses.
That's an entirely different story and conflating the two is very dangerous.
And in terms of this question about foreign lobbying and foreign registration, since the 1930s we've had the Foreign Agent Registration Act, FARA.
That's the, you know, just require lobbyists who are representing foreign governments to do some basic registration to disclose their activities.
There's a really fascinating history in this we don't have time to get into around AIPAC and many of these pro-Israel groups and kind of dodging these regulations for decades.
But what's incredible here is that we have documented evidence of groups that are heavily funded by the Israeli government, at least historically and likely today, that are now staffed, even some of them, by Israeli intelligence officers or former intelligence officers who are taking credit for lobbying and enacting law and lobbying Congress to help encourage congressional investigations by Israeli intelligence officers or former intelligence officers who are taking credit for lobbying and enacting law
And none of these groups that we've discussed today have registered under Farah.
And FARA is not just about money.
You don't have to receive a dime from a foreign government.
If you're taking coordinated action to shape public policy and public opinion on behalf of foreign government, you still have to register.
So these groups that have taken money, that's a trigger they should register.
But for the ones that are openly coordinating, we've listed all these Knesset hearings and other examples of clear coordination.
In addition to the money, none of them have registered.
It just seems like a very lopsided enforcement of the law, especially if you look at since 2016, after the Russian meddling kind of scandal controversy in that presidential election, we've had a huge increase in enforcement of FARA.
FARA, which is enforced by the Department of Justice, there have been many enforcement cases, many civil and criminal actions.
Yeah, it's amazing.
There's so much obsession, of course, with Russia's alleged interference in our sacred democracy and influence campaigns.
People claim they're concerned about that when it comes to governments like Qatar and Qatari money.
And yet this is so far beyond any of that, especially given the relationship between the United States and Israel, that it's almost impossible to feign concern for those other involvements of foreign governments in our political affairs while being indifferent to this massive, longstanding, multi-pronged that it's almost impossible to feign concern for those other involvements of foreign governments in our political affairs while being indifferent to this massive, longstanding, multi-pronged campaign of the Israeli government, not only to manipulate our discourse, but to
It's really quite extraordinary.
As I said, we didn't even cover all the independent important revelations in your article, so I encourage people to go and read that.
Congratulations to both of you on this important story, and I really appreciate your taking the time to join us to talk about it tonight.
Thanks, Glenn.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, have a great night. - Okay.
All right, so before we sign off, we have one more thing on the Julian Assange story that we want to show you, and obviously I'm going to be able to cover it in a much more systematic way tomorrow.
The news of it just broke.
I had heard some whispers over the last week, but nothing definitive, nothing I could report.
For those of you who didn't hear it, there's a plea agreement that Julian reached, Julian Assange reached with the US government that allowed him to plead guilty to one count and serve
And with a sentence that is 64 months, which is the sentence the amount of time he's already served in prison and he left Not only that prison today on bail, but then left the UK to fly home to Australia He is completely free of these charges And we have video I believe of and it's really a beautiful thing to watch just from a human perspective of Julian leaving the prison and then
And then it's a it's a tweet from His wife Stella signs Julian is free words cannot express our immense gratitude to you Yes, you who have all mobilized for years and years to make this come true.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you from WikiLeaks for more info Soon and then here is the video that she attached and I believe this is of Julian Leaving the prison for the airport in a car and then arriving there you see him I think signing the documents he needs to sign and then there he is walking on to the plane that will commit him finally after almost 15 years of unbelievably oppressive and unjust detention.
To be a free man, to leave the UK, presumably to go back to his home country of Australia.
So that's a pretty uplifting and emotional thing to watch, notwithstanding the fact that it was preceded by 15 years of absolute evil in trying to break Julian Assange in every single way for nothing more than the crime of doing real journalism.
So we will definitely have more once I'm able to process all of this tomorrow, as well as we'll do the CNN segment, presuming we have time, and whatever of our news is worth covering between now and then.
For now, that concludes our show for this evening.
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