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June 26, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:06:46
Myths and Lies About Julian Assange Endure After Plea Deal Reached Securing His Freedom

TIMESTAMPS: Intro (0:00) Assange is Finally Free (6:35) Outro (1:05:09) - - - Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - -  Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good evening.
It's Tuesday, June 25th.
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...
Julian Assange is now finally a free man.
Though I had been hearing whispers over the last week, it was not the first time that I thought something imminent would happen and as a result was really unable to report it or confirm it.
It was only last night, while we were in the middle of doing this show live, that we got actual confirmation that Assange had signed a plea deal with the United States Department of Justice, pursuant to which he pled guilty to one felony count under the Espionage Act.
In exchange for his immediate release from the British high security prison where he'd been unjustly detained for more than five years accompanied by his right to travel back to Australia.
Yesterday he flew to a tiny U.S.
territory in the Pacific where he landed today for a scheduled hearing before the U.S.
federal judge there to formally accept his plea deal.
Essentially a formality.
And Assange's agreement with the Justice Department stipulates that even in the extremely unlikely event that that American judge, who just sits in the middle of the Pacific,
Rejected his piece his plea deal Assange would still be permitted to leave that little island to proceed to travel to Australia the only country of which he has ever been a citizen where he plans to reunite with his wife and their two young children and Hopefully rebuild his life full of peace happiness health prosperity and if he wishes going back to the crucial work that he has long been doing now while it is hard on a personal level I
Not to celebrate the video showing Julian Assange walking out of a high-security prison as a free man for the first time in almost 15 years.
It is equally difficult not to feel disgust and outrage at the U.S.
government which deliberately forced him into captivity that whole time without having ever convicted him of any crimes and then at the last minute vindictively imposing on him One last act of unjust vengeance by conditioning his release back to Australia on a guilty plea to one of the least serious felony charges of the 17 charges in the indictment that he faced.
On air last night I offered, more or less from the top of my head, we obviously didn't plan to discuss it, the timeline and history of this saga as best I could, but I've been covering Wikileaks and Assange ever since I first wrote about the group and interviewed him all the way back in the beginning of 2010.
But watching the reaction today to the same group of people who have long demanded and justified his imprisonment, C.I.A.
and F.B.I.
goons, jealous corporate media employees, and American liberals enraged at Assange for disclosing incriminating facts from the Obama administration, and then even worse from their view, reporting incriminating facts about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
I was reminded of just how many outright lies and fabrications and propagandistic deceits and easily proven falsehoods have been circulating about Assange for years to justify his late the imprisonment and I watch media figures interview one liar after the next to spread these same falsehoods all day long to justify why Assange deserved the prison term that he got now we do have more information on the plea deal and on Assange's situation than we had last night
we did some some reporting today, found out some more details.
And I want to report on what it is that I now know and explain the implications of these events.
And most definitely, I want to identify by name these people in media and politics and the U.S.
security state who have been deliberately spreading falsehoods about the situation regarding the Solingen WikiLeaks to justify the U.S.
imprisonment of what I think is the most consequential and important journalist of our generation.
Then CNN is hosting the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on Thursday night in Atlanta to 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 the debate.
Now, this is something we were going to talk about last night and ran out of time, but essentially, early yesterday morning, a CNN host named Casey Hunt invited the Trump campaign press secretary onto the air, and she proceeded to have a remarkable on-air meltdown that CNN hosted that culminated in her abruptly terminating the interview.
We'll examine what happened, not only because of how deeply entertaining it is, but also because it reveals so much about the character and function of U.S.
corporate media.
Before getting to all that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
I've worked with a lot of civil liberties and press freedom groups over the last 20 years during my work as a journalist.
And one thing that I can say for certain about them as a collective is that it is almost impossible to get them to agree on anything, even things that would seem fundamental to their cause of press freedom or civil liberties.
And yet in early 2021, as Joe Biden assumed the office of the presidency, every single major press freedom and civil liberties group united and signed a common letter, sent it to the Biden Justice Department, urging the Justice Department to drop the prosecution of Julian Assange that began during the Trump administration, largely the work of Mike Pompeo.
In order, they said, to avert what they described as the single greatest threat to press freedom in decades, the prosecution of Julian Assange.
That prosecution, the indictment that they brought against him, essentially alleges that he committed espionage by engaging in the acts that all investigated journalists, by definition, engage in.
And yet the Biden Justice Department ignored that letter?
They forced Assange to stay in prison for more than three full years, a high security supermax prison in Britain that the BBC calls British Guantanamo.
And he was in a two by three meter cell for 23 hours a day in isolation, permitted to leave his cell only One hour per day and his medical doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists all attested to the fact that he was suffering serious mental and physical health problems while in prison.
He had a mini stroke.
He had many heart problems and that any attempt to expedite him to the United States would be something he almost would be certain to Not survive.
Now, the Biden administration, and we have been suggesting for quite a while that this is likely going to come, finally did agree to allow Julian Assange to leave that British prison and go back to Australia just a few months before the 2024 election.
And they did so not because they dropped the lawsuit against Assange, but instead required that he plead guilty To one felony count under the Espionage Act so that they could say, look, we were right all along.
Assange had not just engaged in traditional reporting, but instead, as he himself admits, he is guilty of espionage for the reporting that he did.
Now, obviously, the reason Julian Assange agreed to that is because he had already lost 15 years of his life.
He has two small children who have never seen him except behind prison glass, and it was time for him to recover his health and get on with his life.
And I think unless you are somebody who has been in that position and has shown a willingness to sacrifice even more than Assange has, nobody has any standing to object to what Assange chose to do.
But that doesn't mean that the decision they forced him into Isn't incredibly dangerous to the press freedoms that the United States repeatedly claims around the world that it protects.
There was a surprisingly good article in the New York Times today explaining in a very straightforward way in a way that was obviously written for the liberal readers of that paper who have been trained to hate Assange as a Russian agent because of his reporting that he did in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton.
Why it is that even if they hate Assange, they should understand how what the Biden administration did is such a grave threat to press freedom going forward.
Here is the article.
It's not an op-ed.
It's by the New York Times reporter, Charlie Savage.
And you see there the headline, Assange plea deal sets a chilling precedent, but it could have been worse.
Quote, the plea deal brings an ambiguous end to a legal saga that has jeopardized the ability of journalists To report on military intelligence or diplomatic information that officials deem secret.
Quote, the plea deal Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has reached with prosecutors is bad for American press freedom.
Bad for American press freedom.
But the outcome also could have been worse.
The result is an ambiguous end to a legal saga that has jeopardized the ability We just read this whole entire part.
So let's just stop there for a minute.
So many people who probably don't think of themselves as authoritarians believe that as long as the U.S.
in power approved for release.
That is a foundational principle of American self-government.
So let's just stop there for a minute.
So many people who probably don't think of themselves as authoritarians believe that as long as the U.S. government takes a document that describes what it has done and stamps secret or top secret on it, it then becomes both
immoral and illegal for any journalist or media outlet to publish that document because the U.S. government has said this is a document that shall not be published, that we want to remain concealed from the public.
Now obviously there are times that we're supposed to be exceptions when it's legitimate for the government to try and keep a document like that a secret.
Just to give you two examples, if the United States government is involved in a war and there are war plans by generals about where they're going to move troops.
Is contained in a document.
Obviously, there's a legitimate interest that the government has in keeping that secret so that their adversaries in the war, their enemies in the war, don't know where their troops are going or what their war strategy is.
If there is a grand jury investigation where someone is being investigated and yet not accused of any crime, you don't want any of that leaking because it can destroy the reputation of a person.
Before they have even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one.
So there are instances in which government secrecy, namely when the government describes a document as classified, is valid.
But overwhelmingly, the rule is supposed to be, this is the rule of American democracy, and I would suggest democracy in general, that we are supposed to know, with very rare exception, everything that our government is doing.
That's why they're called public officials, working in the public sector with public power.
It's essential to a democracy, not just to be able to go to vote for leaders, but to actually know what they've been doing so the decision is an informed one.
And by contrast, the U.S.
government or governments in general in a democracy are not supposed to know anything about the population, about their citizens.
With very rare exceptions, when they get a search warrant, they're not supposed to be able to spy on us, or keep dossiers on us, or understand and learn everywhere we go and everything we do.
And yet, in American political culture over the last 30 years, this has become completely reversed.
So that everything that the United States government does, practically, is automatically and reflexively marked secret or top secret.
Which means we know very little about what the U.S.
government is doing other than what they want us to know by leaking to subservient reporters who just carry their message and convey it to the public.
So we know almost nothing about what they're doing.
They've built a wall of secrecy that is almost impenetrable.
And at the same time, because of the mass surveillance system that they've built aimed at the American population, They know everything that we're doing.
It's a complete inversion of how a healthy democracy should function.
And the purpose of investigative journalism and the reason That WikiLeaks is so important and pioneering is because WikiLeaks discovered a unique method for blowing a hole in that wall of secrecy that the United States government had constructed, namely that they created a system that would allow people inside the government to leak massive amounts of digital information that the public should have a right to know and do so anonymously.
That was WikiLeaks' and Julian Assange's most important and prescient innovation.
And what the New York Times article is describing here, I think, is such an important point that I've seen liberals all day and media figures all day, wittingly or unwittingly, denying.
As the New York Times says, enshrined in the First Amendment and the role of a free press is to bring to light information beyond what those in power approve for release.
That's a foundational principle of American self-government.
So if you believe that someone is immoral or guilty because they publish a document that the American government has marked secret or top secret, what you're essentially saying is the only things we have a right to know as citizens about our government is what our government decides they want us to think or believe or know.
The whole point of a free press is to investigate and discover what the U.S.
government is doing in secret, even if they don't want that information released.
As the New York Times says, it's a foundational principle of American self-government, yet I watch media figures, people who are supposed to understand and practice the core of the journalistic ethos, adopt the very warped view that the reason Julian Assange is a criminal and deserved to be in prison is because he published documents that the United States government had ordered be kept secret.
An act which, by the way, which every media outlet in this country regularly does.
CNN constantly purports to disclose leaks of classified information.
The New York Times does the same.
The Washington Post does the same.
And nobody ever calls for them to be imprisoned.
In fact, the 2010 publication of Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and diplomatic cables that Assange was being prosecuted for Were documents that he published in partnership with the New York Times and the Guardian and news outlets around the world like El Pais and others.
And yet, nobody would ever call for the editors of the New York Times or the Guardian or El Pais to be prosecuted and put in a prison cell alongside Julian Assange, even though what they did is the same.
Because calling for the prosecution of the editors of those newspapers would reveal that these people are complete authoritarians.
And they're cowards.
They have too much fear to say, oh, the editors of the New York Times should be imprisoned because the New York Times has power in their world and Julian Assange does not.
So the whole case against Julian Assange, the entire hatred that has been ginned up about him in establishment discourse, is all based on a refusal to accept this principle that, again, the New York Times, to its credit, laid out so eloquently, which is that the whole point of journalism Is that you're supposed to tell the public the things the government doesn't want the public to know.
Not only the things that the government tells journalists to publish.
Journalists who only tell the public things the government tells them to say are propagandists of the government.
That's the vast majority of corporate media.
And part of the reason so much of the corporate media hates Julian Assange and wants him in prison Is because he serves as a mirror for what they really are.
He actually does the kind of adversarial journalism they pretend to do.
And as a result, he's broken more stories of more significance than all of them combined.
And a major reason why they hate him so much and spend all day justifying his imprisonment is because he's not one of them and yet has done far more to advance the cause of journalism than they could ever do if they have a hundred lifetimes.
Here the New York Times article goes on, quote, assuming the judge accepts the agreement, it would mean that for the first time in American history, gathering and publishing information the government considers secret will have been successfully treated as a crime.
This new precedent will send a threatening message to national security journalists who may be chilled at how aggressively they do their jobs because they will see a greater risk of prosecution.
Now let me just state here for clarity that a plea bargain is not itself anything that carries precedential value.
It doesn't bind any future case where if a government indicts a journalist The government can't say, oh look, it was already decided that what we're claiming he did is a crime because Julian Assange pled guilty to it.
In order to have a precedent, you need a court ruling.
And the whole point of this plea bargain, and I think it's one of the reasons why the Biden administration did it, is because it avoided court rulings on whether any of these acts could be constitutionally criminalized.
But what the New York Times is saying is that it now intimidates journalists and whistleblowers And it says, look, we just put Assange in prison for effectively 15 years and at the end forced him to plead guilty to a felony.
So if you want to actually publish our secrets, you should think again, because we've just proven to you the power that we have to destroy your life if we do it.
The Times article goes on, quote, he's basically pleading guilty to things that journalists do all the time and need to do, said Jamil Jaffer, executive director of the Knight Foundation, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, quote, it will cast a shadow over press freedom, but not the same kind of a shadow that would have been cast by a judicial opinion holding that this activity is criminal and unprotected by the First Amendment.
The narrow criminal information to which Mr. Assange has agreed to plead guilty centers on one count of conspiring to violate the Espionage Act.
The court document says that Chelsea Manning, an army intelligence analyst, and Mr. Assange agreed that she would send him national security files, even though he had no security clearance, and that he would then, quote, communicate them to others, namely the public, who were also not entitled to publish them.
That is, publish them.
In other words, what Julian Assange has pled guilty to under the Espionage Act is exactly what journalists do all the time.
Now, I'm going to jump around a little bit because I just want to make this one point here.
Back in 2019, when the indictment was announced of Julian Assange, and I read it, I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, and the title of it was, The Indictment of Assange is a Blueprint for Making Journalists into Felons.
And the sub-headline was, the First Amendment is meaningless if it only protects people the government recognizes as journalists.
And the reason I said this, that this indictment threatens investigative journalism, is because the problem from the beginning with trying to prosecute Julian Assange, the Obama administration and the Justice Department really wanted to.
And they'd look for something that he did other than just receive information from a source because they knew they couldn't prosecute him for that because that's what journalists do every day.
And they could never find anything that he did beyond receiving information from their source.
So the Obama Justice Department concluded that they could not prosecute Julian Assange without also prosecuting the editors of every major newspaper who has done the same.
And what the Trump administration did, the Trump Justice Department did, is it concocted two different acts that they claim Julian Assange did that went beyond mere receipt of classified information.
One was that they accused him of having encouraged Chelsea Manning to find ways to avoid detection when she entered the system the next time.
To try and help her evade passwords that would record that she was the one that was taking the information.
And then the other thing they claimed that he did that went beyond mere receipt of classified information is that he encouraged her once she brought him that first archive to try and get other types of information.
Now, the reason I immediately understood that this indictment was so dangerous and would criminalize all investigative journalism Is because those two acts are things that investigative journalists do every day.
There's no investigative journalism I've ever worked on where I didn't do the same two things.
As a journalist, you have not only the right, but the duty to tell your source how to evade detection.
If a source calls you on an open phone line and says, hey, I want to tell you about some government secrets, the first thing you do as a journalist, if you're ethical, is you say, "No, don't use an open phone line. Use signal or use encryption.
I don't want you to get caught." And if you go to the front page of any newspaper like the New York Times, the Washington Post, there are instructions that say if you're inside the government and you want to pass us classified information, this is what you should avoid doing and this is what you should do instead.
So encouraging sources, teaching sources how not to get caught while they're passing you classified information is what investigative journalists do all the time.
It's their duty to do that.
And if that now becomes a crime, meaning you somehow become part of the crime that the source is committing when you're telling them how to evade detection, that would criminalize all investigative journalism.
And the same is true for the other act that they claimed was a crime that went beyond mere receipt of classified documents, which was to encourage a source to get you even more.
So Chelsea Manning came to Julian Assange, said, here's this massive archive I have showing crimes of the US government.
And then he said, well, this is great.
Are there other things we can also get that are worth reporting?
I have never in my life worked with a source who brought me information Where I didn't say, well, this is really good.
Can you also get X, Y, and Z?
Every investigative journalist does that immediately when a source comes to you.
So again, if that also is the basis for turning someone who publishes classified information into being a criminal, that gives you the right to criminalize all investigative journalism.
Now, the thing I want to note about that Washington Post article Was that I published it in May of 2019.
And as it turned out, in June of 2019, the next month, I began reporting a major investigative expose with my colleagues here in Brazil that had a massive impact on Brazil.
It changed the course of Brazilian history.
It led to the release of Lula da Silva from prison and a variety of other impact.
And I had a source who came to me and said, I've hacked into the telephones of the top prosecutors and judges, and it proves that they engage in corruption and illegality when prosecuting a bunch of people, including Lula.
And one of the things I did was say, well, you have to be careful not to get caught.
And the other thing I said was, well, do you have any other things beyond what you've given me?
And because this was all recorded by text when they found the source and arrested the source, and they found those communications I had with him, that was when the Brazilian government then prosecuted me, then brought a criminal indictment against me, charging me with 126 felony counts on the ground that they used the exact theory that the U.S.
government used to try and prosecute Assange, namely that by orienting my source on how to avoid detection, and then asking the source if there was other information they could get, That I had become part of the criminal conspiracy.
Now, unfortunately, in my case, the Brazilian Supreme Court intervened very quickly after I was indicted and said that trying to prosecute me on those grounds would violate the free speech guarantee of the Brazilian Constitution.
And I believe that should have been the same result had Julian Assange come to the United States and for once and for all, a court would have ruled that you cannot prosecute a publisher of classified information.
But because of this plea deal, The government got to avoid any ruling on that, which I think is one of their motives for wanting to put an end to this case, aside from the fact that they never wanted Assange on American soil because of the spectacle it would produce, because of the dangers of putting him on the stand, because of Biden's risk of being the first ever president to preside over the imprisonment in the United States, of not a leaker inside the government, but of a person who just published classified information.
But it's amazing that I wrote this article in the Washington Post in 2019, arguing that this theory jeopardizes all investigative journalists.
And then the next year, the Brazilian government tried to prosecute me based on exactly this theory.
Because again, there is no investigative journalism that does not involve the acts set forth in this indictment.
I want to just go through a little bit of the critical history of the Assange case and the WikiLeaks case because it's something that I've been reporting on for a long time.
In fact, the very first time that I reported on WikiLeaks was back in March of 2010 when I was at Salon.
I was a writer and a reporter for Salon.com, and this was before any of the big WikiLeaks releases, like the Afghanistan War Logs, or Iraq War Logs, or the Diplomatic Cables.
And I wrote this article, the headline of which was, The War on WikiLeaks and Why It Matters.
The U.S.
government escalates its campaign to harass and destroy a key whistleblower site.
So I had seen all the way back in 2010 the massive value and potential that what Julian Assange created at WikiLeaks had for the cause of journalism and I interviewed Julian Assange as part of this article and the reason I actually wrote this article was because there was a short article in the New York Times that had reported that
The Pentagon had classified WikiLeaks as an official threat to national security and that there was a top secret report they prepared which talked about how to destroy WikiLeaks with all different methods.
They talked about how they might submit false information to WikiLeaks in the hope that they would publish it and that would forever destroy their reputation.
And I remember thinking, wow, if the U.S.
military and government thinks this site is that much of an enemy and a threat to it, simply because they're publishing and reporting on secret information, that's a site that I probably would be interested in.
And I interviewed Julian at the time, as part of writing this article, and this is part of what he told me, if we can put that on the screen.
He said to me, when I asked him about what the project of Wikileaks was, he said, quote, the information has reform potential.
Meaning releasing classified information has the potential for reform.
And the information which is concealed or suppressed is concealed or suppressed because the people who know it best Understand that it has the ability to reform.
So they engage in work to prevent that reform.
And then he went on.
There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilization.
And selectively targeting information will do that.
Understanding that quality information is what every decision is based on.
And all the decisions taken together is what, quote, civilization is.
So if you want to improve civilization, you have to remove some of the basic constraints Which is the quality of information that civilization has at its disposal to make decisions.
And then he went on and said, of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards.
I like a good challenge.
And so do a lot of the other people in WikiLeaks.
We like the challenge.
But the vision of WikiLeaks was that if you can liberate information that the public has the right to know, You could then encourage and incite the population to demand changes and reform.
And that was precisely, he said, why all of this information was being kept secret by governments and power centers because they understood the potential for that information to foster social and political change.
Here's the New York Times article I was referring to that prompted me to write about WikiLeaks and interview Assange.
There you see it.
From March of 2010, the Pentagon sees a threat from online muckrakers.
And it talked about how this report was prepared inside the Pentagon, and true to WikiLeaks' mission, they got that report and they were able to publish it, and it showed what the U.S.
US military was willing to do to try and destroy WikiLeaks.
Now, the, As I said, in 2010, when WikiLeaks really did its first kind of major publication of secrets, and the amount of stories contained in those releases are and the amount of stories contained in those releases are too numerous to chronicle.
I've written long articles just showing some of the crucial revelations that WikiLeaks was able to publish based on this archive.
Including all kinds of hidden war crimes by the US and Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as all sorts of secret corruption on the part of many governments around the world.
And the Obama administration was furious.
After all, part of what they published were Hillary Clinton's diplomatic cables, the diplomatic cables of the State Department under Hillary Clinton.
And there have been reports where she said, why can't we just go and drone Julian Assange?
The Obama administration was obsessed.
With prosecuting Julian Assange, they convened a grand jury.
They called witnesses.
But at the end of the process, here is Time Magazine in 2013 reporting on it.
The U.S.
says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is unlikely to face charges.
Fears that the Department of Justice would have to prosecute news organizations as well.
Quote, the problem the Department of Justice has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information with the same theory being applied to journalists, a former department spokesman said.
Quote, and if you are not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not going to do, then there is no way to prosecute Assange.
Now that was always the theory that led to the Obama Justice Department who desperately wanted to put Assange in prison to say we can't.
How do we differentiate between what Assange did and what the media outlets with whom he partnered did?
We can't.
And it was the Trump administration in 2018, under Mike Pompeo, when Trump made Mike Pompeo the director of the CIA in 2017.
He was a standard warmonger and neocon, one of the many who ended up in the Trump administration.
I think that was one of Trump's greatest failures was putting a bunch of people, remember he made Nikki Haley the ambassador to the UN, put John Bolton as a White House advisor.
He had all kinds of neocons and warmongers and people he said he opposed in high positions of influence and power and Mike Pompeo was probably the worst.
And when Mike Pompeo arrived in 2017, as the director of the CIA, he gave a speech early on in April of 2017, three months into the Trump presidency, where he vowed that no matter what, he would destroy WikiLeaks and put an end to this view that WikiLeaks has the right of press freedom, saying they do not, and we will never stop until we destroy Julian Assange.
And then the Trump administration under Pompeo went to work at the time Julian Assange was in the Ecuadorian embassy where he had gotten asylum from the Ecuadorian government for reasons we explained last night.
It was not because he was hiding from a sex assault investigation in Sweden.
It was because he was willing to go to Sweden as long as the Swedish government promised that they would not use his presence on Swedish soil to turn him over to the United States.
Sweden refused and Ecuador offered the same thing.
Ecuador said, if you just promise to not turn him over to the Americans by virtue of his presence on Swedish soil, we'll withdraw the asylum and he'll get on the next plane to Sweden.
He never was concerned about those sex charges at all.
And it was when the Swedish government refused and he became obviously rightfully scared that the plan really was to get him onto US soil and put him in a prison for the rest of his life.
That's when he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.
And he was there from 2012 until 2018 when Trump officials led by Mike Pompeo bullied and coerced and threatened and bribed The new Ecuadorian government to withdraw its protection of asylum, which allowed the British police, the London police, to march into the embassy in 2018, arrest Assange and put him in that high security prison.
And he was charged with bail jumping.
That was the only crime of which he was ever convicted.
It's a misdemeanor.
He was sentenced to 51 weeks, less than a year, because you can't put him under a misdemeanor under British law.
You can't give a sentence more than a year.
He served that in 11 months, and right as he was about to get released, that was when the Trump administration unveiled the indictment against Assange to make sure that he stayed in prison.
And then they knew there'd be this lengthy fight over Whether the British would extradite Assange to stand trial in the United States and that while he was fighting that extradition, they convinced the British to keep him in a high security prison and not let him out on bail.
And he spent the last five years in this high security prison, not because he had been convicted of any crime, but because the British refused to let him out, even with ankle monitors and all kinds of conditions to ensure he didn't flee.
Because the United States wanted him rotting in prison because the goal was always to crush Julian Assange and prevent WikiLeaks from ever returning.
And one of the effects of this was that the United States has completely lost its ability, as has the UK, to go around the world lecturing other countries on their attacks on press freedom to pretend that the United States is somehow the beacon of press freedom.
Here is a BBC interview With the very authoritarian president of Azerbaijan.
And Azerbaijan is a country that was known for curbing press freedom, for imprisoning dissidents.
And the BBC British reporter went there to try and pompously lecture President Aliyev about Azerbaijan on their refusal to honor press freedoms and listen to what the president said in return.
Let's see if we can get that volume up and I'm just going to read it for anyone listening on podcast.
She said, why do you think the people in Azerbaijan do not have free media and opposition?
Which independent sources?
Many independent sources.
Tell me which.
So let's just turn the volume up so people can hear, and let's start over and we'll just listen to what the effect of Assange's imprisonment has been all over the world.
Do you think that people in Azerbaijan do not have free media and opposition?
Because this is what I'm told by independent sources in this country.
Which independent sources?
Many independent sources.
Tell me, which?
I certainly couldn't name sources.
Oh, if you couldn't name, that means that you're just inventing this story.
So you're saying the media is not under state control?
Not at all.
I mean, NGOs are the subject of a crackdown.
Journalists are the subject of a crackdown.
Not at all.
Critics are in jail.
No, not at all.
None of this is true?
Absolutely fake.
Absolutely.
We have free media, we have free internet, and the number of internet users in Azerbaijan is more than 80%.
Can you imagine the restriction of media in a country where internet is free, there is no censorship, and there are 80% of internet users?
This is, again, a biased approach.
This is an attempt to create a perception in Western audience About Azerbaijan.
We have opposition.
We have NGOs.
We have free political activity.
We have free media.
We have freedom of speech.
But if you raise this question, can I ask you also one?
How do you assess what happened to Mr. Assange?
Is it a reflection of free media in your country?
Let's talk about Assange.
How many years he spent in Ecuadorian embassy?
And for what?
And where is he now?
For journalistic activity.
You kept that person hostage, actually killing him morally and physically.
You did it, not us, and now he's in prison.
So you have no moral right to talk about free media when you do this thing.
I mean, you can think whatever you want about Azerbaijan.
As I said, I would not want to live there.
It's a repressive country, to be sure.
But what moral right or credibility do British and American journalists have to go around the world and lecture
Any other country about their attack on press freedoms when the United States and the British jointly kept in prison for almost 15 years, effectively if you count Ecuadorian detention, almost six years of actual prison in the UK, a journalist who did nothing other than do journalism and expose the crimes of the US and British governments and that's exactly the kind of Loss of credibility that the United States is suffering all over the world.
Now, there was, all day today, in response to the news about Assange being released, just a tsunami of lies and propaganda from every major media outlet, trying to justify, obviously, why it is that Assange spent so much time in prison, only for us to, our government, to release him and let him go free without standing trial.
Now, the fact that it was the Biden administration that agreed to release him meant that these media outlets that are completely pro-Biden couldn't criticize the Biden administration.
That's not what they do.
So they were willing to say, yeah, I guess it's fine that we finally let him out.
But they also had to justify why he deserved to be in prison.
And I actually forgot how many lies, and when I say lies, I mean things I can prove to you and will prove to you are actually false.
Have always been spread all over the media to justify Ansage's imprisonment.
Either these people have no idea what they're talking about, or they're actively lying, or both.
But these are the media outlets, like this CNN interview I'm about to show you, that incessantly claim that they're here to combat disinformation.
And yet they spread constant demonstrable lies.
So Caitlin Collins, a CNN host, had on her show to talk about the Assange case.
Not any members of those press freedom and civil liberties groups who denounce this as the gravest threat to press freedom.
She decided to invite on her show an FBI official, former FBI official, And not just any former FBI official, but Andrew McCabe, who was kicked out of the FBI in disgrace because he got caught admitting, essentially, that he was motivated by anti-Trump animus in the FBI's investigation that led to all the Russiagate hoaxes.
She's talking about a career proven liar, who of course CNN immediately went and hired.
And watch the claims that Caitlin Collins allowed Andrew Cabe to make about Julian Assange and why he's not a journalist and why he's actually a criminal.
Because so many of these claims are provably false.
The U.S.
effort to extradite and prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has now ended with him walking free, avoiding any prison time here in the United States.
Of course, WikiLeaks published this video of him leaving a British prison this morning after he reached an agreement with the U.S.
Justice Department by pleading guilty to a felony charge involving one of the largest leaks of classified information in U.S.
history.
The deal allows Assange to immediately return to Australia, his native country.
You may recall the 2010 leak included hundreds of thousands of confidential military records about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Under the plea deal, the roughly five years in prison that U.S.
prosecutors were seeking for Assange would be equal to the time that he already served in a British prison.
Remember, President Biden said a few months ago that he was considering ending the prosecution against him.
I want to talk about this with Andrew McCabe, the former FBI Deputy Director.
And obviously this is a huge step down, Andrew McCabe, from the 18 charges, the potential 175 years.
The U.S.
efforts interest and so you know he's been easy to see how they concluded that obviously this is a huge step down Andrew McCabe from the 18 charges the potential 175 year prison sentence that he was facing what do you make of the the terms that prosecutors have come to with Julian Assange?
You know you're right Caitlin it's a big it's a far cry from the from the charges that that were brought against him but I think it's the right call at this point.
So just look at this CNN wants to talk about the imprisonment of somebody who reported on the crimes of the U.S.
government.
And who did they invite on?
The former FBI deputy director.
And again, not just any FBI former deputy director, but one whose career was destroyed because of corruption lying.
So here's what he says.
In this saga, and you know, don't get me wrong.
I think that the process, the charges and the indictment of the prosecution of Julian Assange is entirely appropriate.
Julian Assange was indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Grand jury who listened to the entire investigation and determined there's probable cause to believe he committed a crime.
Okay, just on that point, I'm not going to say that's a lie, but everybody knows that's incredibly misleading.
There's that old adage that you can indict a ham sandwich in a grand jury.
A grand jury is a process where only the government appears.
The defendant has no right to appear.
There's no counter evidence presented to The grand jury to conflict with or negate any of the government's claims.
So it's a meaningless process.
It's a rubber stamp that the grand jury will always give in essentially every case an indictment and only a propagandist would try and claim that the validity of Assange's criminality was demonstrated because they got a grand jury to indict him.
Easy to see how they concluded that, because the facts here are not in dispute.
He did what the law says you cannot do, right?
He solicited that information.
He published that information, gave it to people who weren't entitled to receive it.
But at this point, we are, you know, many, many, many years into this prosecution.
And I think the fact that continuing to try to extradite him, to bring him here, to hear those charges, to face those charges in court, really raises significant questions, concerns about Let me just stop there because he said, and this is obviously a lie, that there's no dispute that Julian Assange did that which the law says you cannot do.
And what he said that the law says you cannot do is solicit sources to bring you classified information and then publish that information without the consent of the government.
That is something that every major media outlet in the world does every day.
Here, for example, is this instrument called SecureDrop.
Which was actually created by a internet freedom activist named Aaron Schwartz.
It was then taken over by the Freedom of Press Foundation, which I co-founded with Laura Poitras and Daniel Alsberg and others, principally to support WikiLeaks.
And it's a technological device that allows media outlets to tell sources, if you want to leak to us, all you have to do is upload these secret documents to us and that will give you anonymity.
And here's the organizations that use them, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Intercept, TechCrunch.
I believe the New York Times uses it now.
If they don't, they use all very similar ones.
So these media outlets do exactly what Andrew McCabe just described was indisputably a crime, namely encouraging sources to give them classified information and then publishing that classified information without the consent of the government.
And that's exactly why, if you accept this indictment, it means that every journalistic outlet in the country Can be prosecuted.
Now, here are the two eyes that he actually tells that I want to show you and demonstrate the proof of the lie.
Well, I mean, it's notable to hear you say that.
Obviously, his team argued that he should be protected by the same laws that journalists are, that he was releasing sensitive information, but in the public's interest.
And so, you know, he's been alternatively celebrated by some and reviled by others.
And so it is striking for me to hear you, given your former position as the Deputy FBI Director, to say you think this is the right call.
I do think it's the right call.
And don't get me wrong, I think Julian Assange did the wrong thing.
Julian Assange hurt the United States government.
He put the lives of our troops in danger.
He put the lives, particularly of Iraqi citizens who had helped our effort.
In the war in Iraq in danger, so this guy did a lot of bad things But what he did some of what he did was very similar to the way the journalists conduct their business Of course in other ways very different, right?
There wasn't any of those conversations prior to publication that journalists typically have when they're gonna reveal classified and sensitive information to find out what you know reach out to the government entity involved to find let him seek comment and And then have a conversation, give the government an opportunity to say, hey, please don't do this because these people might die as a result.
So very big differences there.
But the fact is that going forward with this prosecution would run the risk of putting all of those processes and those protections kind of up for grabs.
And that could set a very dangerous precedent going forward and have a chilling effect on the journalistic news gathering process and how that impacts the First Amendment.
Okay now, one of the reasons he's obviously saying he agrees with what the Biden administration did is because he's a pro-Biden hack, but he made two arguments about why Julian Assange is different than What he considers to be journalists, and I don't think there's anything more dangerous than having the FBI or CIA operatives decide, oh, this is a real journalist, but this is not.
Those are the last people you should want making those decisions.
Because obviously the people they consider to be real journalists are the people they can control.
And since they can't control Assange, then they don't consider him a real journalist.
But the more important point is that if you actually read the First Amendment, it lists a series of rights Freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, and a free press, to name a few, and none of those is limited to some special priesthood called journalist.
You don't have to be a journalist, whoever decides what that is, to claim the right of free, of press freedoms under the Constitution.
That is an activity, like speech, or the free exercise of religion, That is available to all citizens.
And so anybody, journalist, or pilot, or engineer, or architect, or just regular citizens, have the right to engage in press freedoms under the Constitution.
You don't have to prove that you're a journalist.
But the argument that he gave as to why Julian Assange is different from the respectable journalist who he thinks should be protected is because, according to McCabe, Assange never contacted the government in advance before publishing secret information to give the government an opportunity to be heard about which particular documents might be dangerous or put people in harm's way before he published them.
He simply published them without ever contacting the government.
That's what Andrew McCabe said on CNN today with no pushback from Caitlin Collins.
That is an absolute lie.
It is just a completely demonstrable falsehood.
Here is Foreign Policy Magazine in 2010, and I was involved in this at the time, I reported on this at the time, I remember it very well.
Julian Assange contacted the State Department before releasing Diplomatic cables and said, look, we have a bunch of diplomatic cables that we think are in the public interest to know, but we would like you to give you the opportunity to tell us which ones you think we shouldn't publish because they actually might engage in, they actually might cause danger that we can't anticipate, but that you might know.
In other words, WikiLeaks and Assange did exactly what Andrew McCabe this morning on CNN insisted he never did.
And in response, the State Department under Hillary Clinton refused to engage in that process with WikiLeaks and said, we're not going to talk to you at all.
Here from Foreign Policy, November of 2010, the State Department refuses to negotiate with WikiLeaks.
Quote, the State Department wrote Saturday to the leaders of the self-described whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, telling them the U.S.
government won't negotiate ahead of the expected release of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.
The State Department's top legal advisor, Harold Koh, wrote Saturday to WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and his attorney, Jennifer Robinson.
In response to a letter WikiLeaks sent the same day to the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., Louis Sussman, the State Department rejected WikiLeaks' request, rejected their request for the names of any individuals who, quote, may be at significant risk of harm due to the release of sensitive may be at significant risk of harm due to the release They weren't looking to negotiate with the State Department
They were engaged in the practice that, as Andrew McCabe said, all journalists, before they published secret information, do, which is you call the government and you don't look for permission.
You just tell them, I'm going to publish these documents, but if you have arguments to make about why there may be dangers that I don't see to publishing certain documents, I'm willing to listen.
Andrew McCabe on CNN this morning, Insisted that what differentiates Julian Assange from real journalists is that Assange refuses to do that.
He never did it.
And in fact, Julian Assange did exactly that in many occasions, including in 2010, but the State Department refused to talk to him.
It's just, I just, I just can't, it just, it drives me crazy that CNN runs around constantly saying how they combat disinformation and they're repeatedly putting falsehoods on the air like that.
And I showed this on social media today, I'm gonna send it to Caitlyn Collins, and I guarantee you they won't correct it.
Because they are happy to publish absolutely false claims, as long as it serves the cause that they want.
Now the other claim Andrew McCabe made, which is the most common one, is that the reason why Julian Assange should be Imprisoned is because documents he published endangered the lives of multiple people including Iraqi informants.
I defy anybody to show one document WikiLeaks published that endangered in any way the life of a single person.
And in fact, McClatchy, which was a part of Knight Ridder, the only major media outlet before the war in Iraq that got the story about Iraqi WMDs correct, they were constantly publishing articles saying there was no evidence of Iraqi WMD.
In 2010, they investigated these claims from the Pentagon that WikiLeaks has blood on their hands, that they endangered the lives of a huge number of people.
And here's what they concluded.
Here's McClatchy, September 25th, 2010.
The date on the article is 2013 because they went back three years later and did a minor correction, but the actual date of publication is 2010.
And the headline is, officials may be overstating the danger from WikiLeaks.
Quote, American officials in recent days have warned repeatedly that the release of documents by WikiLeaks could put people's lives in danger.
But despite similar warnings ahead of the previous two massive releases of classified US intelligence reports by the website, US officials concede That they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death.
And again, all of these documents are documents that WikiLeaks partnered with the New York Times and the Guardian to publish.
And both those newspapers, as well as WikiLeaks, went to the government beforehand and said, if there are documents in here that you think could endanger people, tell us what they are.
And many of those documents were in fact redacted to protect the lives of innocent people.
But it is commonplace to hear over and over people like this saying WikiLeaks put the lives of people in danger with these publications.
They have no analysis about why what they did was different than the New York Times and the Guardian.
In every single case, you go back and look at the Snowden release or the release of the Pentagon Papers, the government always claims release of these documents put people's lives in danger.
I spent years after doing this Noting Reporting when people said that, and they often did, saying, give me one example of one document that put anyone's life in danger and nobody ever could.
Same with the Pentagon Papers.
Nobody's life was endangered by the Pentagon Papers.
The only people who are endangered by these leaks are the criminals inside the U.S.
government whose crimes end up being revealed.
You would think if a FBI deputy director went on to CNN to claim that these WikiLeaks documents published with the New York Times and the Guardian put people's lives in danger, someone like Caitlin Collins would say, well, how specifically did they do that?
Which documents did the New York Times and the Guardian and WikiLeaks publish and whose lives ended up being endangered?
Or they would refer to this investigation showing that even the government admitted they had no evidence to justify that claim.
Or there would be pushback when Andrew McCabe just lies and said WikiLeaks, unlike other journalists, doesn't contact the government before publication when clearly that is exactly what he did.
Now, here is, just to give you a sense of the kinds of lies and the way they circulate, here's what Mike Pence said.
And of course, he has been a defender of the U.S.
security state his entire life.
He went onto Twitter today and said, quote, Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops.
Again, absolutely baseless claim.
In a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
The Biden administration's plea deal with Assange is a miscarriage of justice and dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces and their families.
There should be no plea deals to avoid prison for anyone that endangers the security of the military or the national security of the United States, ever.
Now, obviously, nobody endangered the security of the United States more than, say, the people who lied the country into war in Iraq.
Created a vacuum there that led to ISIS, people like Mike Pence.
Here's some goon who worked for the CIA for 10 years named Gail Helt.
She went on to X today and wrote the following, quote, folks, Julian Assange is no hero.
He is a despicable Russian asset, obviously there's never been proof of that, who harmed hundreds of people and dismissed them like they didn't matter, that same claim.
I'm okay with the plea agreement because I hope it means I'll see his name in my social media feed a lot less, but let's not venerate the man.
He caused great harm." And there you see her biography.
She was a CIA analyst from 2003 to 2014 during the Iraq War, during the War on Terror.
So of course she wants Julian Assange in prison and of course she is pretending she supports the plea deal because she doesn't want to criticize the Biden administration.
And then she goes on separately to say this, quote, a journalist, someone had said, but you're imprisoning a journalist.
And she said, who was a journalist?
Assange?
Bah, ha, ha, ha.
That's an insult to actual journalists who do the work with integrity, who I hold in enormously high regard.
Now, as I've said before, Most of the people who work in corporate media, who go to the White House Gala, who are celebrated as journalists, don't do any kind of real journalism at all except the kind that people in the CIA think you should do, which is you call up the CIA, you call up the FBI, you call up the Pentagon, and you repeat what they tell you to say.
People like Natasha Bertrand at Politico and CNN and Candelania and NBC News.
I mean, again, the last people we should want determining who is a real journalist Are people who work for the U.S.
security state.
But aside from the fact that Assange has broken more major stories than all of these people combined, which is the metric of what journalism is, Assange has won journalism awards all around the world.
Here, just to give you a few examples, The Guardian in 2011, Julian Assange wins the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize.
Here is the Sydney Morning Herald, the big newspaper in Australia, August of 2019.
Julian Assange wins EU Journalism Award and it says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been given award established in honor of an assassinated journalist.
Now we move to the next one.
Which is the International Journalist Network.
In 2019, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange captures top journalism prize.
And then here's a graphic, Julian Assange's awards for journalism.
He's won many awards for publishing and journalism, including from Amnesty, Time Magazine, and Walkley Awards.
And it shows the multiple journalism awards that he's won all throughout the years.
Now again, it doesn't matter who is not a journalist from the perspective of who can claim the First Amendment protections of press freedom.
Those are available to everybody.
But it's so revealing about how these people see journalism.
In order to be a journalist to them, you have to work for a large corporation, be completely controllable by the government, and only reveal information that the U.S.
government wants you to reveal.
The minute you're not controlled by the U.S.
government, the minute you're actually adversarial to the government, the minute you expose the things they want to keep concealed and don't want the public to know, that's when you become the enemy because that's what real journalism is.
And if there's anyone who deserves the title of real journalist, Of all these people who talk about journalism constantly, I can't think of anyone more deserving of that title than Julian Assange.
And he isn't in prison, or wasn't in prison, for the last 15 years despite that fact, but precisely because he is engaged in the pure acts of journalism.
him that was the reason why he spent the last 15 years of his life deprived of his freedom.
All right that concludes our show for this evening principally because I have to be on Fox News in about 10 minutes.
Yet, for the second night in a row, we ran out of time to cover the CNN segment, and that's Meltdown by Casey Hunt, which I really want to cover because it's so illustrative of how these people think and act.
We obviously did a lot of that today, but this was a very special case.
The debate's not until Thursday, so I should have time tomorrow in order to cover that.
But for tonight, that's going to conclude the show.
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