Nov. 19, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
18:34
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Well, it's completely scandalous. | ||
| He's been in a high-security prison for four and a half years. | ||
| He's not convicted of anything. | ||
| He's there because the U.S. | ||
| wants to exorcise him, and there's kind of a ping-pong attitude between the U.K. | ||
| and the U.S. | ||
| The U.S. | ||
| says, oh, it's the U.K. | ||
| that's putting him in prison. | ||
| The U.K. | ||
| says, we're just putting him in prison on behalf of the U.S. | ||
| And meanwhile, you have someone who's not convicted of anything, | ||
| languishing in a high security prison for four and a half years and counting. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, I'm here with Stella Assange, the wife of Julian Assange. | |
| And I guess the most, well, the best part to start with would be that your | ||
| husband is actually not too far from here right now. | ||
| Yeah, he's about a 15-minute drive from where we are. | ||
| He's near the Thames, but it feels like it's miles away from London when you're there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he is, I mean, he's locked up. | ||
| That's, that's just the nature of reality. | ||
| You mentioned to my producer, you get to see him twice a week. | ||
| Um, and I guess just talk a little bit about his physical and sort of emotional state. | ||
| Then we'll, we'll get into obviously the bigger stuff, but, but, well, not that much as bigger than that, I suppose. | ||
| Well, he's been in this high security prison in southeast London since the 11th of April 2019. | ||
| He is locked up in a cell over 20 hours a day. | ||
| He gets to go to the yard for up to an hour a day. | ||
| On his wing, about 30% of people there are accused or convicted of murder. | ||
| And, you know, Julian's not a... He shouldn't be in prison in the first place, right? | ||
| He's a journalist. | ||
| He's there because of what he published. | ||
| But he's there because the United States is trying to extradite him. | ||
| I get to see him once or twice a week. | ||
| On weekends I go with our children. | ||
| We have a four and a half year old and a six year old. | ||
| And all they know is their father inside this prison space. | ||
| They've never been in a different room outside of this prison with their father. | ||
| But that, you know, the Contact that we have, it keeps us both connected. | ||
| It's incredibly important. | ||
| We can speak every day. | ||
| We speak several times during the day. | ||
| He's able to call me. | ||
| I can't call him. | ||
| And the conversations only last about 10 minutes at a time. | ||
| And I assume they're listening to the conversation? | ||
| Yeah, everything's, you know, there is absolutely no privacy. | ||
| When we go to see each other, it's in this big hall. | ||
| There are about 40 other prisoners who are meeting their family and their friends. | ||
| We sit on one side of a table about this size. | ||
| He sits on the other. | ||
| I can hug him and I can hold his hand across the table. | ||
| The kids can sit on his lap and he can read stories to them. | ||
| But apart from that, he has to remain seated. | ||
| And yeah, it's a very, obviously very regimented Yeah, I sort of feel like we should do an all interview just on the human part of it, because that's the part that kind of got lost here, but I want to use our time as effectively as possible. | ||
|
unidentified
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So what is the status of his case at the moment? | |
| Is this now just on and off period here in the UK, or where are you guys at? | ||
| Well, it's completely scandalous. | ||
| He's been in a high-security prison for four and a half years. | ||
| He's not convicted of anything. | ||
| He's there because the U.S. | ||
| wants to exorcise him. | ||
| And there's kind of a ping-pong attitude between the U.K. | ||
| and the U.S. | ||
| The U.S. | ||
| says, oh, it's the U.K. | ||
| that's putting him in prison. | ||
| The U.K. | ||
| says, we're just putting him in prison on behalf of the U.S. | ||
| And meanwhile, you have someone who's not convicted of anything languishing in a high-security prison for four and a half years and counting. | ||
|
unidentified
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What if the UK authorities actually say he's in prison for them? | |
| I understand they're saying it's because of the pressure of the United States, but they have to say he's there for something. | ||
| Yeah, they say he's a flight risk. | ||
| Because he previously sought asylum and obtained it in the Ecuadorian embassy. | ||
| Back in 2012, because he said the US was in the background, maybe going to try to extradite him. | ||
| At the time, there was an extradition request from Sweden. | ||
| Sweden refused to give a guarantee that they wouldn't send him on to the United States. | ||
| So he sought asylum and obtained it. | ||
| And then in 2019, Ecuador had changed its relationship with the United States and basically sold him out and he got arrested and he's been in prison since then. | ||
| What's the resolution that he or you would want at the moment? | ||
| Like, if the phone rang today and you got whatever you would consider the best news, what is that? | ||
| Well, this case should never have been brought beyond the, you know, cruelty towards Julian. It is a dangerous case. It sets a | ||
| terrible precedent. It is an attack on the First Amendment in the United States. It's the | ||
| administration, was actually the Trump administration that brought the indictment and it is an | ||
| attack on the First Amendment. | ||
| It's the first time that the Espionage Act is used against a publisher for publishing. | ||
| He's literally accused of receiving, possessing and communicating information to the public. | ||
| he's not actually accused of espionage per se because the espionage act it's this act from 100 years ago it's really broadly worded and uh it's basically been repurposed to criminalize journalism and the way that it's been done is to use julian um to set the precedent and because he's a he's a person who You know, the mainstream media has attacked for many years and so on. | ||
| He was an easy target, but by doing that, the principles of free speech that are so central to U.S. | ||
| society and politics has been fatally undermined. | ||
| So this is just a terrible prosecution to bring because it basically Criminalizes journalism forever, unless it's dropped. | ||
| So the best outcome would be to drop it, to say, actually, we went too far. | ||
| This should have never been brought. | ||
| But frankly, I mean, Julian has been in prison for four and a half years. | ||
| And the principle is important, but I as his wife, I just want him to come home and to be able to be with our kids. | ||
| And his life is the most important thing. | ||
| His freedom is the most important thing for us as a family. | ||
| But there are, of course, bigger implications for the rest of society, for journalism, for free speech, of course. | ||
| Did you have a sense that possibly, even though some of this did happen under the Trump administration, that possibly he was going to get pardoned at the end? | ||
| There was a really big push and Trump was the sort of, I'm going to take out the deep state guy. | ||
| And obviously just nothing happened there. | ||
| Was there anything behind the scenes? | ||
| There was a big push. | ||
| I know there were people within Trump's administration who were trying hard. | ||
| I think it was a terrible sign of weakness by Trump that he didn't pardon Julian and that he is now Basically suffering the consequences of the failure to be strong in that moment. | ||
| Of course, the Espionage Act is being used against Trump now, and this expansion of the use of the Espionage Act, it actually started under Obama. | ||
| He started using it against whistleblowers a lot more often than Trump. | ||
| The Trump administration, I should say, it was basically Mike Pompeo in the background who was pushing for it. | ||
| They then went from whistleblowers to the publisher, to the receiver of information, the journalist. | ||
| And then now it's being used in a in a political, in a like quite a nakedly political manner because this Espionage Act is so broadly worded and it also changes the culture around the use of this piece of legislation. | ||
| Are you sympathetic to people that would say that states have some right to abstate secrets at some level? | ||
| Of course! | ||
| I mean, I understand that, you know, the state has different... it is a multi-organ thing, and there are different functions, and the state has to has an interest and has to try to keep it secret. | ||
| Journalists have to publish information if it's in the public interest. | ||
| They don't have the same responsibility as the state when it comes to secrets. | ||
| What matters there is whether that secret should be in the public domain because it has some significance, because it has a political or legal or whatever, if it's You know, with the publications that Wikimix is accused of publishing, this concerned the Iraq and the Afghan wars, Guantanamo Bay, etc. | ||
| You know, secret information often contains information that... When information has been covered up, when wrongdoing has occurred, then it's kept from the public. | ||
| And that's not to say that all secret information should be in the public domain, but it is to say that it's just a reality that authorities hide information by labeling it secret. | ||
| Are you shocked that more journalists, and usually on my show I have to go like this when I say journalists with air quotes, that more journalists haven't taken up the cause of Julian? | ||
| I mean, obviously there's some level that have, but I mean, certainly from a mainstream perspective, it's pretty much a non-story. | ||
| That's just... | ||
| Well, at an editorial level, you have New York Times, Washington Post to say this case is terrible because they have their legal departments, they've analyzed the case, they understand it's an attack on their ability to publish things. | ||
| And, you know, the fact that, for example, the New York Times has put out an editorial saying it should be dropped indicates to me that they have stories that are just basically left without being published because the advice they get is Look at the Assange case. | ||
| You can't publish this. | ||
| Either they're going to try to put you in jail or we're just going to be bogged down in legal cases for years and years and a lot of money and so on. | ||
| So we're just not going to publish it. | ||
| So basically there has been a terrible chill in the newsrooms. | ||
| Has that translated to journalists? | ||
| Not so much. | ||
| I mean, you have some, you know, there have been segments with some mainstream journalists, but it's not talked about as much as it should be. | ||
| And that's, I think, down to ignorance on the one hand, Basically, there was a failure to understand what WikiLeaks and Julian were about, and that the way the US decided to go after Julian was as a publisher. | ||
| I think hoped that if they went after Julian they'd find some other way of doing it, but the truth is that all he did was basically do what the New York Times does all the time, which is publish information. | ||
| Some of it is classified. | ||
| Sometimes that classified information is given to them by the administration, sometimes it's not. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But their hands certainly are not clean in how they deal with information and when it's political and when it isn't and what they've decided. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But then there's a lot of journalists who don't actually work in... who are more of a kind of commentary in the commentary world and maybe don't understand the bigger implications. | ||
| It should be, you know, I think it should be clear as to all journalists that it impoverishes the public space and the public space needs, like liberty, needs a robust public space to thrive. | ||
| You need people who are, you know, of different opinions, able to speak freely and to disagree. | ||
| And by putting Julian in prison, like you kind of, impoverish that ecosystem dramatically. | ||
| And if journalists are not able to publish the most controversial things, | ||
| then we're basically all in a kind of managed information environment at the moment. | ||
| And social media has been incredibly complicit in this. | ||
| And I think they're after the public domain now. | ||
| It started with Julian and obviously national security, highly controversial publications about war, right? | ||
| But now it's just the opinions of anyone that is being censored. | ||
| And this is all part of a spectrum. | ||
| And I think we're, you know, the failure to defend Julian in the beginning has led to where we are now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Do you think if the timing had been a little bit different, had we known as much, say, through the Twitter files that Elon released years before, that more people could have seen the connections between all of these things? | ||
| Because there's obviously a through line between the way that big tech could, say, suppress the Hunter Biden laptop, the things that Julian was exposing before, years of COVID. | ||
| Like, there's clearly something that connects all of these things, and that maybe if the timing had been a little bit tighter, that we might have fought some of this a little bit differently? | ||
| Yeah, I think 2016 was a major moment of change, right? | ||
| Both because of the election of Trump and the kind of perceived shock to the system this was for the establishment. | ||
| And the same here in the UK with Brexit. | ||
| And so there was this kind of recasting of public opinion as dangerous, as something that had to be managed, information has to be managed. | ||
| And the whole Russiagate hysteria, and of course WikiLeaks was accused by the Clinton administration of having been responsible for Trump's election, this kind of thing. | ||
| The DNC even tried to sue WikiLeaks and Julian personally in relation to the DNC publications. | ||
| But New York, the Southern District Court of New York, threw out the case and this was not talked about because they said publications of the DNC were of the highest public importance, you know, finding out about what's happening behind the scenes during an election period is the most important thing that the American public can read, | ||
| and this is protected by the First Amendment. | ||
| You never heard about this because it just didn't fit the narrative. | ||
| And I think this is a big problem. There has not been an effective counter-narrative. | ||
| There has been a big disinformation, misinformation narrative that was attached to this aftermath of 2016. | ||
| It's allowed to flourish. States have just loved to throw money at this industry of managing information, | ||
| managing public opinion, and that's how we find ourselves, where we find ourselves. | ||
| And of course, COVID basically solidified all of this. | ||
| But at the same time, I think the public is a lot more aware of how their rights are being undermined, how their free speech is basically There is no free speech on the Internet. | ||
| You have to find spaces of free speech. | ||
| And it's not transparent how you're being censored and all these things. | ||
| So I think in one way there is hope because the awareness of the attack on our rights and our liberties is a lot more widespread. | ||
| And I think it's also one point of hopefully of encounter between people who self-identify as left or right that actually there are some fundamentals that we need to fight for and and we're all gonna find ourselves on the receiving end if censorship prospers, so I think we're in a worse place, but also a better place in terms of Identifying the problem Well in the United States | ||
| We have to get joined free. | ||
| People should contact their representatives. | ||
| McGovern and Massey have done a joint letter to Joe Biden asking him to drop the case. | ||
| Congress can, representatives from Congress can join the letter and people can call their | ||
| representatives to ask them to join the letter, please, or any other initiative to help free | ||
| Julian. | ||
| There's Assange Defense is an organization in the US that is fighting for Julian's freedom | ||
| and just talk about Julian's case. | ||
| Follow me on Twitter, I'm Stella underscore Assange and just keep fighting because Julian | ||
| really isn't, he's a free speech, he's dedicated his life to free speech and to informing the | ||
| public and he would do, make a very valuable contribution because he believes in the higher | ||
| good of people knowing the truth. | ||
| It's not about where you stand, it's about we need to value the truth and be able to speak it. | ||
| I know that you would prefer that he was the one doing this interview, but you're an excellent communicator of his ideas, so I thank you for your time. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| If you're looking for more uncensored opinions from today's thought leaders, check out our media playlist. | ||
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