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April 25, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:50
Julian Assange: Death Penalty? Cassandra Fairbanks and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom, I hope you're doing well.
So I'm here with Cassandra Fairbanks, who is an independent journalist, a word that we will be touching on quite significantly over the course of this conversation, a friend of Julian Assange's, who is going to bring us, I hope, up to speed, I'm sure she will, on all that is going on.
Cassandra, thanks for taking the time today.
Thank you so much for having me.
So you have, let's talk a little bit about your personal relationship, the last time you saw Julian, and then we'll talk about the bigger picture stuff of what's going on.
Alright, so the last time that I saw Julian was March 25th.
I visited him a lot over the past year or so, maybe a little more than a year, but this time was very different.
This was a few weeks before his arrest, or two and a half weeks before, and they locked me into a room, the Ecuadorian embassy staff did, And while I was locked in the room, Julian got into a big fight with the ambassador.
He was saying that, you know, they're acting as agents of the U.S.
government, that they had been surveilling him and they were trying to surveil him meeting with me so that I wouldn't be able to report on his treatment and what they were doing to him there.
And so at that point, things escalated pretty considerably quickly.
He had only spoke to the ambassador there twice prior to that.
Or no, this was the second time, I'm sorry.
And they were in the same building every single day.
And so the hostility there, I guess, catapulted.
And he was arrested a couple weeks later.
Things have seemed somewhat stable for the past six or seven years with him.
And by stable, I don't mean not horrifying.
It is horrifying.
It is a form of solitary confinement, of course.
It is denial of dental care and health care as a whole, which is egregious.
And you would be Probably thrown in jail for treating a prisoner of war in such a manner.
But things had seemed relatively even, even Stephen kind of stable.
Do you have any idea what may have changed other than maybe Ecuador getting 4.2 billion dollars from the IMF?
What do you think might have changed to alter the parameters at the moment?
Well, Lenin Moreno was elected president and he was not, he's the same party as the previous president, but he is completely different politically.
And he did not approve of Julian having asylum.
He didn't want him in there.
He didn't want Ecuador to be taking care of him.
And so he had been looking for a reason to get him out since he's been elected.
They fired all the embassy staff, the ones that were friendly with Julian.
He had a lot of people that he was really close to that worked there and that cared about the cause and were happy that he was there.
And they got rid of them and replaced him with this new hostile staff.
And the difference in even how they treated visitors was crazy.
When I visited him the first time, I remember being like, wow, this is so great!
He has so many cool people around him and they really care about this and that's good because at least he has people to talk to.
And then by the time I visited this past January, things had just changed completely.
So I think that they had been looking for a reason to get rid of him.
They wanted to sweeten the pot a little bit, so they sold him for an IMF loan.
It is astonishing how he gathers these sort of fair-weather friends.
In other words, if what Julian is releasing is serving a particular political end, people love him.
And then if it doesn't seem to serve a particular political end, or his usefulness has come to an end, they suddenly don't know him from Adam, and he's just some crazy uncle locked in a cupboard.
Do you think that that's happened with the current administration as well?
Yes.
I absolutely think it has, and it really bothers me on a lot of levels.
I know people are getting really tired of seeing me complaining about Trump now on Twitter, but I voted for him, and I supported him, and I write for a pro-Trump outlet.
I've defended him relentlessly for the last three years.
But this was a huge disappointment to me because he's constantly railing about the fake news, and he's constantly railing about the deep state.
Julian has been fighting those two things for the past 12 years or whatever it was, and if he really wanted to stick it to the deep state and stick it to the fake news, the best way to do that would be supporting the real news that's outing the swamp that he claims to be fighting.
And so, you know, there's been a lot of people who are like, maybe he's just, you know, playing it cool so they can pardon him later or whatever, but I have been harassing the heck out of Everybody that I know who knows Trump or works with Trump or is in the administration or is friendly with him, golfs with him, I have been blowing up their phones and it doesn't sound like that's the case at all.
Yeah, I'd certainly had that hypothesis and floated it, but it is hard to know.
Well, I guess you certainly would have more knowledge of all of this.
So let's talk about, because I gather some of the younger listeners who would have been knee-high to a grasshopper when this stuff all began, Let's go back, I don't know, as you say, 12 years, 13 years, 14 years, and bring people up to speed on the journey of this very unusual Australian as to where he's ended up in Britain's quasi-Guantanamo Bay prison.
Right.
Well, the first publication that they ever did, I believe, was from the Sudan, I think it was.
One of their leaders had put out an assassination order against other politicians.
So that was like the first thing that they ever released.
And it was a really big deal.
And then since then they released, you know, all the manuals and books from Scientology and various world leaders.
They released some Chinese surveillance information.
They've released things all over the world, which is why people are protesting all over the world.
But it hasn't just been US-centric.
I guess in 2008, which is still before the Manning leaks, they released Sarah Palin's emails.
At the time she was very upset, but I've spoke to her since then and she's said this publicly as well.
She now appreciates WikiLeaks.
She understands why they did it.
She said that, you know, it didn't really hurt her politically because she wasn't doing anything Clinton-ish.
Was she out of office, if I remember then, after she had left?
I think she got a bit tired of being sued and harassed as governor of Alaska, so I think she was out of office by then, if I remember rightly.
It was during the campaign when she was running as Vice President with John McCain.
She was out of the governorship of Alaska.
I've heard her.
I mean, she was not pleased at the time, but there has been a turnaround, I think, once she's seen how much incredible and valuable and powerful information has come pouring out of WikiLeaks.
So, sorry to interrupt you.
So, we go on from Sarah Palin's emails and then what?
But the interesting thing about Sarah Palin's emails is that it was pretty much the same thing that they did with the Clinton, with the DNC emails and the Podesta emails.
But the media response was extremely different.
They loved it!
Do you remember that they were salivating?
Oh, we got these emails and they had these long specials and WikiLeaks is doing a great service to democracy and they were just slavering over the possibility of finding any kind of wrongdoing in Sarah Palin's emails.
Well, Washington Post assembled a volunteer team of people who weren't even journalists, who just wanted to read through the emails and report their findings.
The Twitter account for that volunteer team still exists, I believe.
I found it recently, to make a point.
But they had, you know, went, hired, or didn't even hire, they assembled volunteer crews just to go through them.
They still didn't find anything salacious, but the fact that they did that, while ignoring, as much as possible, the Clinton emails, kind of shows how things are playing out.
But then, you know, after that, about, I think it was almost two years later, is when they released the Manning stuff.
And there had been a ton of things in between there, too, don't forget.
I mean, this isn't the only things they've ever done.
And just so people understand, so it is a website.
that has an encrypted upload facility so that you can send files purely anonymously, as far as I understand it.
You can, of course, get in contact with them, but it's a whistleblower direction repository site, but they don't just publish whatever they get.
They go to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information that they receive, sometimes anonymously, I suppose, with Chelsea Manning, sometimes not, and they have a 100% accuracy rate.
Right.
And they do also have a harm reduction process in place, which is really important when we're talking about the manning leaks and what's going to come up during the case.
Sorry, my dog is being a jerk.
I appreciate that even the canines are upset about this, and I'm with them.
Well, her name is Wickie, so... I'm sure she leaks.
All right.
Let's go on.
So, when the manning stuff happened, they had a huge team of people who were working on this.
It was massive.
And it included journalists from Guardian, from just every newspaper you can think of in the world, not even just, you know, the UK and the US.
They had people all over the world working on this.
And their goal was to minimize harm.
So they were redacting things as they saw fit and slow dripping, kind of slow dripping the release.
But there was a Guardian reporter who was writing about WikiLeaks.
And in the appendix of the book, he put the hash code for people to go and download the files unredacted, the complete bulk of the information.
And that leaked online.
So when that happened, Wikileaks called the State Department.
You can actually watch the phone call on YouTube.
But Wikileaks called the State Department.
They were like, we need to speak to Hillary Clinton immediately.
We don't have a problem, but you guys have a really big problem.
Because the unredacted files are going out.
They're all over the internet.
The state department refused to speak to him and blew it off, and then the manning leaks all came out.
So the Manning leaks, were they coming from this reporter's foolish blunder to, well, more than a blunder, I mean, catastrophe, really.
Because everybody was working so hard to try and minimize any potential harm to people in the field, and then this idiot, this clumsy goof, gives people a pathway to all of the unredacted files, and then the, and this was, was this all part of the Chelsea Manning stuff?
Yeah.
And then after this happened, obviously it was a huge big deal.
WikiLeaks tried to sue the Guardian over it.
It was really bad.
But the Pentagon came out and they said, nobody was killed.
We didn't even have to move anybody because of the leaks.
And they testified this during the Manning trial as well.
And so now we have senators and stuff who are coming out now that they actually have Julian.
They're like, he got people killed.
And it's like, well, the Pentagon probably should have testified that during the Manning trial when it was extremely relevant.
Now, sorry, given that it's somebody from the Pentagon, my open, wide-eyed belief in what they're saying is not particularly strong.
And I can certainly see why they'd say, no, it's no big deal.
Like, they don't want to show any weakness.
So I wonder if it's two different stories.
But of course, all we can go with is what they testified to.
You can't just sort of make things up, right?
And I think it would have been more important for them to put Manning in prison for this than to hold it for Julian.
So I see very little incentive for the Pentagon to have lied during the Manning trial when they were trying to throw the book at her.
But either way, the Pentagon then came out publicly and said that there were 300 names that should have been redacted but weren't.
However, the names actually were redacted and they weren't in the release.
Which release?
The redacted one or the unredacted one?
Either, because they had already pre-redacted it as part of the harm minimization thing.
And so these names actually didn't get released.
And the Pentagon had come out and made this big fuss about it publicly and hadn't even looked at it, apparently.
And so, there was a lot going on with that.
It was really complicated.
Did anything happen to this reporter that was a Guardian reporter, right?
Did anything happen to this dude as far as, like, nobody ever trusting him with, like, even a latte order in the future?
Nope.
He's been all over the place making money, trashing Wikileaks.
It's what he does.
Wow.
Wow.
You know, I go out for lunch and I'm like, oh, did I leave the stove on?
And I'm like, I've got to go back and check.
But people can just, yeah.
Anyway, bypass the work.
I assume tens of thousands of hours to go through these.
Documents and try and redact stuff and then just, boop, out they go.
Anyway, that's amazing.
So the manning stuff comes out, which is the subject of course of one of the reasons, his main reason is the manning stuff, why he's going to be extradited, at least they're going to try and extradite him.
But let's do post-manning, pre-arrest.
So, they've put out a ton of stuff.
TPP related things, all kinds of stuff.
Panama Papers and stuff like that, too, right?
Yeah.
So there's been a lot, but then eventually the DNC leaks came out and that's, you know, one of their biggest releases, obviously, and it upset a lot of very powerful people.
And I mean, I've personally been told that there is a grand jury that's happening right now related to that, even though the U.S.
government is denying it.
Two of the witnesses last week Got asked about me personally and my visits to Assange, which obviously didn't take place during the Manning stuff.
So yeah, I think that they're going to be going after him for that as well, even though that's not what they're telling the UK government, because the UK government will not extradite people if it's political and the DNC stuff kind of treads Okay, now, with regards to passwords and hacking and so on, and we'll circle back if that's alright with regards to Chelsea Manning, but the DNC stuff, he just got, right?
He wasn't helping sources, as far as I understand it, you know better than I, but he wasn't trying to encourage sources and get sources.
He just got them and he said, look, I didn't get them from the Russians.
There is this long pause, it's all conjecture, right, but there's this long pause when he's asked about Seth Rich.
That, to me, reads as clear as day.
It reads as clear as day, and the indication seems to be that, given the speed of copying of the file modification, that it was a local, probably USB copy, rather than trying to worm its way through the n-dimensional internet between America and Romania.
So, a local copy, but he didn't have any involvement, that we know of, of whoever provided all of the DNC emails.
Is that right?
Yes.
Well, what we know publicly that I can talk about is Bill Binney, the former technical director of the NSA and a group that he's involved with, which is made up of veteran intelligence professionals.
They've done independent forensics, aside from the CrowdStrike analysis, which was commissioned by the DNC.
They never actually gave the servers to the FBI.
And their forensic analysis is completely different.
They, like you said, found that this had to have been from a thumb drive, that it had to be locally copied.
But on top of that, Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador, has come out and said that he met the sources and got the information, and that they were American.
I think that you can't really argue that Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador, saying that he's the one who got information from the sources, isn't credible.
And so the fact that they didn't even mention this in the Mueller report or anything like that is a huge red flag to me, but it's very strange.
And Julian will never say who his source is.
He still doesn't even call Manning a source.
He'll say my alleged source.
Right.
Now, the DNC stuff was a huge deal, of course, in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and it was a treasure trove of emails regarding Hillary and debates and so on.
Can you give those who aren't up to speed, or maybe those overseas, Cassandra, just a bit of an overview on exactly how explosive and powerful the DNC emails were?
Right.
Well, they revealed extreme corruption, bias from the DNC, working against Bernie Sanders specifically.
They had Donna Brazile providing debate questions to Hillary Clinton.
There was just their strategies for going up against Bernie.
There was, you know, reporters coordinating with the Hillary Clinton campaign, not in a way that a reporter normally would, because normally you want your sources to like you.
You want to get information from them.
But this went far beyond that to the point where it was colluding.
Well, so they were saying like, well, I'll give you the copy, you can have a look at it, let me know if you want anything changed.
It's like, yeah, I wouldn't mind that.
Reporters effort writing about me sent me whatever I could edit.
I mean, I probably wouldn't take them up on it, but it would be nice to be asked, I suppose.
Right.
It was just, it was extremely unethical behavior.
And, you know, it revealed a lot about the inner workings of the DNC.
So, at the time, I think Bernie voters were far more upset than the Trump supporters.
And it was a far—I mean, I was a Bernie supporter.
I had switched to Trump before the RNC.
But at the time, I was furious.
And it was mostly, like, fellow Bernie voters who were like, this is crazy, this is rigged, and we have to do something about it.
So, honestly, I think it helped Bernie more than it helped Trump.
You know, it is what it is, I guess.
I also find it quite remarkable that the DNC would, of course, say, you know, we got hacked.
And they would, you know, complain about this and raise a big fuss about it.
And then, of course, the FBI, while not the most august institution, I guess, in its history, they say, of course, they would say, well, if you got hacked, We need to see the server because we need to see the logs and we need to see whatever ports were open and we need to see any fingerprints that might be on it or anything like that, right?
So the idea that you'd say, hey man, my car was stolen.
It's like, well, can we see the registration?
No.
Can you tell us what color it is?
No.
Can you tell us what the make and year and model is?
No.
And it's like, why are you telling us if something's stolen?
The idea that they wouldn't hand over.
Right.
to law enforcement, but they would rather commission someone to do an analysis themselves is really, really telling.
And I think always has been.
Right.
And so a lot of people have thought, you know, including the intelligence professionals who have reviewed it, they refer to Guccifer as a donkey in a bear suit, like a Democrat pretending to be a Russian, because Julian had already announced that WikiLeaks because Julian had already announced that WikiLeaks had Hillary, these DNC emails and the Podesta stuff.
And the Guccifer just appeared out of nowhere after that.
And they were like, look, we have more.
And so Julian, or Wikileaks, supposedly, was like, yeah, let us have it.
We'll totally take more stuff.
But they already had this release planned.
And so a lot of Bill Binney and Ray McGovern and these veteran intelligence people They've looked at it and they think that the Russian fingerprints were placed on the documents afterwards and that it was basically a big trap to try and blame the entire upcoming WikiLeaks release on Russians.
Oh, that's right.
So there were some fingerprints on some files that had some Russian DLLs or some Russian text or characters and so on, which, you know, if you're dealing with highly professional spy networks, you know, you don't leave your business card at the scene of the crime.
I mean, just to me, anybody who would say, I mean, you've got the Chinese government had a driver for Dianne Feinstein for decades who was standing in for her and listening in to everything.
You know, the spy agencies are pretty good.
And if you wanted to throw suspicion at the Russians, you just throw some of those Russian characters in and bingo, bango, bongo.
If you have people who believe it's the Russians already, it's only going to be confirmation bias.
But the idea that they'd be that sloppy just seems like we can get all the way into the DNC.
But we're just going to leave these fingerprints all over the stuff.
Right.
And ironically, after the election, WikiLeaks published Vault 7, which is, of course, the largest CIA leak in history.
And in those documents, they talked about how they can perform a hack and blame it on another government and make it look like it was another government.
So ironically, Wikileaks released this shortly after the election.
And so there's a lot that's just very sketchy at best and extremely bizarre.
Doesn't look very good.
So I think most of what we've been talking about under American law, I mean I'm not a lawyer of course but this is sort of my understanding of it, so under American law this was adjudicated back in the 70s when the New York Times were publishing the Pentagon Papers and other things where it's like as long as you don't steal it yourself or participate in the theft Then you can publish stolen documents.
That's been adjudicated all the way up to the Supreme Court.
I think it's fairly well settled law.
So, you know, 95-98% of what we're talking about would be covered under that.
That they didn't have a hand in getting the documents or worming their way into getting the documents.
They simply received them and therefore could publish them.
So for the most part, under US law at least, they'd be in pretty safe ground.
But then What they're working with now is a different situation with regards to the Manning leaks.
Right.
So they're claiming that he offered to help Manning crack a password, not so that Manning could get more documents, which is the most important thing that people need to remember about this.
They're not accusing him of trying to access more things or things that Manning did not have access to.
They're accusing him of attempting or offering to help mask Manning's identity.
So it wasn't that Manning couldn't have taken the files or that they didn't have legal access to them or a right to see them.
It was that they were trying to make it look like it wasn't Manning that had pulled them off the file, off the things.
And that is something that arguably is a journalist's job.
You don't want your source to get caught.
If your source is risking their life to give you documents, especially if it's a whistleblower, and I know people can argue whether or not Manning's a whistleblower, but if somebody is trying to blow the whistle, you want to protect them from getting persecuted for it.
And so this hasn't been tried in the digital age, but normally a journalist helping somebody offline to protect their identity would not be considered illegal.
But because now computers are involved, it hasn't really been tried before, and they're figuring out what they can throw at him.
Now, OK, this is where, for me, the shakiest ground is.
And I'm with him for a sort of First Amendment and publishing is all of that.
Now, of course you want, if you say to Manning, hey, you should really try and cover your tracks, you know, that's one thing, right?
But if you say, I'm going to help you crack this password, then it does kind of sound like you're idling the getaway car, so to speak.
Like you're doing, would you sort of accept that it's possible that he may have been doing more than encouraging Manning to cover her tracks?
Or is it still within the purview of journalism?
Well, the lawyer from the Pentagon Papers has argued that it's journalism and that that's what a good journalist should do.
Whether or not people agree with that is up to them.
I personally think that it's fine, but even so, he was unsuccessful in doing it, so it's like, does it even really matter?
Like, he didn't do it.
What if he was just saying, Yeah, I'll help you, but was just saying that.
You know, we don't even know if he actually even attempted to.
And so, it's shaky at best, and I don't think that it's worth spending 25 million dollars surveilling an embassy for six, seven years over.
So, I think that that's obviously not the main charge that he's going to be charged with, so I almost feel like arguing about it is pointless.
Well, and this was looked at, as far as I know, this was looked at quite a while ago.
Because this information has been known for quite some time, these sort of chat logs and so on.
And was it Obama's DOJ looked at this five or six years ago and did not feel that there was enough to pursue it?
Right.
They cited the New York Times problem.
And so what that means is that if they prosecuted WikiLeaks, they would have to go after the New York Times and Washington Post and BuzzFeed.
Everyone who published what WikiLeaks published or everyone who wrote about it and repeated the information, it would be like a real widening circle, right?
Right.
So anybody who contributed to it, to report on it, but also other outlets who also posted leaks from the government.
And all media relies on scoops and secrets, so it's a really dangerous territory to get into, and credit to Obama for not going after him.
I mean, I know a lot of us, myself included, really hate Washington Post and New York Times and BuzzFeed and all these outlets, but it's still very dangerous to criminalize journalism, especially real journalism, where leaks are involved and secrets that challenge the government.
And so I think that Obama's DOJ had made the right call.
And it's pretty alarming that Trumps were the ones who decided to reopen, or re-litigated, or whatever, started up, I guess.
So, do you have any theories, Cassandra, as to what might have changed?
Well, I think that, honestly, if I'm being completely honest, I think that Trump surrounded himself with a bunch of neocons who are not the best people, and that instead of draining the swamp, he hired it.
And a lot of these people really have a bone to pick with WikiLeaks because they've been implicated in releases and things like that.
Clinton still has a lot of friends in the deep state and in the intelligence agencies.
And I think that they want revenge.
And I think that Trump also, I think while he is bold and he does take a stand a lot of the time, I think he also wants to be liked and he wants to be accepted by the very people who have been going after him.
And so that's just a theory.
I'm not saying it's true or not, but I think that he cares a little bit too much about being liked by these people and that he's looking the other way.
Well, certainly if you've hired them, they need to do stuff for you, right?
I mean, you need to get along.
Once you've hired them, I mean, if you haven't hired them, who cares, right?
But once you have hired them, Then they do need to cooperate with you, that you do need their help to get things done.
And I guess once you've hired them, if you keep cycling out people and firing them, you can't get anything done and you get the inevitable, the administration is in chaos, kind of articles that flow up.
Yeah.
But I think that, you know, Bolton and Pompeo are our deep state and the people that he's wanted to fight.
And I think that he might be getting very bad advice here.
Well, and so my concern, Cassandra, is that the goal has already been achieved.
And the goal, of course, is that if somebody reaches out to a reporter with information that could harm powerful interest, that that reporter's going to look at the experience of Julian Assange and say, ah, that's a hard pass.
Yeah.
I mean, I've done it.
People have offered me leaks before, and I'm like, mm, I don't have the legal resources for this.
I'm sorry.
Happens to me fairly frequently, actually, and that sucks.
It's had a chilling effect, and it's going to be even worse if he's prosecuted.
And I don't think that the damage can really be undone.
Yeah, almost like what happens from here, I mean, other than his huge impact to Julian and his mother and friends and family herself and so on.
But almost like what happens from here as far as the larger geopolitical slash journalist slash revelations from whistleblower things go, they've already kind of damned up the conduit as it stands.
Yeah.
I mean, there's, you know, during like when Daniel Ellsberg did his, his release and whistleblowing, He was looking at maybe eight years, and it would probably be far less than that, and he could confidently leak it, knowing that it wasn't going to ruin the rest of his life.
By attempting to put Chelsea Manning in prison for 35 years, Julian Assange probably going to face life in prison.
They ruled out the death penalty, but I'm not sure I believe it, because it was only a verbal agreement.
If you're looking at your whole entire life being over, there's not a lot of people who are going to risk that, even if they have something really important.
And so eventually we're only going to have government-sanctioned media.
And that's a terrifying thought.
And what a possibility the internet and encryption and so on opened up.
Because once WikiLeaks had established itself as an organization that could be trusted, because, you know, let's say you have something damaging on Hillary or Bernie or some other Democrats, it doesn't really matter who, right?
And you go to what you know is a pretty left-leaning press, you're not really sure if they're going to be pursuing it with, you know, they might just bury it, they might spike it, they might do any number of things.
Whereas with WikiLeaks, they did seem to be quite neutral, right?
So they leaked stuff that was damaging to Republicans and Democrats and all around the world.
They were fairly, it seemed to me, fairly neutral when it came to politics.
And so as an avenue where you could get information out that might go against the left-leaning media's interests, it was a pretty unique way to get information out that otherwise it seems hard to imagine how it would have gotten out or how it could get out now.
Right.
And I mean, there's a lot of news sites, like Washington Post included, have taken the WikiLeaks model and created pages where people can send them anonymous encrypted files.
And so they're kind of, you know, hammering the nails in their own coffins by not only being neutral about Julian's situation, but actively like aiding these smear campaigns and his persecution and things like that.
Yeah, it's...
We're in a dangerous spot for the First Amendment right now.
Yeah, because there's what you can do legally, in terms of you can have a pretty good shot at it, and then there's the practical consequences.
You know, it's like the de-platforming thing.
It's like, you could go and give a speech, but you might be charged $50,000 for security costs by the police.
Well, you have the right to speak, it's just going to be kind of expensive.
And I think that's a terrible shame.
And I also think it's tough for the media as well.
Especially because the corporate media in America in particular, of course, as you know, is just coming out of this two and a half year fever swamp mad fantasy dream of the Mueller report and the Russia collusion and that they've been pounding this nail into the wood forever.
And they're getting so much wrong that when they look at Wikileaks and they say, well, they've got 100% accuracy rate, they have a much higher Trust rating, and they've broken way more stories in a month than most mainstream media have broken in the last five or ten years.
So they really are writing about a competitor with a far better track record, with far more important scoops, and with a completely different business model, right?
They're donation-based and so on, right?
Right.
And that's hard to be objective about.
Yeah, but they're digging their own graves.
I mean, there's no way around it.
What if they, you know, these journalists who are anti-Assange and, you know, neutral about what happens to him, what happens if someday somebody gives them Trump's tax returns?
Or, you know, there's somebody in power that they don't like and they get this incredible bulk of information that could implicate them in a crime.
They're not going to be able to publish it either because they're going to have this precedent set by Julian's case where they're going to go to prison for the rest of their lives.
Well, if it's on the left, I think this is part of the whole thing, right, which is that if they're on the left and they're hitting someone who's on the right, and we all know, at least those of us who follow people like Daniel Horowitz, that there's quite a lot of lefty activist judges in certain places in the U.S., it's sort of like, well, for one person to lie under oath to Congress seems really, really bad.
For another person to lie under Congress, it doesn't even register.
So I think that they're relying upon the bias.
That sometimes is in the legal system to say, well, you know, you have the law as a precedent, but not for us because we're on the left.
Right.
But that may not always be the case and it may not always be how things are.
The right to say you give up today will still be gone if we have, you know, a different president or a different government.
Like what I keep telling the Trump supporters who are on the fence about Julian, I'm like, you know, Trump isn't always going to be in office.
Like eventually, once we give up the First Amendment rights to a free press, you're going to be giving it up to another Obama or another Hillary Clinton.
And then they're going to be able to prosecute you if you publish things that they don't like.
So you can't just think about it as things are right now, even with judges.
You have to think about it in the long term, which is what our Founding Fathers did when they made the Constitution.
Like these things need to, you need to be very sure before you give up a right because it's not going to always be this way.
We're not always going to have Trump as president.
We're not always going to have, you know, a Republican Senate.
Things change and politics change and politicians come and go.
But once we give up a right, it's gone.
Well, and I mean, I've always said this, of course, as you know, that if you want to give the government a certain power, imagine giving it to the politician you hate and fear the most.
Because sooner or later, you know, in the great carousel of democracy or the republic, it's going to come around where the person you most fear, most despise, is going to have the power that you gave to someone you thought was just so gosh darn great.
Right, exactly.
Now let's talk about Sweden.
I know it sounds like we're hop, skipping and jumping all over the planet here, but of course for those who have heard about Julian, then they've heard about these allegations of sexual misconduct coming out from Sweden.
Now of course the first thing is that if you've pissed off intelligence agencies and the next thing that shows up is a sexual allegation, that's not entirely Unexpected, or there's precedent for that, I guess you could say, in human history.
I mean, back to Martin Luther King Jr.
So let's talk a little bit about why he ended up in the embassy, what he was facing coming out of Sweden.
Right.
So he was in Sweden and he was going to be speaking at a conference, I believe, and he stayed with this woman.
She was supposed to be out of town.
I don't want to go into too many of the details about it, but essentially they ended up sleeping together.
And then, at the conference, he met another woman who was acquainted with the first woman.
And, you know, something like a week later, he went on a date with that woman.
They ended up sleeping together.
The two women found out about each other.
They weren't very happy.
One woman especially was not very happy and convinced the other woman that they needed to go to the police department because one of them said that they had been sleeping together the whole night.
But he tried to sleep with her while she was half asleep, and so that apparently was considered rape to them.
And the other one said that the condom broke, and so they wanted an STD test to be done.
And so the one woman ended up talking the other one into going to the police department.
A rape charge was filed.
The woman who went on a date with him later was like, no, whoa, whoa.
Yeah, she didn't want to sign it, right?
Yeah, no, she didn't sign it.
And she was like, this wasn't rape.
It was, you know, I thought it was bad that he'd slept with us both, but it wasn't rape.
And even by US standards, neither of them would be considered rape.
It's ridiculous.
But, um, that was basically what happened.
And then in 2013, Sweden wanted to drop the investigation completely, but UK pressured them to keep it open because obviously this was a ploy to get him into the United States.
Yeah, because that's one of the reasons he went to the Ecuadorian embassy, wasn't it?
Because he was going to be sent to Sweden and then he was concerned from there he was going to be sent to the States.
Right.
And so, yeah, that's basically what happened.
And now I think that the one woman is trying to reopen it now just to slander his name.
And there was never any allegations that it was violent or that sex was unconsensual.
The group Women Against Rape A feminist organization has even come out on the side of Julian Assange on this and said that it like denigrates the term rape to call this rape.
So, yeah, it's it was, you know, typical government stuff.
They want to get you and they're gonna.
So what's his situation at the moment, Cassandra?
What's he what's he living with that we know of?
Well, I've spoke to his mother and some other people this evening and found out that He has not been allowed to see his lawyer.
He was arrested 11 days ago, at the time that I'm talking to you right now, and he has not had any visitors, including lawyers.
They've spoke to him over the phone, but they have not been allowed to go to the jail.
It's considered the Gitmo of the UK, so we don't really know how he's doing.
I know he wasn't doing very well the day after it happened, but I haven't heard very many updates since, which is alarming.
And how has it been possible that he's been incarcerated, so to speak, for so long without dental care, without health care, without... I mean, this really is barbaric.
I mean, it's pre-medieval.
Even in the Middle Ages, you could get a doctor and a priest.
Right.
Well, that was one of the big concerns.
You know, his supporters and his family and friends have always been worried that, what if he had a heart attack one day?
And had to go to the hospital.
Would he do it?
Well, toothache.
Toothache, you're swallowing bacteria, you're not getting your teeth cleaned.
I mean, I don't care if he doesn't have any cheesecake.
It's going to be a problem.
Right.
But yeah, there's been an issue.
Like, if there was an emergency, what does he do?
Does he choose to go out, get care, and possibly get extra to the U.S.?
Or does he die?
Like, what do you do in an emergency?
And he had to work out those plans with his lawyer and with the embassy.
And the fact that he even had to do that is...
Insane.
Prisoners don't even have to deal with that.
So, it's been a rough journey.
And I still don't know if he's had medical care now.
I've tried to find out.
I met with his lawyer last week and they weren't sure.
So, I don't know.
Extradition requests can be very lengthy.
And I've heard years sometimes.
Do you have any sense of where things might go from here and what time frame he might be looking at?
Well, I think that a big part of why the charge is so light and easy and basic is to prevent a long extradition case or a large trial because there's not really much they can fight because it's just this short little five-year prison sentence, right?
So the UK government has given the US a two-month time limit to present the charges, but the U.S.
won't really have to show everything.
They can do whatever they want, essentially, once they get them.
So whether or not they'll actually show all their cards, we don't really know, but he will be able to appeal after the decision is made in a couple months, and he's appearing in court via video link on May 2nd.
Via video link.
I mean, do they think he's going to turn into mist and go out through the HVAC system?
I mean, that's just astounding.
Yeah, I mean, they're treating him like a terrorist and then claiming that they only want him for a five year sentence and expecting us to believe that.
So.
So.
What is it that you would like for people?
I mean, you've been involved in this for so long.
What is it that you would most like for people to understand about what's happening to Julian?
Because, you know, he's some guy, a lot of people have just heard a lot about him.
There are certainly larger principles at stake here that are important, but what's the most important couple of points that you wanted to get across in this conversation?
I think that this is bigger than Julian, and that if you care about the First Amendment, you better care about this case, because it's going to have Extreme implications, no matter which way it goes.
And we need to be paying attention.
We could lose, essentially, a massive part of our First Amendment.
So, I think people need to remember that, because there's a lot of people who don't like Julian, or they've heard that he's mean, or they just don't like him, or they believe the smear campaigns about him being dirty, or whatever.
You have to remember that this is bigger than him, it's not just about him, and it's about all of us.
It's not just reporters either because the First Amendment and the freedom of press isn't necessarily just to protect reporters and talking heads on TV.
It's to protect you so that you can get information from a variety of sources and that you're not depending on the government to tell you what to believe.
So we need people like that.
We need people like Julian and we need to keep them safe so that there'll be more Julians in the future.
I think that's the most important part and I think that people should not Just trust that the government's going to do the right thing.
People keep saying trust the plan, but what you're talking about is trusting the deep state that's been trying to overthrow the president for three years.
Why would you trust these people?
Don't trust them.
Get loud, speak out, share things about it, get involved.
Yeah, that's all I'd have to say, I guess.
And as far as practical steps that people can take, I know that WikiLeaks takes donations, and what else do you think that people can do after they listen to this before they go to bed?
You can go to Wikileaks shop.
It's wikileaks.shop.
They sell t-shirts and posters and everything that you can think of, tote bags.
I bring my tote bag with me almost everywhere I go and it sparks really interesting conversations, even with leftists.
They've been stopping me lately being like, hey, can you tell me more about this?
And they end up coming out on the right side.
So it's a great conversation starter and you'll be surprised how many people want to talk to you about it.
He's following Julian's mother, Assange Misses, on Twitter.
She's constantly putting out calls to action and asking for help with things, spreading information and combating bad narratives.
I suggest following her and, yeah, just get involved any way that you can.
Protest.
Do whatever calls some attention to it.
And for people who want to find your work on the internet?
I write for the Gateway Pundit and my Twitter is at Cassandra Rules.
All right.
Well, I really, really appreciate your time and also really appreciate the amount of effort and energy you've put into this course.
It's a powerful force of nature and I hope it leads people in the right direction.
I really, really do thank you for your time today.
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