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June 25, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
45:33
20240625_assange-walks-free-the-debate-wrfk-jr
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Julian Assange's Legal Battle 00:14:37
Depending on who you ask, Julian Assange is either a truth-seeking journalist and a martyr for free speech, or a foreign agent who did nothing less than jeopardize America's national security.
Whichever side you're on, the fact is that he will soon finally be free after five years in a high-security London prison and seven years exiled on the Ecuadorian embassy.
The damage may already be done, not just to him personally, though it's hard to imagine how he can ever lead a normal life again, but to the principles of accountability.
Let's be clear, Julian Assange didn't commit war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He didn't even steal the documents, which showed that America did.
Assange published information that other people stole, and in doing so, he exposed some very uncomfortable truths about America's conduct in an already illegal war, humiliating some of the most powerful people on earth.
And as a result, he's faced half a lifetime of legal misery.
He was denounced without credible evidence as a Russian spy.
At one point, the CIA and Mike Pompeo allegedly considered abducting and murdering him as he resisted extradition to the United States.
And on his face, that feels like a grave injustice.
But there's another side to the debate about Assange, represented in this viral uncensored exchange between his wife, Stella, and Ambassador John Bolton.
Committed clear criminal activity.
He's no more a journalist than the chair I'm sitting on.
The information that he divulged did, in fact, put many people in jeopardy.
It undercut the ability of the United States to have confidential diplomatic communications, not just with other foreign governments, but in many countries with dissidents, people who even speaking to American diplomats could find themselves in trouble.
And I hope he gets at least 176 years in jail for what he did.
Ambassador Bolton is kind of the ideological nemesis of Julian.
He has, during his time for the Bush administration and later the Trump administration, sought to undermine the international legal system, ensure that the U.S. is not under the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction.
And if it was, Mr. Bolton might, in fact, be prosecuted under the ICC.
He was one of the chief cheerleaders of the Iraq War, which Julian then exposed through these leaks.
So he has a conflict of interest here.
Well, the two sides couldn't be clearer.
There's an obvious tension between the journalistic duty to publish all truths and the responsibility of the people charged with keeping us safe, including the men and women who fight to do so.
But saying the words national security doesn't give anybody, however powerful, the right to behave with impunity.
There's a long tradition of holding those powerful people to account.
The Pentagon Papers in the 70s exposed crimes in the Vietnam War and were fated for their impact and bravery.
The sorry saga of Julian Assange may already be enough of a deterrent to prevent anyone doing it again.
But is that a good thing?
I'll shortly be rejoined by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has some explosive and emotive views on today's developments.
But first we'll debate this with Twitterfiles journalist and author Michael Schellenberger, the host of Judging Freedom, Judge Andrew Napolitana, the podcast host Ben Ferguson and former Conservative MP Louise Mensch.
Welcome to all of you.
Michael Schellenberger, your reaction, I woke up this morning not expecting to hear this news and then hearing about this sort of crazy journey that Assange was going on, released from Belmarsh prison on a plane not to the United States, but had paid apparently half a million dollars of his own money to fly to this tiny island, Saipan, in the northern Mariana Islands.
It's obviously a U.S. territory in the South Pacific.
And from there, it's expected that tomorrow a judge will give him a 62-month sentence, which he's already served.
He will then be released and put on a plane back to his home in Australia.
I wasn't expecting that on my bingo car this morning, were you?
I was not.
I don't think anybody was.
In fact, I don't know that even Stella Assange, his wife, was expecting it, but it's obviously a major victory for her.
Her children haven't seen their father outside of prison.
Unfortunately, it's not a huge victory for the First Amendment.
As you mentioned, in 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court made very clear that the publisher of leaked documents are protected in our First Amendment rights to publish those documents.
The person that leaks them is not.
Obviously, they're constrained by U.S. laws.
And understandably, the person that leaked the documents to Julian Assange was prosecuted and served a sentence.
But I think this is a very chilling case on the rights of journalists.
And we've seen that Pentagon Papers principle be challenged, be under attack in recent years, including around the election of Joe Biden in 2020.
So my concern is that this still sends a potentially chilling effect given how severe the punishment was of Julian Assange, but obviously a really wonderful day for him and his family.
Ben Ferguson, you don't agree.
No, I don't.
And there's a difference between the Pentagon Papers and what Assange has done.
And I'll give you a perfect example of that.
He knew that he was putting lives at risk when he decided to relieve the Afghan diary, which was those, including some even in the Taliban, that were working with the UK and the United States of America.
And he knew when he put those names out there that they were going to be hunted down by the Taliban and they were going to be brutally murdered.
And many of them were.
Many of their families were tortured.
Many of their children were tortured.
Many of them were beheaded.
So when you try to convince me that he is a journalist, no, he's not.
He didn't act responsibly.
Could you make the argument that there were some things within what he put out there on the internet that maybe could have been in the category of the Pentagon Papers?
Absolutely.
But when you start going out there and publishing the names of individuals and sources that are giving information about a terrorist organization to the U.S. and other countries, you cross a line there that has nothing to do with journalism.
And those people, many of them, were viciously murdered, including children.
And so I don't feel sorry for him.
I think he should still be in jail.
I'm not celebrating this day.
It puts national security at risk all over the world because now the question you have to ask is: if you are an informant, if you're trying to help stop World War III, if you're no information within al-Qaeda or ISIS-K, and you work with people around the world, are you going to be outed?
And if you're outed, are they going to hunt you down, your children down, and murder them in front of you?
That is what he was a part of, and you can't rewrite that aspect of history.
All right.
Judge Napolitana, I mean, I can see both arguments here, but as a journalist, my every instinct is you should absolutely be free to publish, particularly when you're protected by the First Amendment.
Should there be any line though?
I mean, you know, I'm mindful of the fact that President Trump is facing criminal charges for storing classified documents.
Joe Biden was investigated for the same thing.
If it's perceived to be a crime for a president to take classified documents just to his home where he's protected by secret service, why isn't it a crime for people to publish random classified documents to the world?
Well, because of the First Amendment, Piers, which not only guarantees the freedom of speech, but according to the Pentagon Papers case, nicely described by my friend Michael, establishes the right of the public to know what the government is doing.
And as for Ben, also my friend from a long time ago, Henry Kissinger once said it's dangerous to be America's enemy.
It's fatal to be America's friend.
You work with the federal government, you take a in dirty, sloppy, wet work, as the intelligence community calls it.
You take the chance that that's going to reverberate back and harm you or harm your family in the long run.
Look, the First Amendment is the linchpin of our liberties.
Without the freedom of speech, we have no democracy.
We have no transparency.
We don't know who the government is killing and we don't know when the government is lying.
The Pentagon Papers case should have no exemption to it.
Julian Assange is a national hero.
I am elated that he is free, but I'm crushed that the feds got their pound of flesh with this meaningless, sham guilty plea for a crime we all know he didn't commit.
Louise Manch, I can see you grimacing as you heard some of that.
Why?
Because, and I hate to say this, Piers, but I am going to take my life in my hands here.
You were wrong and your introduction was wrong.
And the entire discussion is wrong when it posits that Julian Assange has been indicted for publishing something.
He has not been indicted for publishing anything.
And indeed, he is pleading guilty to being more than a publisher.
He's pleading guilty to breaking the Espionage Act to helping Chelsea Manning hack and release that stuff.
He was never indicted for publishing anything.
And he's admitted it.
He is admitting to be a felon that broke the Espionage Act by helping Chelsea Manning hack and release that information.
And there is nothing in the amendment that covers that.
Hang on, you picked up.
Okay, let me respond to that.
Technically, what you just said is correct.
However, the reality is he's done a plea deal so he can get his freedom after all this time in semi-incarceration in the Ecuadorian embassy, then in one of the worst prisons in the country.
I mean, this is one of the toughest places to be incarcerated, Belmarsh.
And the reality is he didn't steal these documents.
He was given them by somebody who did break the law, Chelsea Manning.
Well, hang on, hang on, let me finish.
Let me finish.
Pass them on to him.
And he acted as a publisher, as indeed the newspaper.
They encouraged it.
With years?
Well, yeah, listen.
He encouraged it.
But we have to...
Give me more.
Hang on, hang on.
Let me finish.
As Louise knows, there was a massive scandal in Britain involving politicians, many of whom were her former colleagues.
You remember a parliament in which exactly the same scenario, a document containing all sorts of secrets about MPs' expenses was passed to a Daily Telegraph.
Interestingly, the editor who published it was Will Lewis, who's currently in the firestorm surrounding the Washington Post, where he's the publisher now.
But the principle, surely, was the same.
It was an illegal act to steal this information.
But the editor of the newspaper believed it was overtly in the public interest to expose the fact loads of your colleagues in parliament have been on the take with public money.
What's the difference?
I don't dispute it.
And may I just say that I came into parliament in the term after that scandal.
So I personally am not guilty.
I have no problem with embarrassing governments.
That's what the press is there for.
Publish and be damned.
But you know who disagrees with you, Piers, in your analysis of this situation?
Julian Assange, because he's admitting that what you just said and said at the beginning is completely false.
He is pleading guilty to assisting Chelsea Manning.
He's done a deal to save himself.
Well, hang on.
Okay, so your argument is that he has nothing to do with it.
No, He's done a deal.
Hang on.
He's done a deal to avoid being extradited to the United States.
Well, who the hell knows what would have happened to him?
That's why he spent hundreds of thousands avoiding going to mainland America.
Let me jump.
Let me go to the judge for the legal part of this.
As the judge, I have taken more than a thousand guilty pleas in my career.
Fully half of them were for crimes the defendant didn't commit.
We all know that.
It was to relieve the defendant of the burden of prosecution in order to accept a deal that the government was willing to give him.
The government in the United States always over-indicts charges for more crimes than they think they can prove so that the defendant will accept a guilty plea to some lesser event.
He is pleading guilty tomorrow in a federal court in the middle of nowhere to the conspiracy to violate the espionage laws and agreement to do so.
Don't you think the New York Times and the Washington Post encouraged Daniel Ellsberg to give them the Pentagon papers?
I'm sure the Supreme Court.
Yeah, and I do feel the same way about the Telegraph and the MPs' expenses.
Let me bring back Michael Schellenberger.
I mean, look, it's an interesting quandary, isn't it, for journalists everywhere?
Is there a line?
I mean, part of the argument against Assange is he just put everything out there.
And as Ben said, it had serious ramifications.
People died as a result of the publication of some of this stuff.
Is there a line that journalists should be mindful of or not?
Well, first of all, on this issue, this has been repeated a few times.
It is not the case that anybody has found that anybody died due to the release of Julian Assange of the documents by Julian Assange.
In fact, quite the opposite.
In fact, they found that it had not.
Even Joe Biden.
Allow me to finish this.
Let me tell you, even President Biden had admitted that it had not resulted in any deaths or any sacrificing of national security.
Now, on the issue of asking for documents, I think it is important for investigative journalists to know that they can't solicit information from their whistleblowers.
You have to be very disciplined about this.
Anybody who's a working journalist and has spoken to their lawyer about this knows they need to be careful.
And we also need to be careful not to redact the information before we release it.
I agree there was some carelessness there.
However, the punishment was far more severe than any misdeeds here.
Again, nobody was harmed.
No national security was undermined by this.
It is true.
And it was found by repeated investigations.
And the point here is that this was clearly designed to chill investigative reporting, which is absolutely protected by the Pentagon papers and by the First Amendment.
And I think that this severe of a punishment was aimed at scaring off many journalists.
Many of journalists have become cowards on this issue.
I'm shocked by the stories that other journalists have passed on that my colleagues and I have decided to cover, which is very clearly covered by the First Amendment and is now, I think, being undermined in some ways.
And just like you said, Piers, in this case, Assange chose to be with his wife and children and accepted a plea deal, but he was not responsible for the national security violations.
Well, let me bring Ben in.
So, Ben, look, Ben, look, you stated as a fact that a lot of people died as a consequence.
We just heard it from Michael Schellenberger, who's been all over this story for many years, that that is not true.
Freedom of Speech Under Fire 00:12:13
Do you actually have it?
You can't have it, by the way, both ways.
And let me just say this.
Number one, I love how a moment ago, everybody's like, oh, you can't trust the government, but now you're quoting the government saying no one died and no one was harmed because of this.
That is total crap.
I will quote now for you.
The Taliban spokesman said, we're studying the report when the report came out.
He then said, after the files were released to the public in the summer of 2010, quote, we knew about the spies and we are working to find them.
We will be investigating through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are spies or working with the U.S. and if they are U.S. spies, quote, then we know how to punish them.
Fast forward, they then put executions online and then said that they had actually killed people on their websites on Twitter back then before it was X, saying that they had hunted down the people working with the spies.
You're repeating Taliban propaganda.
You're literally repeating Taliban propaganda at this moment.
You're spreading Taliban disinformation.
Let me ask you this, seriously, because I'm not dumb enough to buy what you're saying right now.
Do you actually believe the Taliban wouldn't go out and kill people that were working with the United States of America?
Are you that dumb as a journalist to believe the Taliban doesn't kill and behead people that betray them?
Like, give me a question.
Why are you spreading Taliban misinformation?
You're participating in the Taliban's propaganda.
Nothing you said.
Nothing you said proves what you claim it proves.
In fact, the U.S. government has itself.
I hope that it did not result in the deaths of any American soldiers.
to go out there and to put everything on the internet when someone sends it to you, which is what he did.
An actual journalist who has integrity.
I agree that he should have redacted some of that information.
I think he's decided what they were putting out there.
But you say, oh, you're a journalist.
You can do no wrong.
And I don't trust the Taliban.
I trust Joe Biden.
Ben, Michael just made an important clarification.
So repeat that, Michael.
Well, I agree that I think Assange was careless and should have redacted that information.
And that's just a separate issue from whether it actually resulted in the deaths of American servicemen or our assets abroad or undermine national security.
On that issue, the U.S. government has been very clear.
So yes, in this case, I think that the U.S. government had an interest in actually exaggerating the ways that you're doing.
You're citing the Taliban as the source of your information.
I'm citing the U.S. government.
There's one thing.
Let me just say this.
There's one thing about the Taliban, and you should know this throughout history if you've studied the Taliban at all.
The Taliban does one thing incredibly well.
They make sure that people that get out of line are brutally murdered.
And if you were and found to be spying for any other government and you were not a leader.
It's a completely separate issue.
They will come after you.
It is not insane for them to look at the diary and go through there and see the name of the activity.
It's not insane, but Ben, but Ben, do you accept your own information?
And then go back.
But Ben, do you accept your only source for all this is the Taliban?
And are you comfortable about that?
I will go back and quote you guys earlier.
Do you trust that the government would tell you the honest truth?
No, I'm asking you whether you trust me.
I'm asking you if you trust the Taliban.
I trust the Taliban when they say that if someone is out there, I never thought the day would come when I'd hear Ben Ferguson on this show saying, I trust the Taliban.
No, on the issue, if I accept your Taliban, those are your only words.
You're dead in this town.
Piers, you're better than this.
I trust the Taliban will kill you if you betray them because they have a thousand years of history.
I don't disagree with that, but do you have any independent corroboration that they actually killed anyone?
Their own post on social media after this happened in 2010 was clearly pointing to going after and hunting down these individuals.
But again, I asked, do you have any evidence they actually kill people?
The evidence that they put out on social media celebrating the killing of people that have betrayed them in the name of Allah.
That's the evidence.
Let me bring him a judge who wants to jump in.
Then I'll come to Louise.
I suggest you were losing sight of the issue here.
The issue here is the freedom of speech.
The issue here is the right of the government to know.
The issue is not that a spy take a chance working for the U.S., that his name is going to be revealed.
Of course he did.
He voluntarily made that choice.
That is no reason to punish someone for exposing it.
That's not me.
That's the Supreme Court of the United States in the Pentagon Papers case, followed universally, except by the government, since it came down.
All right, Louise.
I don't know how Michael can have it two ways.
He can say on the one hand, yes, he should have redacted those names because it's dangerous, and then say on the other, but it's okay, guys, because although he didn't redact them in any way whatsoever, nothing bad happened to all these people and they were totally fine.
Isn't that a remarkable coincidence?
But we have to go back to what the United States government actually charged Assange with.
They charged Assange with conspiracy to help release this material and he pled guilty to it.
At the end of the day, the charge only ever carried a five-year sentence.
I am delighted that Assange, a very wicked man, a criminal, a felon, a breaker of the Espionage Act, has served his sentence in one of the darkest holes in Britain.
I hope he hated every single minute of it.
I hope he detested it, and I hope his life is ruined.
But this was a minor offense.
I very much hope he'll be charged with much more serious offenses in the future.
Wow.
And did you feel, again, The analogy I gave, do you feel then that Will Lewis, because he was editor for Telegraph when they published stolen information about MPs, of which he used to be one, and you weren't involved in that, I accept that, but a lot of your colleagues were, and exposed for fiddling their expenses.
Would you feel that that editor should rot in jail?
Or what's the difference?
On principle?
Ah.
We're in the glorious situation of Louise of being able to see you, but not hear you, which is kind of my kind of my utopia.
You might be back.
Hang on, are you back?
I am back.
You can get it really quickly.
I'll come back.
We've got you.
So just quickly, the difference in principle between the editor of the Telegraph publishing MPs' expenses and what Assange did.
The difference in principle is the editor of the Telegraph didn't help anybody hack that document, didn't conspire to produce it.
This wasn't just a problem.
But he published it having paid.
Well, hang on.
He paid a six-figure sum.
Hang on.
Hang on.
He paid a six-figure sum for the stolen document, knowing it had been stolen.
Is that a problem?
I don't think it is.
He was never charged with that.
Obviously, not for you, but if Assange had paid...
Assange didn't pay Chelsea Manning, did he?
Maybe he did.
Oh, but he helped her do it and he admits that he helped her.
So if you pay for stolen information, that's fine.
But if you don't pay for it, you should rot in jail forever.
Yes, haven't we just established that it's okay to publish bad information and encourage governments, even if you give money for it, so what?
You give money to a journalist for writing a piece.
Assange.
I'm trying to get to where...
Okay, I'm trying to get to where...
Hang on.
I'm trying to get to...
I'm a national defense.
That's what he's pleading guilty to today.
I understand.
Let me come back to Michael.
I mean, I think it's pretty obvious he's done a plea deal.
I don't think he would, if you interview him, I'm interested in what he had to say.
I think he wanted to avoid extradition to America where he feared he could get life imprisonment or potentially worse.
I mean, I think you can still get a death penalty in parts of America for the crimes that he was accused of.
So he has avoided that.
He'll have served five years in prison and he'll be back home.
It seems a pretty good plea deal to have done.
But on that point of principle, as a journalist, is there much difference in principle?
I mean, if one editor buys a stolen document to expose wrongdoing by politicians, is what Assange did, in terms of principle, any really any different?
No, I don't think so.
In fact, I think it's, I mean, in the United States, it is not ethical to pay sources for information.
And look, I think what is really interesting here is that there's a lot of speculation, including by The Guardian, but also by my sources, that Trump was, you know, three weeks ago said that he was seriously considering pardoning Assange.
I think that the Assange, the cause celeb that this had turned into, thanks to Stella Assange and others, showed that this was a popular cause, that Americans prefer free speech.
We don't want our journalists going to prison.
That's a very old principle in the United States.
It's the bedrock of our country.
They put it as the First Amendment for a reason.
So I think that Biden did not want to have to deal with this in his debate with Trump this week.
I'm not saying that's the whole explanation.
The deal was itself falling apart in part because all of the accusations that somehow Assange was essential to getting the information was wrong.
Chelsea Manning had access to it.
Of course, a journalist is going to help his source to hide their identity.
That's an obligation of a journalist who's working to get that information out.
Look, I think that the First Amendment is only as good as the support that it has from the American people.
And I think the fact that this became a political issue shows that the anti-free speech people on this panel are in the minority.
Let's hope they lose power.
They've been at war with the Pentagon Papers principle for 50 years.
You are not a journalist if you are against the Pentagon Papers principle.
You're a journalist if you're in favor of this.
I'm not sure incompetency when I'm a journalist.
Okay.
So let me say this: as someone that's been doing radio literally since I was 12 years old, TV since I was 17, I've been given information before to expose things that are wrong in the government, okay?
But as a responsible journalist, you also have to look and make sure that you're not doing harm in a mass way to others.
Assange is beneath journalism.
He is not a journalist.
He is a hacker at best who encouraged others to take massive risks and to then be a narcissistic individual who wanted to throw everything out on the internet.
If you want to sit next to that guy and say you're the same, then you're beneath a journalist.
Okay, let me ask you a standard of journalism integrity.
And I had fun with that.
Given your extensive journalism experience, and I don't know how many decades we're talking here, I wouldn't like to embarrass you, but let's say four as a journalist.
You're saying that to me?
Sorry, I broke up.
Yeah, how many decades have you been a journalist?
I'm 42 now, so I've been doing this for 30 years.
30 years, right?
So can you think as a journalist of any higher calling for journalists than exposing war crimes?
I think that you can expose war crimes while also not putting people's lives at risk.
No, I have nothing to do with that.
I don't want to quit location.
I'm just saying, can you just in principle think there's anything?
I think there's many different.
I think being a whistleblower, war crimes, there's a long list, Pierce.
But when you get everything and you just throw it out on the internet and you don't realize the damage that you can be doing that has nothing to do with the categories you just described, you're not a journalist because a journalist would comb through everything and make sure that this was worthy of being seen and not just saying, I'm a hacker and I put every damn thing on the internet.
That's not journalism.
Let me bring him a judge.
That's not reporting.
Let me bring in the judge.
That's not investigating.
It's not making phone calls to sources.
None of that involves journalism.
Okay, let me bring him a judge.
I mean, look, you know, passions run high about this.
And it's striking to me that on the Republican conservative side in America, Ben has very strident views one way, but I've heard lots of other leading Republicans coming out today giving, you know, rather celebratory comments about his release.
But Mike Pence, for example, has slammed it.
Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest 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.
And Biden himself has actually been extremely critical of Assange in the past.
Republicans Shift on Free Speech 00:02:26
You know, effectively, I think he called him a terrorist at one stage.
Yeah, he called him a high-tech terrorist when he was vice president.
And he could have dropped the case in 2021, instead, tried to extradite and to stand child in the United States.
So, you know, people are flip-flopping around a bit on this.
And even on one side or another, there are people disagreeing with each other.
What should we make of it all?
Well, as I said earlier, we can't lose sight of the significance of the First Amendment and the absolute freedom that journalists must have, like Daniel Ellsberg, just to drop the 7,000 pages that he stole from the federal government on the New York Times and on the Washington Post.
He was eventually indicted for espionage.
The case was thrown out.
We all know the story.
The FBI broke into a psychiatrist's office during the trial.
The judge was outraged.
He threw the case out.
Chelsea Manning was prosecuted, pleaded guilty to half, was found guilty to the other half, sentenced to 35 years in jail.
President Obama commuted it to time.
Served Manning was released from jail hours before Trump was inaugurated.
Trump told me shortly after January 6th and before January 20th, in one of our final of many conversations, he planned to pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
Someone, probably Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo, talked him out of it.
Fascinating.
Bill Ball has ever done.
I think it's, I should say, Elsa Piers, I would just say I think it's wonderful to see Republicans coming around to a properly pro-free speech position after having been stuck in this awful neoconservative agenda, which got us into terrible wars in the Middle East and have got us stuck in an awful war in the Ukraine.
So to see so many Republicans coming out in support of a properly liberal or libertarian agenda is a wonderful transformation.
And it's wonderful to see so many Republicans finally arriving here.
Maybe you are like Julian.
I actually believe you now that you guys are very close as journalists.
Like if I think you and Julian are real close together now.
I think on this moment of general unity amongst the panel, I'm going to thank you all very much indeed because I've got RFK Jr. joining me to talk about this.
He's been quite vocal about it today.
So thank you very much to all my panel.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thank you very much indeed for coming back to Uncensored.
Whistleblowers as Democracy Heroes 00:09:49
Your reaction to this news of Julian Assange being released, we understand he's now just left Bangkok for the final leg of the journey to go to this tiny little island, Saipan, in the northern Mariana Islands in the South Pacific.
And he will do this plea deal tomorrow.
He'll be on a plane and sent home a free man to Australia.
What's your response?
I mean, my response is this is good for our country.
It's good for democracy.
Julian Assange is a journalist.
He did exactly what journalists are supposed to do.
You know, my uncle Pierce gave a speech in April of 1961, which is one of his most memorable speeches on the topic of the secrecy.
And he said that during that speech, the government secrecy is repugnant to a free people and that it is antithetical to American democracy.
And, you know, the odd thing about Julian Assange's imprisonment is that the American press did not rise up in outrage and indignation to object on this.
You know, I said yesterday on Twitter that we should not just release Julian Assange and Edwin Snowden, but that we should build a monument to him in Washington as a civics lesson to the American public about the importance of free speech and the First Amendment in this country.
It is the foundation stone for the American experiment with self-governance.
Everything in democracy relies on the free flow of information.
And government, of course, the role of government is to constantly try to increase its power by reducing transparency and reducing the information we have about their deliberations.
But of course, in a democracy, a transparent government is, that is the essence of democracy.
That's what Julian Assange did for us.
You will also know from your uncle, JFK, from your father, that when you're actually in government, when you're running the country, a president has to have very private conversations sometimes with other world leaders about very sensitive matters, which where there is an expectation that those conversations will remain private for very good reasons.
It may have very damaging consequences.
And it was the scattergun approach of Julian Assange, where he didn't redact anything.
He just put it all out there without really seeming much thought or care about the potential consequences of some of the unredacted stuff.
I mean, should there not be any line?
I mean, if you were the president of the United States, you're running for office now for the highest office in the land, would you not expect and want some of those communications you have as president about national security to remain secure?
I would want journalists to exercise some discretion if, for example, there are confidential sources in other countries whose names are exposed and who could put their lives in danger.
And I think that there are legal ramifications for that anyway.
There are civil and criminal lawsuits for that.
But in terms of government secrecy, I just think that government, in a democracy, we are reliant on transparency in our government.
We want to know what our leaders are supposed to do and are doing, what they're up to, what they're talking about, how they're making their decisions.
And the more transparency, the better off we're going to be.
Should he have effectively about to be convicted of a crime involving conspiracy to commit espionage?
Should he be convicted of that crime?
No, he shouldn't.
He shouldn't have been prosecuted.
And I'm disappointed that he had to make this guilty plea.
I understand personally, it was important to him.
His health is very shaky.
And he needed to be home.
I think it's a disappointment again in our government that they forced him to make this guilty plea rather than recognizing that what he actually did is a service to American democracy.
He exposed things.
The revelations that Chelsea Manning released to him about the misbehavior of some of the contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and many, many other important issues that we need to know about in a democracy that our government, of course, the government would love to conceal for us the Mili massacre.
They'd love to conceal from us what Daniel Ellsberg released in the Pentagon Papers in 1973.
Thousands of pages of lies that the government had told us for 20 years that Americans never knew about.
And we could have avoided these wars if the government was telling us the truth.
The government has an interest in lying to us, and it's doing that now regularly, more and more every day.
And the best interest of the American public, the best interest of democracy is absolute transparency.
I mean, I, as somebody who believes passionately in free speech as a journalist, I kind of find myself agreeing with pretty much everything you've been saying.
But of course, what people will want to feel is that, I mean, for example, we've got President Trump facing criminal charges over storing classified documents at his house where it's surrounded by Secret Service.
You know, should he be facing those charges if we're going to say that any journalist who acquires classified documents should absolutely be able to publish them with impunity?
In other words, how closely guarded should things like national secrets be?
Well, I think that's altogether a different issue because that is, you know, I don't know much about that case and I don't know about the interaction.
You know, there are a the president has a right as president to declassify any document that he wants.
So I'm not sure what the what the interactions and the interplay between presidential power and executive power and, you know, retaining those documents.
I know that President Biden also took a lot of those classified documents home and that the prosecutor decided that he should not be prosecuted, not because he hadn't broken the law, but because he was too mentally incapacitated, which I think is a controversial decision.
But I think it's a completely different issue.
The role of, as you know, Pierce, the role of a free press in a democracy is to maintain, as Louis Brandeis said, a fierce skepticism towards government and government authority.
The role of a journalist is to dig up things that the government does not want you to hear and expose that to the public.
And we all recognize that the impulse of a government is always going to make everything secret because that increases their power.
If we have no idea what our government is doing, they no longer belong to us.
We are no longer the boss.
We are the boss of our democracy.
And they need to be honest with us and transparent.
And there may be certain things that should be kept secret for a long time.
If you're going to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima or something like that, yeah, you want to keep it secret for a while.
If you're developing a nuclear bomb, you want to.
The press in this country has always been very good about that.
But it always is a tough call because really the role of the, the essential role of the press in a democracy, and democracy cannot function without a free press.
Today, one of the things that's happened with the press is that they no longer do that job.
They've become propagandists for government rather than speaking truth to power.
They become stenographers and propagandists for government and government agency.
We saw this during COVID.
We saw it during the Iraq War where the New York Times had to apologize for using lies, government lies, to broadcasting those to the public without proper scrutiny.
So, you know, it almost always is a bad idea for the press to keep the government secrets.
We want them to be.
We are the boss.
Yeah.
I agree with you.
I mean, do you think you'll be lying to us?
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, do you think whoever wins the presidential race in November, they've had the power to pardon Jude Massage?
Do you think whoever that person is should pardon him?
I would definitely pardon him, and I'll pardon Edwin Snowden, too.
And there's other whistleblowers that I would pardon, too.
I think we should encourage whistleblowers.
Whistleblowers are the heroes of democracy.
They're not villains.
You know, Edwin Snowden disclosed to us that the NSA was spying on the American people, that it was gathering all of our phone data, our text messages, our emails.
Pardons for Leakers and Spies 00:06:15
Nobody knew that.
He disclosed that to public, and then Congress went and enacted laws regulating it as a direct result of Edwin Snowden's disclosures.
And so why are we punishing him as a supervillain and a criminal?
He did a great service for our democracy and for the world.
He's a hero.
We should be building monuments to him, not putting him in jail.
Before I let you go, and I really appreciate you joining me.
The presidential debate is on Thursday, 90 minutes unfettered between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
First time either has been in any debate since their last one four years ago.
Last time I spoke to you, you were hoping to be on that debate.
Do you feel you should be there?
Yeah, I should be there.
I mean, honestly, nobody should be there because nobody qualifies under the criteria that CNN established.
And because nobody has 270 delegates, enough, you know, are on the ballot enough states to win 270 delegates.
I'm the closest.
Neither of them have any delegates at this point.
The other criteria that I have four polls from 12 separate polling organizations that put me at 15% or over, I met that.
And CNN arbitrarily threw out one of the polls from the approved company's Monmouth in an arbitrary way.
So they are keeping me off the stage.
But the worrying thing is this.
This is the first time in American history that a private for-profit corporation has owned the presidential debates.
Biden and President Trump colluded with CNN to exclude the Presidential Debating Commission since my uncle's premier debate with Nixon, the first one in history.
This has never happened.
And the worrying thing is that the DNC and the RNC are putting tens of millions of dollars into CNN.
So there's a conflict there.
Plus, the CNN announcers on some of the biggest, most monumental decisions during their presidency, like the lockdown of the American public, the CNN announcers were cheerleaders for those lockdowns.
That Biden and Trump had shifted $4.3 trillion in wealth to this new oligarchy of billionaires that destroyed the middle class in this country, that shut down 3.3 million businesses with no due process, shut down our churches, made us wear masks.
Jake Tapper was cheerleading for that.
So do you think he's going to ask them any of the tough questions?
Do you think he's going to ask them to do that?
I actually do.
I think Jake's a great journalist.
I work with him at CNN.
I think Dana Bash is too.
Yeah, of course they can.
I think they'll actually do a very good job.
I'm disappointed you're not going to be there.
But given you're not going to be there, because I think you should be there, and you would definitely add some spice to it.
But given you're not going to be there, who do you think is going to win?
The debate.
I think, well, I don't like to make predictions, but I would predict that Trump will win because I really, I think Donald Trump is good.
He could win a prize for the greatest debater in modern American history, probably since Lincoln Douglas.
And I'm not saying that based upon my own assessment.
I'm saying that based upon watching him run through 16 Republicans one at a time and just demolish them in his debates.
And he has all of these extraordinary techniques.
He's extremely entertaining to watch.
He has an ability to make up facts and then believe them absolutely and sell them to the crowd.
And he's just, you know, he's like watching, he's an entertainer.
He's a brilliant entertainer and nothing phases him.
And he has extraordinary debating techniques.
So I don't think it's possible for President Biden to beat him in that debate.
And I think a lot of people are going to be watching the debate to see how, to measure some of the questions that people have about the acuity of the mental acuity and the cognitive flexibility of the current president.
If it turns out to be a train wreck for Biden, given how early this debate is being held, way earlier than normal, is it beyond the realms of fantasy that the Democrats may say we can't possibly go forward with him as the nominee?
We're going to have to do something about it and parachute somebody in in time for the convention?
I think that's possible.
I think if they were, I have no idea.
So again, I don't make predictions.
But I think if they were going to switch out somebody, the convention would be the place to do it.
Yeah.
And if they have this, you know, they have this, they have this super delegates who are in line basically, and they are the ones who would choose the next nominee.
So I think, you know, they would, probably some of them would welcome that chance.
Given how well you've been doing, given your soaring profile, if either President Trump or President Biden were to offer you a job if they were to win in their administration, would you take it?
Oh, I intend to win the race, Pierce, so I'm not thinking that far ahead.
And by the way, by the way, I'm not looking for a job in government.
I'm not, you know, I have a very good life and I've had plenty of opportunities throughout my life to work in government, including very, very big jobs in government appointment, presidential appointments, and I've never done it.
Rejecting Government Job Offers 00:00:10
So it's not something that I'm looking for.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., brilliant to have you back on Uncensored so soon.
Thank you very much.
Pierce, thanks for having me.
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