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I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Joe Lauria, Editor-in-Chief of ConsortiumNews.com, and he's over there in the UK covering the Julian Assange hearings.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
I'm not in the UK, though.
I didn't go because of the pandemic.
I was there in February.
I realized it would be very difficult, impossible to get into the courtroom, and they only let three people into the public gallery.
It would very hard, 10 reporters in the reporter's gallery, and then I could watch it remotely online, and that there were public events that we had in February going to be online, so it didn't make any sense to go to a hotel room in London and watch it online when I could do that anywhere.
I see.
So, but you were able to watch the entire proceeding on live streaming, then.
Is that right?
Not today.
We, for some reason, we got bumped off when we tried to get on, but we're going to try again tomorrow.
We definitely have a ticket, a so-called ticket, to get in there.
There was some technical issue.
We're not sure exactly what happened.
I'm not speculating, but we got bumped off.
So it happened to other people, I think.
So tomorrow we'll be watching it, but I followed several people tweeting and was able to put together the updates that I did with the knowledge I have already of the case, and it was quite a day.
Okay.
Well, go ahead and, well, I'll go ahead and start us off.
I woke up this morning to the news that they had added, was it really 17 new charges?
My understanding is this was the superseding indictment from June, and it just repeats the original 18 charges, 17 under the Espionage Act, and one conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.
That's what I thought.
When I read it, I thought, this is just the same stuff again.
I thought maybe they'd come up with some new names for it or something.
So that was just a misunderstanding, huh?
I've seen that report.
I just saw a Sky News report that said that's wrong.
Okay.
What this superseding indictment did is replace the existing indictment.
So they had to copy over the same charges that already existed.
What it adds only is some so-called evidence.
That's really the heart of this story.
That comes from 2010 in Iceland, and that evidence was put in there in June, but there's no new charges.
One of the, just to point this out, one of the pieces of evidence is that Assange helped Edward Snowden escape from Hong Kong.
Well, there's no charge of, you know, aiding and abetting a fugitive to evade justice.
It's no new charges.
They're just adding on, piling on PR stuff, and it's very questionable, a lot of it, because all of that, a good part of it anyway, of the new evidence, they've known about since 2010 because it came from two FBI informants.
And that doesn't mean anything anyway.
He asked his lawyer to go and help Snowden?
That doesn't mean anything.
Even if he paid her airfare, still.
Yeah, it's completely ...
Oh, they made a big deal that Assange had booked 12 different flights for Snowden, so that just to confuse the authorities on which one he was on.
They spent the money to buy 12 different tickets.
Heroic.
But I don't see what the charge is there.
As you say, it's just public relations, right?
Just piling on.
There's no charge.
Even in endangering informants from the Espionage Act, there's no statute against that.
It's not cited in the indictment.
It's not a crime.
It may be unethical.
And anyway, he, according to an Australian journalist, Mark Davis, who was in the bunker with him and the Guardian, he actually stayed up all night redacting the names, whereas the editors at the Guardian and the Times couldn't give a damn.
This is what Mark Davis says anyway.
So I mean, this whole case is a public relations one.
In the article I wrote, on the editorial that I wrote today, I put a definition of something called a show trial.
And when you read the words of that definition, it's exactly what's happening.
This is a PR thing, it's a pre-determined outcome, and it's being done as a warning to other dissidents.
I mean, this is precisely what's going on here.
They're putting a show on.
It doesn't really matter what the prosecution says or does or how the defense responds.
They have to go through the motions to make it look like that this is a trial in which justice is being sought about whether to extradite him or not to the U.S.
Foregone conclusion.
I'd be shocked, leaving the door open, would be shocked if they decide not to extradite him.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole thing is political at this level.
There's not any such thing as law.
It's just what they think they can get away with and call it whatever they want.
It's interesting, though, Joe, that in America, they can't do this.
I mean, they just can't prosecute somebody for publishing secrets that were leaked to them and weeping over the details of how they're trying to obfuscate that and say that he conspired with Manning to get the like.
But at the end of the day, no matter which idiots are sitting on the Supreme Court, this is never going to fly.
We got the First Amendment.
In England, they don't.
In America, we do.
And they just can't do anything about that.
The problem is the Espionage Act has in there a section that says anyone who possesses and or disseminates classified material is not authorized to do so has broken that law.
So everyone could include journalists technically, but they've never no government has ever prosecuted it.
Right.
They've never tried it because they know they can never get away with it.
They tried it, actually, and depending on papers, he paneled a grand jury in Boston to go after the two New York Times reporters who worked with Ellsberg.
But in the end, when Ellsberg's psychiatrist office was but was broken into and they discovered that his phone was bugged, the reporters asked the government, well, that means you must be bugging us, too, because we were talking to him on the phone.
And they dropped the case at that point.
So it didn't happen until now.
This is the fact.
But you notice in this particular opening day today, Scott, that the government has moved away from the espionage charges because they know it doesn't fly, as you just said.
In the first day of the hearing back in February, the James Lewis, who was the Queen's counselor for the British lawyer for the U.S. government, turned to the reporters in the press gallery and said, this is not about you, we're not going after you.
But that made it about them.
And of course it's about them.
And the government knows the New York Times even, and Guardian, and Rachel damnato said that this was wrong to charge, as much as she despises Assange.
So they're not going to go down that road, like you're saying.
So what are they doing?
They're shifting it to this rubbish story about that all from two FBI informants back in 2010 in Reykjavik, that Assange conspired to break into a computer, that he encouraged others to hack, encouraged others to get banking data, that he did all these things about hacking when he didn't actually hack himself.
That's why it's a conspiracy to do it, but not that he didn't do it himself.
They're not even charging him with hacking.
It's so damn flimsy.
They don't have a case.
The only thing they have him on is that section of the Espionage Act, which is so weak.
And that part of the act should be amended or taken out because on a constitutional challenge.
It's unconstitutional.
It conflicts clearly with the First Amendment, but it's still in there.
So it's always been there for governments to go after people.
And by the way, it's prior restraint that they really can't do.
But after publication of a classified document, they can go get you.
Even Mike Gravel, who read the Pentagon Papers into the Senate, that Senate committee after Ellsberg gave it to him, was threatened by the Nixon administration that they could charge a senator.
They can't stop him from saying it, but after he said it, they could charge him.
They didn't in the end.
And Nixon didn't do that either, but they threatened him.
So they're going down this road, Scott, away from espionage, and they want to shift the whole focus onto these so-called new charges.
And they're not new charges.
And that the press is publishing that mistake is indicative of the, first of all, how the media doesn't understand anything about the Assange case and really doesn't care.
And second, playing into this idea that these are new charges against him.
And they aren't.
They're the same old ones.
And they are just this new evidence that's 10 years old and comes from two FBI informants.
And this is like Al Capone.
They got him what?
Not on murder, not on bootlegging, on tax evasion, right?
They want to get anything here that they can get him transferred from London to Alexandria, Virginia.
And once he's in that court, they're going to maybe hit him with the espionage.
It might be, but as you say, they won't be able to get away with it because if it's challenged, the Supreme Court would strike it down.
So they got to get him on this other stuff.
They might be able to get a conviction and then drag his appeals out for years before the Supreme Court finally sets him free.
Something like that.
You know, that could take a decade or more.
So they'd settle for good enough there.
I bet.
You bet.
Well, you're right.
Because computer charge, intrusion charge only carries five years.
So that's not enough for them.
They're going to try to go for the espionage thing unless we have a new administration that decides not to pursue it.
Although Mr. Biden has called him, agreed that he's a high tech terrorist on television.
So I don't have a lot of confidence in that, although that could happen that a new justice department decides not to pursue this or at least not the espionage charges, which go up to 175 years.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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Well, and so to get specific here on the computer hacking charge or whatever it is, it's still, you said it's the same old accusation.
So if I remember it right, then it's just he was trying to help, and I guess didn't succeed in helping Manning crack a password that, I forgot now, fill me in on the details here.
It did not lead to the classified data because Manning had access to all the classified data.
It was just, they were trying to, it was a little bit of trade craft to try to spread a few false breadcrumbs away from Manning, correct?
The indictment clearly says she had legal access to all of them.
So that's not the issue.
Right.
They were trying to say that he helped her break into a government computer, which doesn't make any sense because she had a legal issue, but that she changed, he wanted to help her get in with an administrative password to hide her identity.
And they make a big deal how that really misled and screwed up all the investigators because of that.
But it turns out in that, and I was in the courtroom that day in February in London, that Assange's lawyer said that in fact it wasn't any government documents he was trying to help her get or hide her identity to get.
It was music videos and computer, and music videos and video games that are illegal for active duty U.S. personnel, military personnel to possess.
So she was going in there to get them to give to her friends in the army and Assange was helping.
They made that assertion in court, open court.
I heard it.
I was there.
I doubt they would say that if they can't back it up.
On top of that, you know, yeah, the informant thing, Robert Gates, when he was defense secretary, didn't kill anybody.
It was only an embarrassment.
So they are- The prosecutors admitted that at the court martial too, that they could not prove that anyone had been killed.
That's right.
Now, what they're adding here is not new charges, but this new, this old new evidence from 2010 in Iceland from the two FBI informants that show that Assange was encouraging them to hack.
And this is not just, this goes beyond the Chelsea Manning thing that we just talked about.
It's about other things that he tried to do, like help Snowden, like tell people to hack this thing, hack that, get the bank data, that he followed police cars in Iceland.
And these two informants ratted on him, and in fact, entrapped him in some ways.
If you read a great Rolling Stone article from a couple of years ago, it gives the entire story of what happened there with these two informants.
So they don't have anything on them.
They really don't, except that one little espionage thing that they won't pursue, most likely because it could lead to a challenge in the court.
And this, they're trying to get him on this computer intrusion thing, but it's only five years.
So I think they might go for the espionage act.
The thing right now is to get into Virginia from London, and I, they think that it's going to happen because they don't really have to prove anything in the court.
They just have to make a case, and it has to be also illegal in Britain at the same time.
And then he's gone.
He's a goner.
Back to Virginia, where we may never see him again.
Yeah.
Now, okay.
So what happened today here, where the defense tried to get an adjournment and a postponement on what cause?
Okay.
So because this superseding indictment was first published in June, but wasn't formally sent to Assange's lawyers or the court until the end of July, it's basically six or seven weeks ago.
So Assange's lawyers said a couple of weeks ago that they probably would need more time to prepare to defend against this new evidence, not new charges, but new evidence.
And Barreza, Vanessa Barreza, the magistrate overseeing this, said, okay, we will delay it till November.
And for some reason that I don't understand, other than they don't want Assange to be in that prison anymore with coronavirus around, with him being in ill health all since he's been in the Ecuadorian embassy.
They want to get him out of there.
So that's the dilemma.
Do we hold this off till November to get a better defense?
Or do we try to get him out of there sooner?
So they denied this.
They said, no, let's go on September 7th.
And Barreza said, okay.
So they started today on September 7th.
But at the beginning of the court session today, they argued, Assange's lawyers did, that they didn't have enough time to prepare, that they hadn't been able to speak to Assange, and he only received this new superseding indictment today, and that they had only had two phone conversations with him in the last seven weeks, and that the line was bad and they couldn't even hear him.
So based on that, they asked for more time.
She said, okay.
She'd asked about the contacts, and that's when they told her that there was only these two phone calls.
She went away for 10 minutes or 15 or 20 minutes, probably spoke to Lady Arbutnat, who is the overseeing magistrate here, who has her own conflict of interest with her husband, working for military contracts and things, a company that was exposed by WikiLeaks.
And she came back into the courtroom, Barreza did, and said, no, I deny it.
You had time.
I gave you a chance, which was true, and you didn't take it, so we're going ahead.
And then after that, as totally anti-climatic, we had our first witness call, defense witness, Mark Feldstein, who is a professor of journalism, of broadcast journalism, who went on and on about the really important things you would think about how the press always publishes classified information, no one's ever been prosecuted before, et cetera, et cetera.
But that fell flat because the government of the U.S. has moved it away from espionage.
So he came prepared to fight the fight.
The lawyers of Assange got this witness to fight this fight.
That's not even the fight anymore, because they're talking only about this stuff that happened in Iceland 20, sorry, 10 years ago that didn't result in new charges.
It's just an unbelievable mess.
Well, here's the thing of it too, man, is the absolute level of just absurdity of the situation he's in.
We're talking about this highest level thing where they're pretending that he's this James Bond villain he's accused.
As you say, they're backing down from espionage.
At the same time, they're treating him as though he's Aldrich Ames or Robert Hansen or something, the worst.
Oh no, those were American government employees.
They got treated a lot better than this for their highest actual treason.
But they're treating him in that way, right, as though he's the world's most dangerous man.
And yet he's wanted for jumping bail on being punished for refusing to submit to questioning until he could be assured that it was not a ruse to get him arrested and then extradited to the United States where he could face espionage charges, which they all ridiculed at the time and said was a ridiculous conspiracy theory and there could be nothing further from the truth and he's just a liar pretending to be afraid of that.
And then meanwhile, you have Nils Meltzer, as I think you and I talked about on the show before, wrote up this extensive report on the way the Swedish authorities abused the story of these two women's complaints against him and twisted it into this fake rape case in the first place.
And anyway, this guy should have been $50 and time served like Night Court years ago.
And he's, you know, was holed up in this embassy and, you know, in the most extreme circumstances and the most ridiculous circumstances there for years.
And then they came and got him and they're putting him through all of this, as you say, just to make an example out of him, because he got essentially one hell of a leak from then Bradley, now Chelsea Manning, a leak too good that he should not have gotten and should not have published.
Yeah, unfortunately, I was cut out for about a minute there, Scott, so I don't matter because you already know it.
It was just me random raving about how unfairly they're treating this guy over just telling the truth.
Yes, they try to get him to Sweden, to the U.S.
He was right to go into the embassy.
He skipped bail, yes, but he was given legal political asylum and then he was dragged out of the embassy and he served that term, that sentence for his bail skipping, which was an extremely draconian sentence for a minor infraction.
And now he's just been on remand and treated like a terrorist inside a maximum security prison in London, Belmarsh.
Who knows how they've really been treating him in there.
They got their hands on this guy.
They want to silence him.
They want to bring down WikiLeaks, just listen to Mike Pompeo, who I think is the real driving force behind this.
And it would be good to see him go, because another Justice Department may not be as incensed.
But you know, Obama tried to do it.
They tried to arrest him or prosecute him anyway.
And in fact, indict him.
They couldn't because of what we talked about earlier.
They ran up against what they call the New York Times problem.
If they got Assange on that part of the Espionage Act, then they'd have to go after the Times too, because the Times published WikiLeaks material.
So how could you arrest and prosecute and indict Assange and not do it to the big boys?
So they backed off.
That didn't stop the Trump administration, though.
That did not stop the Trump administration.
And that's why we are where we're at right now.
So I mean, we got three more weeks of this trial, and I don't know where it's going right now because the witnesses, and by the way, the judge tried to block the witnesses from reading out their statements at the beginning, because she'd already read it herself.
But in the end, it was sent out, the statement was emailed out and we got copies of it.
But that was just another little thing.
You know, the thing just started and there were fireworks within like the first five minutes about this.
Yeah.
That was the rearrest of Assange.
I don't know if I mentioned that, which is quite interesting, under the new indictment, which is the same old charges, which is some more tales about what happened in Iceland.
So he got rearrested in this cell, apparently.
So he may have been a free man for a few seconds.
That's funny.
I wonder if he would have made a dash for the door, you know?
What an interesting little ceremony, the rearrest.
I don't think we do that here, do we?
I've never heard of that.
I've heard people getting out of prison and then getting charged again for the same crime, but just calling it a different charge and stuff like that.
I think it's the same charges in a new indictment and under a new extradition request.
That's why it's all over again.
And this extradition request seems to be based not on the espionage act, which they see as a losing strategy, but on this, all this other garbage about the computer.
As long as they have a big guy blocking the door while he's free for one second, then they can rearrest him.
Hello?
Yeah.
Oh, now I can hear you again.
Yeah, I was just saying that I'll be glad to talk to you again in a few more days, if you want, after this thing continues.
But I think that's pretty much what I have to say right now, because I need to go to sleep.
All right.
It's four o'clock, 4.30 in the morning here.
I'm in Australia, not in London.
Oh, I got you.
I was lost on the time zones there, but I get you.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for your time, Joe.
And yes, I will be checking in with you, say, every other day here.
Maybe we'll catch back up Wednesday and Friday, if that's cool.
Okay.
Sounds good, Scott.
Okay.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
