All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
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.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Kevin Gosselaar from Shadowproof.
Been a while.
Great to have you back on the show.
How are you doing?
Yeah, it's good to talk to you.
Yeah, man.
And by the way, everybody, in case you don't know, Kevin's been good on Manning and Assange and Wikileaks and all these things all along, and I was thrilled to see in my Reddit group this morning, someone posted your Twitter thread from yesterday and today from all your great coverage.
So I read all that, and I read your article, and I talked with Joe Lori a little bit about the first day here, but I figured I'd go ahead and get this update from you because there's so much going on here.
And even after talking to Joe yesterday, I'm still not exactly clear on the most...
Did I say we're talking about Julian Assange's extradition hearings in the UK?
Sorry.
I'm not exactly clear on what is the deal with the redone charges and the re-arrest and all of these things.
I can tell from your writing, it's very important to the stakes in the hearing, but I'm not exactly clear what that means or what it implies.
And the details are a little fuzzy, but what we do know is this, that in my view, we can say that Judge Vanessa Barretzer, who is the magistrate court judge presiding over this case, will make the ultimate decision about whether extradition is authorized.
And then obviously, a lot of what we talk about in this, we preface with the fact that this process is going to see at least three to four appeals are likely to go all the way to the top.
We know it's going to be a much like what we see with cases in the United States, where a lot of times if the government loses, they're going to go to the Supreme Court.
If the human rights defenders lose, they're going to try to take it all the way to the Supreme Court and win.
That's the way it's going to go here with this extradition case, that they'll go as high as they can.
But she's going to make the ultimate decision.
And what she determined on day one was that they were not going to remove conduct from this fresh extradition request that's new, that was inserted in there without notice to the legal team for Assange.
And to be very clear about this, that means that everything that they've prepared for in this extradition hearing, these witnesses who we are going to see come testify, aren't giving testimony about these new general allegations that form two of the charges, they're the basis for two charges that exist outside of the core story, I suppose, if you will.
The core, we center everything around Chelsea Manning.
Most of what we talk about with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and this prosecution has been that Chelsea Manning disclosed those major sets of documents to Julian Assange and the U.S. government was going after Julian Assange for those publications.
But it seems they're aware that they might fail in what they're trying to do.
So they've got in their back pocket these two charges that they now claim would be good enough to prove and still extradite to the U.S.
So there's actually a universe where we could see Julian Assange extradited to the United States and none of the prosecution would have much to do with Chelsea Manning at all because they're setting up these general allegations around conspiracy to support hacking, that the LulzSec hackers suggesting that he was an accessory or aiding and abetting them to get information that WikiLeaks could publish.
That sort of thing is playing out as a way, I think, to cover for the fact that all these press freedom groups recognize the unprecedented nature of this case and that it is such an attack on the First Amendment.
Okay, but I'm still confused because it wasn't right that they announced 17 new charges or something.
It was the same charges again, only with different facts behind them now?
He's charged with breaking into a computer, but now instead of helping Manning break into a computer to download video games or to maybe disguise her trail there, now it's helping some other guy break into another computer in Iceland on a totally different date.
But we're keeping the same charge, but we're just making up a whole new reason for the charge.
Is that it?
That sounds about right to me.
That's where I'm at.
But I would say that all the Manning charges are still there.
What they're doing is, and so first off...
I'm confused about the adding versus changing thing.
We still have the same total number of charges or we have added a couple?
Yeah, so let me first clarify.
I noticed and did a screen grab and I really hope that Sky News, with the kind of reach that they have in the UK, would correct.
But I don't really know how they can because there's no way they can correct their story on what happened on day one without retracting the entire story.
They put out this thing that there were 18 new charges against Julian Assange, and that's not true.
There are no additional charges.
There were new details added to the indictment about what Julian Assange is alleged to have done as far as criminal conduct.
It expanded the scope of the prosecution beyond 2010 and 2011 and Chelsea Manning to include 2010 through 2015, and it ropes in this hacking stuff I've talked about.
It also is going after him and others at WikiLeaks who are mentioned as co-conspirators for supporting Edward Snowden in his efforts to get to a country where he could claim asylum and not be prosecuted for exposing NSA mass surveillance.
And so yeah, this is what they're trying to do is make it so they have some alternative if the whole entire core of their case falls apart.
Man, and yeah, so it just sounds like they cooked up some spaghetti and they're just throwing it at the wall to see if they can get anything to be good enough here?
Yeah, essentially, and to me, I can't believe that this is allowed as far as the process because this changes the entire dynamic of the case.
We heard legal argument back in February around an extradition request, and now we've got this new fresh extradition request, but we're not going to have another week of argument around the law.
We're going to just act like nothing new happened, and we're going to call the same witnesses that were going to be called when we had the older extradition request.
And it's clear to me, that's why I think the word, I use it very deliberately, railroaded is the way to describe what Beretzer is doing.
I mean, she even said so.
They came back, they didn't want to adjourn the proceedings because Julian Assange is being held in jail without bail, and that takes quite a toll on him.
We've heard quite a bit about his deterioration of his mental and physical health while he's been at the Belmarsh security prison.
And she said, no, I'm not going to adjourn these proceedings.
They made a request to push it to January.
And she said, because they did not ask for the adjournment in August, and instead because they asked her to use her authority and just remove the conduct so it could be the case that they thought they were fighting, well, she said, I don't know, she kind of insulted them and suggested that they didn't understand the law and had done the wrong thing.
And because they did the wrong thing, she wasn't even going to hear their request for adjournment.
It's certainly a rig game there.
And the fact that he's being held without bail in maximum security terrorist prison and all of this is clearly meant to be punishment enough, you know, right, or not, not necessarily enough, but part of his sentence already.
And the abuse is definitely a part of it.
The constant abuse and the way in which Vanessa Barretzer has done very little to support his due process rights during this, I think that doesn't go discussed much.
But we saw on day two that most of the news media is focused upon this outburst that occurred with Julian Assange, where he interrupted the proceedings and he said, this is nonsense.
And he was, he was asking the, you know, he, he was, he stopped James Lewis, who is part of the Crown Prosecution Authority, is this British attorney who's representing the interests of the U.S. government in this case.
And he was cross-examining Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, who is a human rights attorney, or he used to be with Reprieve, he was a founder of this human rights organization.
He's been involved in fighting U.S. drone killings on behalf of survivors or victims.
He's been involved in representing Guantanamo Bay military prisoners.
And Lewis kept going at Stafford Smith, at Clive Stafford Smith and saying that, you know, you don't understand how this works.
You keep talking about documents that we haven't charged.
We've only charged the documents that exposed informant's names.
So you can't talk about these cables or the detainee assessment briefs, which are known as the Guantanamo Bay files.
And Julian just got very, it's fair to say, pissed off at this lawyer who kept repeatedly badgering this human rights attorney and he said, this is nonsense.
And he started going off in the middle of the proceedings.
And then the judge halted the day's proceedings and then he came back and he was scolded.
He was told that if he does this again, he might be removed and not allowed to participate in the extradition hearing for the rest of this trial portion.
And a lot of the coverage that we're seeing in the media is highlighting this as the unruly defendant who needs to be brought under control.
And in fact, I think the context needs to be understood here that there's been so much that Assange has dealt with in the past year with this, that I'm surprised there haven't been more outbursts from Julian Assange because he's been denied bail.
They won't let him go on home confinement.
He made a very simple, basic request back in February to sit with his attorneys and not be kept in a glass box.
And the judge opposed it, even though the prosecutors said they would allow it and that it's not a new kind of, you know, so I don't know how much you know about this, but compared to the U.S. where we don't have glass boxes in our courthouses, they put the high profile terrorist defendants back in this glass cage type thing.
And it's sometimes hard for people to hear and follow what's going on.
And you can't really engage with your counsel.
You can't give them questions that you'd like to put to witnesses, or if you don't understand what's going on, they can't turn around and explain it to you easily.
And that's been very frustrating to Assange.
So I think we should be really stunned that there haven't been more Assange outbursts.
Well, and that everybody is not outbursting in his favor because of those circumstances.
And for that matter, all the Arab terrorist defendants before him, like they all have a built-in suicide bomb somehow that can go off even when they're in custody, you know?
I mean, what could possibly be the danger of letting them sit at the table, much less, you know, Julian Assange, for crying out loud?
But of course, you know, that's part of it.
And again, that's part of the punishment, is that, you know, your role in your own defense is diminished, and you have to sit there helplessly watching these people you don't know decide your fate.
Yeah, I think it's about wearing him down.
I'll note that there's formalities that come with a fresh extradition request.
So for a third time, he was asked the basic question that all people are asked if they're going to be extradited from the UK to the US, and it was, you know, do you concede basically to your extradition?
And he, of course, said no.
But you know, imagine the psychological wear that he's gone through, and having already been asked twice, what if on that third time you just said yes, because you're tired of all this?
Well, yeah, I mean, that could be part of the strategy.
He's a sharp enough guy to not fall for that.
You know, and you mentioned there, they're only saying that out of all of the State Department cables, the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs, the Guantanamo files, all of which are still available for the audience's perusal at wikileaks.org there, that, oh, no, no, we're only charging the ones that had informants names in them.
But as you point out in your journalism here, and I'm not sure, I think you mentioned that this was brought up by his lawyers in the court, that they argued about this, that, and maybe that the prosecutor didn't even understand the facts of this correctly, if I understood it right, that all of that information was already published online before Wikileaks released it, and that was because of that idiot from The Guardian had posted the password in a book, had published the password in a book that led to all the stuff that had not yet had the informants names censored out of it being posted online, and that only then did Wikileaks post it up there, right?
Yeah, that's correct.
So that came up, and that was actually with a witness named Mark Feldstein, who's a journalism professor who wasn't really on the stand to talk about all of that.
That's something that the prosecutors brought up.
And then he got led into a cul-de-sac, and he didn't really know how to get out.
And the defense had to come back later and try to bail him so that he wasn't just helping the prosecutors make arguments against Assange.
But one thing that's really important to note is that Clive Stafford Smith was faced with what you're talking about here, this claim, this repeated claim that, oh, none of what you're talking about matters.
I know you've represented Guantanamo prisoners, okay?
You say you did this stuff that helped lead to a subsiding of drone strikes in Pakistan.
But we're really not concerned with that.
We didn't charge that, and Clive Stafford Smith very smartly said, I don't think you understand how U.S. cases work.
I don't think you really understand how this would be pursued, because what they're going to do if Assange is put on trial is they'll call someone like an FBI expert, or they'll call somebody comparable to testify at length about terrorism, or terrorist groups, or just simply al-Qaeda, or maybe they would talk about ISIS.
I don't know.
But there'd be very broad testimony about how WikiLeaks revealed this information that helped terrorists, and it's actually the position of the U.S. government that torture revelations fuel blowback, or they inflame terrorists to the point where they will engage in retaliatory attacks against U.S. military forces.
And so that's why we need to keep all of this evidence of torture classified from the people.
That's why we have to hide this criminality.
So in fact, these documents actually do matter, because the way that the case is going to be brought against Julian Assange is to, you know, somewhat suppress them and also kind of use them against WikiLeaks.
Right.
Which, you're right that, of course, Smith is great at what he does and had his act together the way he answered that is, of course, absolutely right.
And isn't it ironic that all of the rest of the time you're supposed to think that Islam makes men into suicide bombers and all of this stuff, except when the facts are necessary.
And then they say, well, your honor, if the people of the world were able to see this video footage of the inside of the Abu Ghraib prison, then that would cause more terrorist attacks against the American people, because in fact, they hate us for what we do, not because of who they are and who we are.
Right.
And we haven't really gotten to it, but there's Camp Bucca, which is, you know, where Baghdadi was.
And there's actually a standard operating procedure that was disclosed by WikiLeaks there.
It's something that we can see.
He was in Abu Ghraib, too.
John Schwartz at The Intercept shows where he was also at Abu Ghraib, but I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, but I think, like, you're getting to a very good point here.
And something else that came up that's relevant to recent developments in the last few months is the fact that WikiLeaks disclosures have gone to help this investigation that the International Criminal Court wants to pursue in Afghanistan that is going to focus on CIA torture.
And we've seen Mike Pompeo and other Trump officials who are key people for why Donald Trump is prosecuting this case.
We've seen that they are sanctioning International Criminal Court investigators who want to focus on U.S. torture and war crimes.
And that was brought up in the context of this case, because actually WikiLeaks disclosures are part of how they won the appeal to keep this ongoing in the ICC.
So there's a lot of this that what the, you know, to give this a broad context, what the defense is doing with this extradition proceeding is trying to present this, all this evidence of torture and war crimes that came out in the cables and the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs as well as in the Guantanamo Bay files that show that there was criminality in these documents that was exposed.
And in order to suppress it, what they're doing is prosecuting Julian Assange with this extradition.
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And now, this has got to be the crux of it, but of course the lawyers have to, you know, engage in every different legal argument that they've got.
But I know part of what they had this expert Feldstein argue was, I think you quote him saying, well I'm not saying the New York Times and the WikiLeaks are the exact same things, but what I am saying is that what they do is essentially the same thing.
And that you can't make a legal differentiation between this kind of journalism and that one because of the limitations of the English language.
I mean, what this guy is doing is essentially publishing leaks that are given to him in just the same way as has happened.
I think you should, like some kind of master list of 10 million leaks or something, right?
Yeah, so Feldstein listed a lot of history of these leaks that have come off, and unfortunately off the top of my head I can't rattle this off, but it's available in the day two thread that I put out on my Twitter handles at KayGastola if anybody wanted to grab that.
I think it's just, you know, for me the basic point is that in the continuum here, this has been happening all the time, and I think Feldstein's value to the extent that it might help persuade Beretzer to reject extradition is to show that they truly are criminalizing standard practices in journalism.
And they truly are trying to treat this as extraordinary when it really isn't.
I mean, maybe the volume of documents is something that catches us off guard, but it's much more easier to release that kind of volume of material in the digital age, whereas if you go back a hundred years, I think 10 pages would have made people feel the way we do about half a million documents.
And so, you know, he made this, he emphasized the solicitation aspect of news gathering and how that's not criminal, just something that the prosecution is explicitly targeting here.
And he said, I have a history of soliciting.
This is what I do.
This is what journalists do.
And if you think that there's passive news gathering and that's it, like, hey, I'm just sitting here waiting for someone anonymously to send me an envelope or an email that has documents that will just magically show up and I can report something that'll tear down the structures of government and reveal mass wrongdoing.
That's not how it works.
You're, you're constantly working sources and trying to get them to cough up material so that you have stories to report.
I mean, this is, this is normal conduct.
And you know, he also made it clear that you have a moral obligation to protect your source.
So we've had part of the case focus on how Assange was maybe going to help Manning find a way to conceal her identity as she moved around the U.S. government computers and grab this material that could be exposed.
Well, I mean, to a certain degree, if you're a journalist, you want to protect your source so that, you know, when you go to publish, the government isn't immediately ruining the life of the person that just gave you this material.
Of course.
And, you know, my wife is a investigative reporter and trade craft and working with your sources on trade craft about how to make sure we don't get caught with these secrets going through here and how to make sure you don't get caught later and all that is a huge part of it.
That's how you convince somebody to give you a secret is I have a way to make sure that no one will know it was you, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
In other words, soliciting, convincing, persuading as much as possible for them to try to say that that's crossing some line is ridiculous.
There's no line.
Yeah.
Crazy.
Okay.
So now what else do we learn from Feldstein that's important here from his testimony?
You said that he got trapped by the bad guys a couple of times into maybe conceding a couple of things unnecessarily.
Were those important?
You know, I don't I don't know.
I had an issue with how judge how the judge was managing the courtroom, because to me, I don't think that the prosecutor should have been able to keep asking the questions he was of Feldstein because he was there on the stand to testify about journalism.
And what he was now being used for by the prosecution was to basically do an infomercial for their extradition case.
And and and he doesn't know how the indictment was put together.
He doesn't know how the Justice Department developed it, and he never claimed to.
But he did make a narrow statement with his with his submission to the court about what was significant.
And the significance was that the Obama administration didn't pursue charges against Julian Assange.
That's just a fact.
That's a fact that they had an opportunity to do it when they were prosecuting Chelsea Manning in a military court and they ran up against a roadblock or they came up against something and they decided not to issue charges.
And from the reporting we have in The New York Times, and I think there's even a Washington Post article that we heard about today, although I'm a little less familiar with that.
But the reporting out there was that they recognize there was a New York Times problem and that you couldn't prosecute WikiLeaks and then turn around and say you weren't going to go after the editors or the publishers or the journalists over at The New York Times that you were going to be endangering what they do as well.
So they backed away from it.
Now, the problem here is they never shut down the grand jury investigation.
So it was just there when Donald Trump stepped into office.
And when I talk about this, most of the time when I give the timeline, I focus on Jeff Sessions as the attorney general as being one of the key players who was so against WikiLeaks and has his history of hating leaks.
And he's one of the few senators in the recent history of the U.S. Senate who supported things like a law that would explicitly criminalize leaks from the government.
Him and Joe Lieberman, both in favor of doing this, having a kind of official secrets act here in the United States, which is in the UK.
We don't have that here.
We have the First Amendment.
So you can't really have an official secrets act that comports with the First Amendment.
So I think that Feldstein, his value was impressing upon the court that there was a political decision made.
And that's what they're trying to convince the court, is that this is a political case.
Objectively speaking, the Obama administration hated Assange, would have charged him if they could, but they were like, we can't, that would jeopardize a lot of what we claim to stand for.
And as much as I loathe the Justice Department and a lot of what they do on any given day, I can't pretend like they didn't make the appropriate decision.
Yeah.
At that time.
At that time.
Yeah.
Specific and isolated instance.
Again, I'm not endorsing widely the U.S. Justice Department's activities.
No, I hear you, of course.
Now listen, so when you're saying that this guy was basically used as the infomercial, in other words, the prosecutor wasn't really asking him questions.
He was just doing a performance for the court and using this witness as a punching bag and getting him off onto topics that he didn't really know about.
Yeah.
And also, you know, hitting those talking points that any of the hawks or national security agents like to hit on when they want to undermine the effectiveness of the leaks that have exposed massive criminality or wrongdoing.
Things like, well, do you agree that journalists aren't above the law?
Do you think that anything can be kept secret?
Are there pieces of information that can be kept secret?
I mean, I'm sure that you've spent enough time on these subjects that you've heard these canards over and over again.
And it was just pointless.
It had nothing to do with anything in the case.
It was just a performance.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder if overall, I mean, I can see Assange's frustration that he's going to jump up in circumstances like these and say, enough of this garbage.
Can we get to business, please?
Or whatever it is.
I wonder if overall, maybe it's a good thing for even bringing his case, you know, back to people's attention, knowing that the media is only going to cover stuff like that.
You know, and hopefully raise the issue of, well, what exactly is he being prosecuted for here to more people?
Have you seen any change in the spirit of the media at all on his story that, geez, there but for the grace of God goes me at the hands of the DOJ?
So we've had in the last month or two, at least 40 or so press freedom.
I think some of them are even peace groups or human rights groups from around the world who are pressuring, I want to say Downing Street, actually trying to get the UK government to oppose the extradition, which isn't a bad tactic to try to pursue because it's almost hopeless to try anything here in the United States.
But we've seen some of these groups step up in ways they had been silent two or three years ago, not really engaged in what was going on.
And you've got groups that mostly when he was in the embassy, they they weren't paying that close attention and didn't take his concerns seriously.
But hey, I I'm someone who really admired and respected the work of Michael Ratner at Center for Constitutional Rights and some of the other and some of the other old older attorney.
I mean, he was he was a fan of the work that that I did on Chelsea Manning.
He helped me and others at CCR challenge the military court at Fort Meade when they weren't releasing documents to journalists that, you know, transcripts weren't being made available.
So he was good for helping me fight for some transparency in the Chelsea Manning case.
And I just remember the things that they were saying all along, predicting what would happen with the U.S. case and predicting that, you know, even if, you know, even if the U.S.
Justice Department backed off and weren't going to charge Assange now, that really wasn't any guarantee of anything.
Constantly saying that the Swedish allegations, the sexual allegations, that that was all just a ruse to find a way to tie him up and eventually bring him to the United States for trial.
And a lot of people just brushed it off as, you know, that these are cranks are coming up with conspiracies.
And it all turned out to be true.
It turned out to be absolutely true.
And so I think that's the takeaway, is that we really need to consider the credibility that a lot of the people on Assange's side have because they've been proven to be right.
And you know, we saw with Ecuador and the UK and the United States and Sweden that all four of these countries have basically conspired with each other to engage in this massive public character assassination of a journalist and publisher to the point where he is currently in a cell in a jail rotting away.
Yep.
And you know, the public too, I understand that the right wing is mad at Assange for the Manning leak and the left wing is mad at Assange for the, or not left wing, I guess I should say, the liberals, the conservatives and the liberals are mad over the case of the 2016 email publications and all that.
How about instead of having both sides mad at him, both sides should love him.
The liberals and the left and the progressives should all celebrate him for being the guy that leaked all that great stuff with Manning about the wars.
And the right wingers can love him for helping to sink Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And then we can all be on the right side of the First Amendment and our traditions of free speech and free media.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a lot of lies that are still told about WikiLeaks and the role of what was published in 2016 and the effect that that had and who was involved.
And you know, the one thing that is, the one thing that is sort of odd about this prosecution is that it completely overlooks everything that has to, I mean, well, they brought it up today.
The prosecutor did, but for the most part, they're just kind of uninterested in raising all of it.
I mean, I think that that's a huge can of worms that they just don't want to open because there's a lot going on with intelligence agents that they just don't want Assange to, we've all heard of the term gray mail.
We probably just don't want to make a case out of this.
And that's also why the vault seven materials haven't been brought into this at all.
I don't know if you're familiar with, with that release, but sure, go ahead and remind us though.
Yeah.
Well, it was just the, it was just the CIA materials that brought, um, you know, an extra dimension to what we understood our intelligence agencies were doing.
And to some degree, we kind of knew this was happening because Edward Snowden had exposed all of these documents that it's basically the CIA spying on us on the FBI.
On an NSA level.
Yeah, using the same tactics, the same tactics that NSA had been using, basically.
And then, you know, there was the important thing of that, right, was he was negotiating with the CIA, um, or, well, I'm going to screw this story up, but he had some, he was talking with, uh, um, I guess the FBI about, they would, uh, pardon him or, or, you know, let him come home, drop the, drop the espionage charges or whatever it was.
If he would just, uh, agree to not release the vault seven stuff.
And then Comey told Senator Warner and Warner leaked it and ruin the whole thing.
And so that was, that was, think about that.
The political bosses completely screwing the CIA there.
You'd think that the CIA would then get revenge against them on the right side of this thing.
But no, but that was a hell of a story right there.
They could have protected all those secrets.
If only they were willing to drop these bogus charges against this journalist and they weren't willing to do that.
Comey went and sabotaged it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, if, if I recall correctly, part of that was that, uh, they were still collecting evidence on this, uh, you know, sham of a Russia Trump investigation.
And they wanted to know what WikiLeaks his role was in the publication of these emails and, uh, who their sources were.
And of course you can't ask a journalist to, to, to come and testify about that.
They're not going to do that.
But, um, you know, the situation in which Assange found himself, he was willing to actually testify about who wasn't the source because there's a lot of disinformation out there.
And that was part of the potential agreement is that he was going to give testimony and details and, and that Democrat Mark Warner in the intelligence committee, he put the kibosh on that and said, we're not going to let you do that.
So, uh, that all blew up and he obviously went on to publish the vault seven materials because there was no dealing anymore.
Uh, so, uh, I think that kind of precipitated an escalation in this to some extent, because a lot of what you see with this case seems to all center around the CIA's vendetta against Julian Assange.
And my view, I mean, most of what we have rhetorically from the government comes from Mike Pompeo and anybody else working with him and his immediate circle, that, that rhetoric that we have now of, of describing WikiLeaks as the hostile non-state intelligence agency that's coming from Mike Pompeo and people are repeating that now, huh?
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's, it's seeped into the way that we understand WikiLeaks, but you know, if, um, one last detail I would, I would get in here is that Mark Feldstein actually raised, uh, a part of the history of the war on journalists.
And I found it to be an incredible analogy or, or incredibly similar to what, uh, Assange has gone through personally.
So Feldstein's the author of this book called Poisoning the Press, and it focused on a journalist named Jack Anderson, who was a thorn in the side of the Nixon administration.
And they did a lot.
They wanted to shut him down, um, and they were even bringing in intelligence operatives from the CIA and trying to contemplate ways that they could assassinate him, uh, poison him.
Uh, and the poisoning part that I hear, um, and some of the different things, they wanted to smear LSD on his steering wheel and see if they could, um, affect him in that way.
And I, I hear all of this and I go, oh, I recall that in this case, the, the undercover global is this private security company that targeted Julian Assange while he was in the Ecuador embassy.
Uh, the Ecuador government under Lenin Moreno brought this company in and it was supported by US intelligence.
We believe the CIA was involved.
We at least know that all of the information being collected by the security company was being piped into an FBI server.
So, uh, they had concocted their own schemes that they wanted to employ to go after Assange, like kidnapping him.
I mean, there was this idea that they were going to leave the door open to the embassy and someone was going to leave the embassy, just leave it open so people could swoop in and take Julian Assange out.
And they could basically, I guess, commit rendition and bring him to the United States with no extradition at all.
Um, and there were, you know, there were things along the lines of poisoning that were discussed as well as, as a way to, to get him.
And this was the CIA.
So we see, uh, the echoes of, uh, of the way that the Nixon administration was at war against journalists coming up here now, um, under Trump.
Yep.
And you know, all of the things, you know, including or aside, however you take it, this is enough to oppose Donald Trump.
This is enough.
He should be impeached and removed from office just for this, for daring to challenge the free press, um, you know, uh, clauses of the first amendment in this way.
How dare he allow his government, I know he ain't driving it necessarily, but he's allowing his just department to do this.
He can tell them that he wants it stopped right now and they would have to stop it.
And he's absolutely responsible for this in just the same way that, uh, Barack Obama was responsible for prosecuting however many it was eight or 10 people under the espionage act, uh, during his reign.
And this is just absolutely unacceptable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I, I say to people out there who are supporters of Donald Trump, uh, and you know, my message to them is if you heard him talking about those emails that were published against Hillary Clinton and you heard him talking about how exciting it was to have the WikiLeaks, uh, first off, let me make clear that I don't think there's anything wrong with Donald Trump's campaign using those materials to try to beat Hillary Clinton.
Uh, that makes sense to me.
I mean, Hillary Clinton would have tried to win with those materials if they were against Donald Trump.
Hey, how come the emails didn't portray her as the greatest Senator and American leader ever?
Why were they anything to be embarrassed about at all?
Yeah.
I mean, they tried to lie and say they were forged and they couldn't find any proof of that.
But, uh, but now of course, as, uh, he's up for reelection, he's completely, um, uh, abandoned his love for WikiLeaks.
Four years later, we don't hear anything about Julian Assange.
She wants to pretend like none of this is happening.
And to a certain degree, his supporters have allowed this to be the way it's kept silent because it's not an issue that they, you know, the make America great again, people who love the Clinton emails, uh, don't really seem to care that Julian Assange is in a jail.
But if you believe that those emails helped to get your president elected, uh, it's kind of, it's kind of appalling that you're letting this man rot in a jail in London, um, after what he did for you.
Yeah.
All right.
One last question.
Is it true that Patrick Coburn is going to testify?
Yeah, he's on the list.
Uh, we've got Dan, we've got Dan Ellsberg on the list and we've also got Noam Chomsky on the list.
So, so some, some, uh, uh, heavy hitters here in the, in the world of people who have spoken up against us empire.
Yeah.
Uh, the world's greatest journalist and the world's greatest whistleblower there, Coburn and Ellsberg, you can't really do better than that.
So, um, man, oh man, I'll tell you, uh, this is going to be something, and this is expected to go on one another two, three weeks, you say?
Yeah, we should see this go on through September 24th or, or after, uh, there's about two witnesses every day that they're able to put on the stand and there's over 20, uh, 20 or 24 witnesses that we're going to hear from.
Um, and, uh, and we've yet to get to the really good stuff about the CIA supported security or espionage operation that was targeting Assange.
Yeah.
I mean, that'll certainly be, uh, I guess if it's allowed, that'll be a major part of the defense's case is the way that they've been violating his rights thus far.
Right.
Right.
Well, I mean they, and this is what they'll talk to Ellsberg about.
They see a similarity because the, of the burglars that broke into Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to try to steal records and go after him.
Um, and they, and then that played a role in him not being found guilty under the espionage act.
And, and that's sort of why we had this delay in the way we go after leakers.
Right.
Great point.
Um, okay, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today and all of your great journalism over the last decade on this issue, Kevin.
And um, I beg you permission to invite you back on the show over and over again throughout this month as a, this is going on to get the best out of you here.
Yeah.
Hit me up whenever I, I, I'd love to do it.
And um, you know, if you, if you let me just quickly plug, if anybody wants to see what is happening on a daily basis, I've got these threads going out, um, uh, every, every more early.
Um, in the U S this is starting up at like 5am in the morning, but, uh, by the time everyone's up and, um, moving around, they probably can see a full half day of the thread and there's going to be a day thread every single day that these proceedings are ongoing.
And uh, um, I don't have it handy.
I wish I did, but I, uh, Edward Snowden caught some of my coverage, had a really great comment about the Kafka esque nature of the proceedings.
So, uh, anyways, it's, it's had a kind of, it's had a good effect and I'm, I'm, I'm glad there's not a whole lot of journalists that are following this really closely.
So that's right.
It's uh, you and Joe Lauria and, and just as small handful, uh, keeping up like this.
So, and, and by the way, so I have a blog at the Libertarian Institute that has a link to both threads and I'm pretty sure we copied that over onto the antiwar.com slash blog over there as well.
If people want to find those links and those links will also be, uh, Sam, uh, we'll definitely link them up in the show notes, uh, you know, at the entries of this interview at the Institute and at scotthorton.org as well.
So people can check all those out.
And then on Twitter, it's a twitter.com slash K got Stola and you're just going to have to go to shadowproof.com to figure out how to spell that.
Thank you, Kevin.
Appreciate it so much.
Thank you.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, apsradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
