America This Week, June 28, 2024

I'm Matt Taibbi.

After a couple of weeks of not terribly, well, that's not true, actually.

We just haven't had weeks of the sort where lots of huge things happen just before we

go on air.

But that was not the case this week.

This week was incredibly eventful.

Right.

Right.

And we're going to be, as you're probably already aware, we will be sort of live streaming

the debate tonight.

It's going to be on my Twitter account, at mtaibbi.

You'll be able to see it there.

If you look on Racket, you'll be able to see instructions on how to watch it.

We've had to make a few changes about where this is going to be broadcast because of CNN's

unusual restrictions.

And we'll get into all that tonight.

But that will already have happened by the time this show comes out.

So the two huge stories that we're going to talk about instead of the debate, if you want

to hear our thoughts on the debate, which are probably going to be drunken by this evening,

I think.

Yes, for sure.

So we had two enormous historical events happen this week.

The first being the release, somewhat surprisingly, although I think we both got hints that this

was going to come, of Julian Assange that struck a plea deal with the government that

gets more interesting the more we hear about it.

But he's already free.

I heard from his brother this morning, Gabriel Shipton, that Julian's already had a walk

on the beach, that he's feeling good.

And he's out after an incredibly long ordeal.

And we can get into some of the history of that.

But Walter, did you think he was going to get out?

And what do you think of the timing?

So if Trump won, it was a done deal.

There's some who speculate that that jogged the process.

I think both you and I never understood why he didn't get out under Trump.

But I guess I thought he'd get out eventually, though I heard at various times during his

incarceration that he wasn't doing all that well physically.

So there was some suspense about whether he would come out the same man.

And apparently, he's doing well, as you say, and that's wonderful.

I was hoping that he would get out without conditions, but he was forced to accept several

conditions.

So in addition to the fact that he had to plead to the top count of the Espionage Act

and the 62 months that he spent in jail, will go towards time served.

So this is not him getting out, being freed, because the government is making any kind

of admission about the fallibility of their case.

Or the inappropriateness of bringing it.

They're actually saying that the five, the 62 months that he served was appropriate,

and that he should have been charged under the Espionage Act.

And we'll get into what the implications of that are.

But then also, we heard this.

And he went to, I guess it was the Marianas Islands, right, Saipan, to plead on the way

home.

And this is NPR reporting, under the terms of the agreement, Assange faces a sentence

of 62 months, equivalent to the time he has already served at Belmarsh Prison in the United

Kingdom, while fighting extradition to the United States.

The judge said Assange was required to direct Wikileaks to destroy material containing classified

information, though given how long this case has gone on, such an action is likely to have

minimal impact.

Walter, what do you think of that?

I mean, that's a weird inference to me.

It suggests that Wikileaks hasn't had time while he's been gone to gather new stuff.

From what I understand, he was also asked to destroy stuff that had already existed,

stuff that had already circulated, or take it off the servers, at least.

And if he was holding anything back, which one might, as someone negotiating for his

life, so to speak, I would guess that he had to turn over or destroy that too.

And whether it was substantial or not is impossible for us to know.

By definition.

government that they insisted on its destruction.

And we also have to ask ourselves whether his possession of whatever that was, was an

element in the negotiations.

Yeah.

Would they have let him out absent this thing that he clearly was holding over their heads?

You know, these are all tricky questions.

They get into, you know, it's impossible to speculate because when Wikileaks over the

years has dropped things, including like the Vault 7 files, those were incredibly damaging

to the United States.

We didn't have any clue that that was coming.

So it could be something like that, where, you know, it's something about the US capabilities

that they don't want him to release.

But it could also, you know, I mean, it's hard for me not to wonder about things like

things that are related to 2016, the DNC releases, who the source might have been on some of

those things.

I mean, those questions are certainly at the center of the Assange drama.

And this is not going to make, this is going to make those questions get louder, not the

opposite.

So that's a drag.

But, you know, the other thing about this is just the, I'm very glad that he got out,

you know, as someone, I think we've both spoken on his behalf over these years.

You know, I appeared with Stella last year in London, you know, in an effort to try to

keep attention focused on the case.

And but the fact that he pleaded guilty means that this case still has unbelievable implications

for journalists going forward.

And the total lack of recognition of this in the press community, the fact that nobody

has looked at this as a, as an ongoing threat to press freedom tells everybody that most

journalists now do not see themselves ever.

They just can't imagine themselves ever being in the role of publishing something that the

government doesn't want them to publish.

And facing the kinds of charges that Assange faced, you know, 175 years for Espionage Act

charges.

What's your take on the on the press reaction to this whole thing?

And that's, and that's instructive in itself.

It was a, you know, they talk about chilling effects.

This was a freezing effect for any journalist contemplating some project like WikiLeaks

to or Pentagon Papers to or whatever, because we're not going to only prosecute you imprison

you, we're going to make you destroy your files.

And really, and then and then I think another condition was that he not contest this in

the future.

I guess that's common in these plea deals.

But you know, he can't use Freedom of Information Act discovery to somehow argue his case again,

or try to show his innocence.

The importance of this for journalists going forward is absolutely paramount, because there's

no wiggle room, apparently.

And did he win a moral victory?

It's hard to say.

They kind of denied him one, I think.

Um, you know, we just had a case where an Australian Army lawyer got five years for

leaking details of offenses by Australian Special Air Services in Afghanistan, doing

things like putting the throw down weapons next to unarmed bodies.

Um, you know, not not terribly dissimilar from from what WikiLeaks did five years sentence

for that for the source.

Now, that's the source.

That's not a publisher like WikiLeaks was.

But still, there, I think they're making an example out of leakers.

leak to WikiLeaks?

Right.

But they made an example for publishers and journalists, too.

So right, that's the entire life cycle of a leak, the person that comes from and the

person that goes to and the person who puts it out.

And all those parties are now under severe warnings.

I still run into people who don't really know or they don't really understand.

They think it's one of a couple of things.

I think it's hacking.

All right.

I hear that all the time that Julian Assange is on trial for hacking.

Not exactly true.

There's one one of the 18 counts.

And we'll get into this.

Hang on a second.

Let's see.

The last count here, conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, is actually an agreement

they never even saw whether it happened or not between Assange and Chelsea Manning, then

Bradley Manning, saying, you know, can you help me crack a hash?

The idea being to help Manning access files, but not under her own identity.

And so this wasn't actually hacking into, you know, helping helping her hack the database.

The idea would be helping her disguise her identity.

That was that was the idea behind this attempted act.

Really, it was just, yeah, you know, I agree to try to help you.

And there was never any showing that this happened or that there was any kind of real

attempt to make it work.

But they did have a written exchange with an agreement.

And that was the first case.

And then the second thing with the rest of it, all these other charges, you know, one

two to four, five to eight, nine to 11.

These are all Espionage Act charges, conspiracy to receive national defense information, disclosure

of national defense information, disclosure of national defense information.

Although some of these materials may have been classified, they were not classified

that is not a required element of these charges.

National defense information can be anything the government asserts in the Espionage Act,

which we've talked about with other cases of the Mar-a-Lago case.

And the problem here for journalists is, well, what do you call conspiracy to obtain national

defense information if you're a national security reporter?

want you to.

I mean, it could be almost anything, couldn't it?

And in the indictment, what I thought was even more damning is they list what they're

upset about.

And here they write, to further encourage the disclosure of protected information,

including classified information.

The WikiLeaks website posted a detailed list of the most wanted leaks of 2009.

And they go on to talk about what those are.

And let's see.

Here it is.

On November 28, 2009, Manning in turn searched the classified network search engine Intel

link for retention of interrogation videos.

The next day, Manning searched the classified network for detainee plus abuse, which was

consistent with the most wanted leaks request on WikiLeaks.

And what are they talking about when they mean that?

Well, just so that people can remember.

This is what, by the way, this is very hard to find.

The actual WikiLeaks site is gone.

You have to rummage through the Wayback Machine to actually find this.

But the most wanted list was asking people to find CIA detainee interrogation videos

and detainee abuse photos withheld by the Obama administration.

And so that's what they're upset about.

They're upset that they were looking for essentially corruption or things that are

worse than corruption and that he shared that.

And the government does not have a right to classify abuse, torture, violations of law,

things that are embarrassing.

So that part of it has always been frustrating for me.

You talk to journalists, they continually come back to it's either hacking, which if

you hack, then now you're not a journalist, you're a criminal.

Or they say it's conspiring to get classified material, which journalists do all the time.

So I think it's also important just to take a moment and say, what came out of WikiLeaks?

What were its greatest hits?

We all remember the hacking.

We call it the hacking of the DNC, but there's no evidence that it was.

Could have been supplied by a source, an insider at various times, especially on TV.

In one interview, Sanj suggested that he had an inside source who brought him his stuff.

He denied at all times that the Russians had any involvement.

He was often accused of that.

Another thing that you're going to see and do see in the public case against Sanj is that

he acted on behalf of Russia in some way.

You see that all the time.

But no proof of any actual collusion or cooperation.

And it doesn't even, by the way, it also doesn't make sense.

If you've followed Sanj at all throughout his career,

there are some things about his personality that I'm sure lots of people won't like.

And he's been accused of a lot of things in terms of, you know, perhaps hypocritical

attitudes towards secrecy about WikiLeaks versus secrecy about governments.

But he's never, ever been someone who has been allied with governments.

That's just not his thing.

He's fundamentally opposed to that.

And there's never been any evidence of that.

Sorry, I interrupted.

But just to review what exactly came out from WikiLeaks over the years that,

you know, was supposedly the basis for all this.

Let's remember what it was.

You know, most recently, it was the DNC leaks, the emails, the so-called Podesta emails.

Before that, footage of a sort of helicopter-borne wipeout of some journalists in Iraq.

A lot of things.

But what of it seemed classified to you or seemed like it somehow revealed something

that would get American troops or agents in big trouble?

Because that's the other thing we're told, that his revelations resulted in the deaths

of many American or, I don't know, allied troops in Afghanistan.

The accusation that always sticks to him is that he released the names of people who

worked with the United States in places like Afghanistan,

you know, and that they could have been subject to being hunted down by the Taliban.

But, you know, the idea that he exposed military positions in the field or spies,

the identities of spies, you know, there's no single instance of that.

The Pentagon actually had a task force that looked at that issue

and concluded they couldn't find any deaths attributable to WikiLeaks.

That was back in like 2011, but still.

And beyond that, just by any conventional measure of like what a scoop is in journalism,

they've been by far, you know, the biggest producer of sort of massive scoops in our

generation, you know, everything from the release of the US diplomatic cables.

I think there were like 90,000 of them.

There was the Gitmo files, again, the collateral murder attack, the Vault 7 stuff.

I mean, just one thing after another.

And I think a lot of journalists maybe are just jealous of some of the things that he's gotten.

And, you know, the method is certainly different.

I mean, as a young journalist, I wasn't sure.

I liked the idea of just putting stuff out there.

But it increasingly makes sense because now where context is used to obfuscate so much,

you want to look at the primary documents almost before you even want to look at anybody

reporting on it.

You know?

Right.

rather than your interpretation or your selective summary of them.

And, you know, I sometimes wonder, though, if really his crime in the end wasn't political.

It was these DNC leaks.

It was the 2016 election that really turned a lot of people who at

earlier stages were celebrating Julian Assange, and suddenly they got on the bandwagon that,

you know, Satan had come up out of hell to somehow hurt our democracy.

is so transparent what it was all about.

It's actually almost embarrassing.

I mean, I remember doing public service announcements for Manning, you know, back in

2010.

Every good liberal wanted to be, you know, part of those efforts.

But as soon as WikiLeaks continued to put out things that were now damaging not to the Bush

administration, but to the Obama administration, when they started putting out things about,

you know, trade agreements, right?

I'm trying to remember which of the TPP, the TTIP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Suddenly, he was embarrassing to the Obama administration.

And I remember talking to people in the Justice Department who had this attitude that, well,

you know, he's basically a terrorist and we should probably just kill him.

It was just a shocking thing for me to hear.

And that was from somebody I liked.

And then under Trump, apparently, there was a scheme afoot to assassinate him.

We've heard reports of that.

I don't know quite how they can be substantiated, but those rumors exist, I guess.

And, yeah, he turned into public enemy number one after having been a Daniel Ellsberg-like

figure when he was just hurting Bush.

And it's to every journalist's credit who stood by him, as far as I'm concerned.

It was a little bit of a sorting exercise to see who would and who wouldn't.

And that's why the silence over the rather prejudicial way in which he was released

upsets me.

Because this is, as we said, great for Assange, great for his family,

not great for the rest of us.

wherever you are, anywhere in the world,

and put you away forever, you know, if they feel like it.

I mean, if he had been in a US territory, you know, things might be very different here.

If he hadn't been in the UK, where the political pressures were different.

But certainly, this precedent, and again, I've had arguments with other reporters about this.

You know, you talk about the Assange case, they immediately start bringing up 2016.

And you say, dude, have you read the indictment?

This isn't about 2016.

It's like, yeah, but it speaks to who he is.

No, it doesn't.

It has nothing to do with Julian Assange.

This case is about you going forward.

This is what they're laying out in this indictment is what they can do to somebody

who publishes something that is very damaging to the national security establishment.

Now, sometimes, yes, you do need to have some kind of punishment in place for people who

publish classified information.

The traditional way we did that is, you know, we made the price was always paid by the source.

And they understood that the whistleblowers always understood

that if they leaked classified information, or if they stole it,

they may have to, you know, do a bid for that.

But going after the reporter was sort of a new tactic that started, by the way,

in earnest under Barack Obama, who started to use the Espionage Act.

And reporters just could not process the idea that this could ever apply to them.

And to this day, they can't.

I guess because they just don't see themselves ever being in that position.

They can process the notion that it might apply to them.

But they're unafraid because they have no intention of doing this kind of thing.

You know, they've internalized the lesson so deeply.

And they've even rationalized it as somehow moral, perhaps,

such that they're not going to be vulnerable to any of this.

So, you know, the kind of reporters who are doing the kind of thing

that Julian Assange did, and might face the same fate are very few anymore.

Very few.

Cy Hirsch, maybe, right, was the kind of person who would have published,

he did, he published the Family Jewel story, which was,

the CIA desperately did not want that story to come out.

And he did it.

And that was what, you know, gave you the imprimatur of a great investigative journalist

back then.

Who is that person now in the mainstream press?

I just don't know, right?

I mean, you see, when the same kind of thing repeated with Greenwald and Snowden,

you know, they both ended up essentially expatriates as a result of that story.

And yeah, well, I think it's a shot across their bow, basically.

I think one of the reasons this story bothers you is because

should information of the kind that WikiLeaks published come your way?

I'm not sure you'd be a guy who sat on it.

You know, you have to do it.

But I think there are a lot of reporters who still would do it.

They just don't work for or they can't work for the New York Times anymore.

Even, you know, the Times and the Post still have some really, really good reporters.

They're just in a very difficult position.

They have to kind of couch what they're writing about and find strategic ways to get,

you know, information into the public.

brings to mind a notion that I have about the uniqueness of this case.

This case happened in the age of the Internet.

OK, and it's really a story of the Internet.

You know, Daniel Ellsberg, for all his courage, had the backing of the New York Times,