Judging Freedom - Julian Assange Extradition

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

UK Court Formally Issues Order To Extradite Julian Assange To US The decision now rests with interior minister Priti Patel, although Assange's lawyers may still appeal to the High Court if she approves the extradition. #JulianAssange #extraditionSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there everyone, good morning. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, April 20th, 2022. It's about 10.50 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. A couple of hours ago, 3,000 miles from here, a British judge in a British courtroom in London signed an extradition order granting the request of the Biden administration Department of Justice, which piggybacked a request of the Trump administration Department of Justice for the extradition of Julian Assange from Great Britain to the United States. Julian Assange is a controversial figure if you're in the deep state. But if you're not in the deep state, then you know that Julian Assange is a great human being and an American hero, even though he's not an American person, and as far

as I know, has never been in the United States of America. Julian Assange almost single-handedly exposed the murder of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq by the Bush administration. And here's how all of this went. He had a confederate in the military named Chelsea Manning. Well, the name is now Chelsea. Chelsea has undergone a sex change operation and had another name. But Chelsea Manning, when Chelsea was a male and had a top security clearance, was giving this information to Julian Assange, who ran a sort of avant-garde, almost bohemian journalistic entity called WikiLeaks. And WikiLeaks then took this information, this is years later, and revealed American drones were targeting and killing civilians. And the killers, the people

who actually ran the drones, were laughing about it, joking about it, and gloating over it, almost to the point of saying, watch this, watch this, watch this, and then you saw an innocent human being vaporized. All of this occurred under the Bush administration and caused a tremendous, tremendous furor. Chelsea Manning was indicted for espionage, which is the theft or the failure to care properly for national security secrets, and he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 45 years in jail. And then President Obama commuted his sentence, so he was immediately released from jail. By then, he had undergone the sex change operation. Now, whether or not the government should be paying for sex change operations for prisoners is another story, but they did in this case. He came out as Chelsea

Manning, as free as the rest of us. So what about Julian Assange? Well, the Supreme Court has ruled that if a thief steals national security secrets and gives them to the media, and there is a genuine, realistic public interest in knowing the secrets, and the media publishes the secrets, the media does so with impunity. The thief can still be prosecuted. This is the Pentagon Papers case when Daniel Ellsberg, a civilian employee of the Department of Defense working in the Pentagon, stole national security secrets showing that LBJ, President Lyndon Johnson's generals, were lying to him and that he was lying to the American public. Now, this happened after LBJ was out of office and the generals had retired. It happened in the Nixon administration. The Nixon Department of Justice got an order from a federal judge in New York enjoining the New York Times from publishing this. That order was vacated by the Supreme Court in a very, very famous case known as the Pentagon Papers case. And that Supreme Court opinion stands for the

following proposition. The media and everybody who works for it is immune from civil liability and from criminal prosecution for publishing national security secrets, no matter how they were obtained, as long as there is a genuine interest in the secrets. We're not talking about dirty laundry. We're not talking about generalist private behavior. We're talking about the misuse, abuse, and criminal use of government authority by military and civilian officials. That Supreme Court opinion should invalidate the prosecution of Julian Assange. But the Trump administration persuaded a grand jury to indict him for espionage. It's taken years to get him to the United States. Now, this order signed today by this judge, I don't think it's going to be complied with for a while.

There's one more appeal to Prime Minister Boris Johnson's cabinet. It's kind of obvious which way they're going to be complied with for a while. There's one more appeal to Prime Minister Boris Johnson's cabinet. It's kind of obvious which way they're going to go. Then there's an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Even though Britain has left the European Union, it still is a signatory to the treaty, which gives authority to the European Court on Human Rights, which could very well invalidate the extradition order. Interestingly, after hearing a year-long trial about why Julian Assange should be extradited, a British judge denied the extradition request and ruled in favor of the Americans because the British judge found that Julian Assange could not get a fair trial in the United

States and that if he were convicted, there's no guarantee that he would survive the conviction. Why? Because the CIA attempted to assassinate him before he was arrested in London when he was holding out in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy. It's a long, tortuous story. The bottom line is if you love freedom, if you believe in transparency, then Julian Assange is a hero. He should not be prosecuted. He should not be in jail. He should be as free as the rest of us. We'll see where this goes. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.