Judging Freedom - Ron Unz - The Deep State / Trump and Julian Assange

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 17, 2022. It's about 2.45 in the afternoon here on the East Coast, 11.45 in California, where my next guest, Ron Unz, is. Ron is the founder and proprietor and chief executive officer of the Unz Report, a website that I highly commend to you for serious discussion of the issues of the day, domestic and foreign, concerning libertarian and freedom issues. Ron, I have known your work and admired it for years. I know you've said nice things about mine. This is the first time we've met, even though we're 3,000 miles away, but welcome to my podcast, Judging Freedom. Hey, great to be here. Thank you. So how serious is the problem of the deep state? Is Donald Trump a victim of a legitimate Justice Department legitimately enforcing legitimate laws,

or is this the intelligence and law enforcement community which battled him for four years in the White House now ganging up on him again, enforcing a statute, which though it's been upheld by the courts five times, the Espionage Act, by today's standards would be largely unconstitutional because it proscribes behavior that is essentially harmless. What are your thoughts on all this? Well, I think it's very much the latter situation. In other words, we're really talking about a judicial act that has, until very recently, had dropped off the radar screen that nobody really paid any attention to. I mean, we're talking about something from the First World War. The notion of a president of the United States having his home raided by the FBI in search of alleged national security materials that he himself had the right to declassify as the chief

executive officer of the United States is just completely absurd. In other words, it's obviously a continuation of the efforts of the national security apparatus, backed by the media and backed by the leading Silicon Valley gatekeepers, to really basically destroy Donald Trump, destroy his political credibility, and make it impossible for him to ever consider running for the White House a second time. I think you're 100% on the mark, and I think most people watching this now would agree with you. And I, of course, agree with you. Unfortunately, the law is not always freedom-oriented. I mean, this is a dreadful, dreadful statute, the Espionage Act of 1917, pushed by President Woodrow Wilson to suppress dissent during World War I. Eugene V. Debs died in prison because the government persuaded juries that under the Espionage Act, he had committed a crime by holding massive rallies in New York and Chicago, critical of the war. And Wilson himself, who of course is a former governor of New Jersey and former president of Princeton, I mentioned that for

what will be obvious in a few moments, while president of the United States used the Espionage Act to prosecute Princeton students for reading the Declaration of Independence aloud outside draft offices. I mean, can you imagine that happening today? I'm convinced that the Espionage Act, which really lets the government go after anybody for anything, espionage used to be like what the Rosenbergs did, selling national secrets to an enemy. But for the government to claim that reciting the Declaration of Independence is espionage or keeping some pieces of paper locked in your safe in your house, which is guarded by the Secret Service, is somehow espionage, shows you how deep the deep state has gone and how far the government has gone to interfere with fundamental liberty like thought and speech. And moreover, it's really pushing America down the road of becoming very obviously what we used to denounce as a third world country. In other words,

many countries in the world have a situation where when a president leaves office, he's regularly prosecuted or put in prison by his successor. And I mean, that has never been the American style. notion of American presidents being basically prosecuted for simply taking their own documents out of the White House is just absolutely absurd. And the precedent it sets would be a very dangerous one. If, for example, either Donald Trump or someone aligned with him then becomes a president, then wins a future election. I mean, all those same tools can be turned against the current people in office. And I mean, it's just a very dangerous precedent to set to allow something like this. Almost the definition of a banana republic. Exactly, exactly.

Where this stuff happens, I mean, all the time. I'm not picking on a particular part of the world, but it seems to be very prevalent in Central America and in Latin America. Yesterday afternoon, a group of lawyers filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan against Mike Pompeo, the former director of the CIA, against the CIA itself, and against something called Undercover Global, SL. I'd never heard of it until I read about the lawsuit. These are American lawyers, mainly from New York City, who've been advising and representing Julian Assange. Assange, in my opinion, even though he's not American, is an American hero for exposing lawfully the murderous excesses of the Bush administration. He received

stolen information. He didn't steal it. He published it. Absolutely protected under the Pentagon Papers case, almost to a T. What are these lawyers suing for? When do you hear this? So these American lawyers fly to London to meet with Assange. This takes place five years ago in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he lived for five years in order to avoid being arrested by the British and extradited to the United States, which sadly now appears like it's going to happen. When they approached the Ecuadorian embassy, of course, security said to them, well, you can't bring your cell phones and you got to give us your cell phones, your iPads, all your mobile devices, which they did. The security was Ecuadorian security and also a private security company

called the Undercover Global SL. While they were in the Ecuadorian embassy, you can almost guess what I'm about to say, speaking with their client, remember, lawyer client, all the contents of their mobile devices were downloaded and shipped to Langley, Virginia to the CIA. They probably just learned, you almost can't make this up. They probably just learned about it recently because they filed the lawsuit yesterday and this happened five years ago. The American public will go, oh, but the American public should be scandalized and outraged. the people who took an oath to uphold the Constitution have perverted it. What do you say? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And that happened

under Donald Trump's administration. So the very same tools, the same precedents that his minions used against Julian Assange, against other whistleblowers, are now being turned against him. And that's exactly what happens. In other words, America's moving down the road where these same really almost totalitarian means are regularly employed against different political groups by their opponents. And it's not a question of one group suffering it's a question of everybody suffering because i mean these what goes around comes around well look if they can do this to julian assange they can do it to anybody and they probably do i mean we already know i i i guess it wasn't an apple device because apple doesn't give away at least it says it doesn't give away passcodes. But I get a kick out of when the FBI

seizes an Apple device and they claim there's evidence of a crime in there. They want to get in there and Apple won't give them the code. And then there's all kinds of moral breastfeeding about Apple's duty to the government, of which there's none. And then I laugh because the NSA has everything that we put in our desktops, our iPads, and our mobile devices, but they won't give it to the FBI because if they give it to the FBI, then they have to admit that they have it. And if they have it, then they too have violated the Fourth Amendment. We all know that they did it, but the assaults on privacy are so great that this lawsuit brought by these lawyers didn't even make the front pages. But you make a good point. I mean, I don't defend Donald Trump's behavior, although I think it was harmless, but I do attack what the government is doing to him. Nevertheless, when he was the president,

it was his Department of Justice which indicted Assange for espionage. His Department of Justice, which got an indictment charging Assange with some of the very same allegations that the Biden Justice Department is now bringing against Trump. Exactly, exactly, exactly. And the Biden official should realize these same weapons can be turned against them in the future, a few years down the road. I mean, we're talking about a situation where when you pervert the law in this way, when you sacrifice our basic constitutional freedoms, everybody loses. Everybody loses either now or down the road. Well, you're right. I have to comment that you are the publisher of the works of a dear friend of mine,

the great Phil Giraldi, who is a fan favorite of the Freedom Watch team, and Freedom Watch viewers, who when they learned that Phil was in the Oval Office and told George W. Bush, hey, Mr. President, Saddam Hussein does not have weapons of mass destruction, and Bush threw him out and started the war anyway. 20 years later, Phil has become, certainly in libertarian circles, a national hero, and you publish all of his brilliant and courageous work. And he's a great man and you are for publishing it. Ron, we hope you'll come back again. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. I'm going to send you some columns. Maybe they'll show up on the UNZ report, but whether

my work shows up there or not, UNZ report. It is a treasure trove of libertarian analysis of economics, cultural, social, political, legal malaise affecting America today. Thanks very much for joining us. Hey, thank you. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.