Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/15/23 Kevin Gosztola on Assange’s Latest Legal Setback

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Scott is joined by journalist Kevin Gosztola to discuss the UK High Court’s latest ruling in the government’s effort to extradite Julian Assange. They examine the ruling, reflect on the establishment’s hypocrisy about Assange and discuss how the CIA spied on American citizens who visited Assange in London.  Discussed on the show: “Justice Severely Delayed and Denied: UK High Court Rejects Assange's Request For Appeal After Nearly A Year” (The Dissenter) Eric Brakey’s speech Ithaka (IMDb) Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of Shadowproof. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.” He is the author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange. Follow him on Twitter @kgosztola. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys on the line once again i've got the great kevin got stola and he writes at the dissenter dot org and also at shadow proof of course and he's the author of

of the still new book, The Excellent, Guilty of Journalism, the political case against Julian Assange. I said, excellent, that's not in the title. Guilty of Journalism is the title by Kevin Gottsdola. And, man, we got some bad news here. It reads the headline over there at the dissenter. Justice severely delayed and denied.

U.K. High Court rejects Assange's request. for appeal after nearly a year so I guess give us the details on what happened and what's next and all that yeah so first I mean I made a big deal out of it because this appeal was submitted almost a year ago I mean we think about due process and the courts and his attorney who's from Australia, I quote him as basically describing how easy it would have been to give Julian Assange a response and let him know about 11 months ago or 10 months ago that they weren't going to give him a day in court to present his appeal that he believes his press freedom rights were violated and that all these other issues that he wants to raise that he's not been allowed to challenge

in a UK courtroom yet. And they just kept them waiting and waiting again, the limbo that we've seen in this case. And then on June 6th, I think it was, that the Assange legal team learned that one judge had just set out right when usually it's two judges because the last time when the U.S. had an appeal, two judges heard their appeal.

And they got a full hearing of one judge said, no, we're not going to let you come in here and make an argument and just dismissed it. So now he's really running out of options as far as challenging his extradition to the United States. Yeah. And I don't know. I thought there was a good joke in here somewhere about the judge being named Jonathan Swift. Did he propose that we just go ahead and eat Julian Assange? I mean, I've been telling people he's my least favorite Jonathan Swift. And that I don't have any particular feeling about Jonathan Swift at all as, you know, a writer or author. You know, what we could do is for the hungry people, we could have them eat the right of free speech and the freedom of the press.

Let let them eat paper or something like that. Yeah. And so it's now there is an opportunity which his. Stella Assange, his wife laid out. They are submitting some papers. They will get a kind of mini appeal within the High Court of Justice. And then they're supposed to get some kind of a hearing where the two judges will hear how it was wrong that they didn't give him a day in court yet. I just don't see this really working out well for Julian Assange because he just can't even get his foot in the door to make a day.

argument. It's very clear that these judges are doing the bidding of the United States. Well, it really is almost like a scientific experiment, right, in the question of the very existence of the rule of law under the Anglo-American systems, as they both work together in this case on the most crucial and obvious First Amendment question. And I know they don't have the First Amendment there, but I don't think even if he was a Brit that he'd be in violation of their official secrets act necessarily. But certainly he ain't charged with that. And the law he's charged with violating here and the way it's being applied is clearly in violation of the Bill of Rights and is null and void. And they're doing it anyway.

And they're willing to, you know, essentially pretend, right? This is not a question of law at all. It's a question of politics and power. And what do the people in charge prefer to happen? And that's about it. That's true. That's correct. And his attorneys take note of what is unfolding in the United Kingdom because we're seeing efforts pushed forward in the United Kingdom to make it less of a civil liberty to protest.

You make it easier for people, you know, whatever their issue might be that brings them out to a settlement. humble. They are giving the police additional powers to remove them from public spaces. We're also seeing national security legislation proposed that makes it easier to do what we saw when they did the theater, the security theater, where they went out back behind the guardian office and destroyed the hard drive that had Snowden files, files from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And they crushed them and they said, okay, you can't publish those documents about the GCHQ, the partner spy agency in the UK working with the NSA to conduct mass surveillance that violates everyone's privacy. You can't have those files. You can't do that journalism. They're they're, you know,

they're intensifying it. There's there's all this power that they're expanding to control what is published and allowed in the public in the UK. And so, that, coupled with what we're seeing with Assange, it's a tightening of the ability to restrict freedom of expression. Yeah. Now, I know this is stupid. It must be trying your patience, but bear with me because I'm sure there are people in the audience who have just heard this a lot of times before and maybe don't know what to make of it. They say, Assange is not a journalist. He's something else. Mike Pompeo says he's an intelligence agency. The WikiLeaks, yeah, that WikiLeaks could be a, uh, uh, like, well, so Julian Assange

did hold out the idea that the WikiLeaks could be an intelligence agency of the people, but the way that those people who attack WikiLeaks mean it is that they're working for a foreign power like Russia or maybe they could be working for China. Who knows, it can be working for maybe a golf state or some other monarchy or oil garky or whatever to take down the United States. And there's just never been any evidence presented at all that could connect those dots. It's all a character assassination on the part of the U.S. government, it's propaganda, and even Robert Mueller himself, the taskmaster, who was given. been the job of looking at all these allegations that were laundered and made up by Hillary Clinton

and the Democratic Party and MSNBC and a bunch of other outfits. You know, he went through every single allegation and he came back with no charges against Julian Assange, no charges against any staffers of WikiLeaks. Not even political, empty ones that could be filed at a court, like what they did with the Russian nationals that were accused of. who are never, ever going to be hauled into a U.S. courtroom because do we even know where they are in Russia? I mean, I don't even know if we know where they are. So he's not. He's a journalist and all of these publications that are targeted under this indictment, these espionage act charges,

it involves 2010, 2011. It involves the best part of WikiLeaks's history, the most impactful part of WikiLeaks's history as a media organization when they were publishing diplomatic cables, war documents on Iraq and Afghanistan, showing us all the different people, the Guantanamo Bay prisoners who were being held there, hundreds of them, and the collateral murder video that we watched, and some rules of engagement documents in the Iraq war and some other files that we're important to understanding the way that the U.S. operates as a global empire. Yeah. Now, you know, importantly, for people not familiar, the First Amendment doesn't say anything about you. You better have an official press pass license from the government that declares you a journalist first before this protection applies to you in any way.

And the courts have never ruled that that's the case the whole time. The freedom of the press is the freedom of any person to publish whatever the hell. they want to in the United States of America. Everybody knows that. Right. It protects the act, the act of journalism. Right. And is, you know, really, they always exclude the preamble to the Bill of Rights, but I like to include it. It says these are declaratory and restrictive clauses against the government. They're not allowances of freedom for the people. It says Congress may not do this, that, and the other thing to violate the rights of the people.

And so they do anyway, but still, that's the law. All right, now, so what's next? He's got how many levels? He's got one more level in UK, and then he goes to some European court of also getting screwed. I believe that he

has this mini appeal I described to you. That'll unfold quickly over the next seven to ten days. it will have news I'll have something that I write over at the dissenter about how that ends if he doesn't win then he's in trouble

and he can go to the European Court of Human Rights I admit that I have lost my understanding of what happens after the European Court of Human Rights simply because I've heard one group of people say that the U.S. government has the power to just put Julian Assange on a plane and say we don't

really care what the European Court of Human Rights rules. We're going to bring him to the U.S. and put him on trial. So then the European Court of Human Rights could say it was wrong for him to be extradited, but he's already gone. So that ruling doesn't really matter. But I've also seen a school of people say, well, no, they might have to wait until the European Court of Human Rights is done. And also an interesting political backdrop is that, because of what happened with Brexit and everything that, and the movements within Britain to not be part of the European Union, they've been moving towards pulling out of the European Court of Human Rights. So if that's really the way it happens, you know, we live in a timeline in which if this moves slowly enough, that might not actually be available to Julian Assange if they were to completely pull out of the European Court of Human Rights. the UK, as then he's really just only got the courts in the UK, and then he's coming to the United

States. Give me just a minute here. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books, real good ones. So far, we've got Will Griggs's No Quarter, Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine, and what social animals owe to each other, and four of mine. Fool's Aaron, enough already, the great Ron Paul, and my brand new one, hotter than the sun, Time to abolish nuclear weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one,

The Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at libertarian institute.org slash books. And for a limited time, signed copies of enough already and hotter than the sun are available at Scott Horton.org slash books. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety.

I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. And now the charges are in the Eastern District of Virginia? the espionage court as it's been dubbed yeah and that means in other words everyone on the jury is either a national government employee probably a national security state employee or their spouse or cousin or something that means that they're from top secret America uh this was what bill arkin and dana priest documented over 10 years ago when they looked at the security contractors

the rise of all of these corporations and companies, this whole complex that took over the region after 9-11. And those people there, of course, we've got military branches that people are enlisted in that have relatives. They work for the FBI. They work for the different national security divisions or intelligence agencies in the region. We just have to remember that people who work in D.C., they don't all live in D.C.

You know, many of them do live in the Arlington, Virginia area. And so that would be where the jury pool would come from if Julian Assange wanted to use them. He could always choose a bench trial and have a judge rule on the espionage act charges. And that might benefit him, maybe given all of the character assassination that has gone on in the press. But I don't know. We've seen what happened with judges in the UK. And I don't think they'd be very different in the United States. United States. They've all are part of a social circle and they have been taught that Julian Assange is a traitor who wants to take down the United States. And I'm not sure that he would get a fair hearing when it came to assessing how unprecedented it is to expand the espionage act and go after Julian Assange in this manner.

Yeah. Man, that's really something. And then I guess you'd like to think that at the end of the day, the Supreme Court would never allow it to go. through, but who wants to be left with that and having faith in those guys? That course seems to be not that bad on some things, but I sure don't trust them. It should not have come to this at all.

You know, this is another we were talking earlier today about how it was supposedly, if you remember the PR, it was this absolutely, and I agree, it's an absolutely outrageous thing for Trump to tear up the JCPOA, the Iran deal, just because that's what Netanyahu wanted.

Then Biden comes in and he sticks with the same policy. And here we are years later. They're about to settle for 60% before they had 20. Whatever. Anyway, his same thing here. This is an outrage. W. Bush didn't dare. Oh, wait.

No, this didn't really come out until 2010. I mean, the big one, there was some during W. Bush. But, as I said, even Dick Cheney stuck up for the guy. But Obama had the New York Times test. as you talked about they just decided they couldn't indict the guy and then it took Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump who

supposedly were supposed to consider the Tasmanian devil right this complete lunatic with no grounding in reality or even legitimate authority even while sitting at the desk in the Oval Office to be the president of the United

States he indicts a journalist against every norm that the rest of D.C. believes in at the time, even though they hate Assange. They come out, what are you going to do, though? Right. And then now Trump's gone.

Biden comes in, same policy. And now they're kind of backing themselves into a corner here where, yeah, we said we meant it. Like, they're really going to go through with this? It's crazy what they're doing. And they're trying to act like it's not crazy. Like somehow this is how it goes. But no, this is crazy. Yeah. It was it was Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. And then it was Attorney General Bill Barr who own this indictment against Julian Assange. And now it's Attorney General Merrick Garland who owns this indictment, this political case against Julian Assange. And we look at the timeline. Things are speeding up.

Joe Biden could be running for president at the same time that Julian Assange is being put on trial in Alexandria, Virginia, or the proceedings are gearing up. We're seeing an arraignment. We're seeing hearings. And I don't know, I don't know what that does for him. I don't think he can, I certainly don't think as he campaigns, he can make any pronouncements about. celebrating press freedom. As you were talking about your friend, a colleague who is up in Maine, Evan Gerskovich, is a cause of the U.S. State Department. But on World Press Freedom Day, the hypocrisy could not have been more apparent. And reporters noted it. There are people like Matthew Lee at the Associated Press and others who could recognize that this did not align, that you can't be for freeing this reporter from Russia and also at the same time be jailing Julian Assange.

It's just, it's so basic. It's just so basic. And I don't think that he can run a presidential campaign. I mean, fortunately, you wouldn't call press freedom a bread and butter issue. It's not what we typically hear from politicians who are campaigning for office. They're not going to speak about press freedom. But that being said, it's not like it's not going to come up while it's in the news. And it will upset people that this is the expansion of the law.

And this is an attack on news media. And those reporters are going to care about it as they interview Joe Biden on the campaign trail. Yeah. Well, I don't know if he's going to leave the house. We'll see how that goes. Well, I know they're going to keep him as quarantined as they did during the pandemic because he can't do an interview anymore. it's just the you know the cognitive function has has deteriorated it's pretty bad all right now instead of talking about that let's talk about this lawsuit by journalists and lawyers who got spied on by

the CIA when they should have been protected here and what's going on with that and the status and all yeah so i think this is a big deal because i was curious what the response would be to the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo's argument that as citizens of the United States, if we go to an embassy outside of the country and we visit someone like Julian Assange, who they have deemed as a wanted fugitive, even though being a wanted fugitive is something that we can contest

because he was just engaged in journalism, what crime? why is he being targeted? Why should he be under targeted surveillance? You know, it's not like he's some kind of mafia Don that is hold up in the Ecuador embassy. They said that you give up your privacy rights when you are there because it's now, you know, you should know, your expectation of privacy is no longer there because you are meeting with somebody who is, you know, is likely to be a national security target. The response of these people,

their two attorneys, two journalists who visited Julian Assange in the embassy, is to say it was not incidental contact. Well, first, they reject this idea that there's no reasonable expectation of privacy. When you leave the U.S., you don't give up your privacy rights just because you're traveling around the world. You're still a U.S. citizen.

You still have constitutional rights that people who are in these agencies of power. They have to follow. But they said it's not incidental. Look at what's happening. As he meets, as they meet with Julian Assange, they are handing over their electronics and their property and everything at a security checkpoint. And this company, UC Global, that was hired and developed some arrangement formally or informally with the CIA or someone who was a cutout representing the CIA, has this information, this data being copied from these phones, different parts, different devices are being copied, shared with people back in D.C. And, you know, that is not incidental. That's an act.

Like, it's not like you're eavesdropping on a conversation. You're targeting Julian Assange. And the second person or third person in the room are these people who just happened to be there in the room with Assange. No, you have taken their personal private property and you are seizing the contents on them and copying those contents and sharing them with agents for this investigation into Julian Assange. And that is a violation of their privacy rights. And that's what they're pushing here and saying that they should have some relief. They should at very, at the minimum, their demand is that the court order, the FBI, the CIA, the justice, department, whichever agency has these records to destroy, expunge everything that was ever copied from these devices. And we know this happened because the Spanish newspaper El Pais

reported that this guy, David Morales, who is facing a criminal prosecution right now, had a folder on his computer that was labeled CIA. And you don't just have a folder labeled CIA while you're working a security contract at an embassy. You're obviously doing something with those people providing some kind of a service. So we know that this was going on and that there should be some accountability for the violation of Fourth Amendment rights that was ongoing against these people who were talking to Julian Assange. Yeah. Now, part of this too is, right, it's an Ecuadorian embassy in Britain and it's CIA doing it. So you have all these divided jurisdictions.

Maybe, but I mean, my understanding is that these people, as their attorney, Richard Roth, would argue, you still have rights as citizens when you go to the, you know, they're in this diplomatic building. They're Americans and they're being spied on by the CIA. So that cuts out all those middlemen, kind of, right? Right. And so they also are giving their passports over at the security checkpoint. So immediately those agents are given notice. that these people are Americans. So at that point, they should have to pause or, like, go dark or like, you know, like the taps or whatever. They're no longer collecting that data because they know that person. And then, okay, just because of the law and the way the Constitution works, someone from Ecuador is in the embassy meeting with Assange, they could eavesdrop on them. Somebody from Russia is there.

Somebody from Great Britain even is there. they can eavesdrop on them. But when an American identifies themselves, they shouldn't collect this. And also, we know that the purpose of the collection was to undermine Julian Assange's defense and make it impossible for him to basically get to a point where he could take advantage of his asylum. One thing we know in the timeline that has been made clear is that the UC Global Company uncovered information in December 2017, just a couple weeks before Christmas, that they were going to give Julian Assange diplomatic status so that he could leave the embassy in a diplomatic car

and he could get on a plane, it would be a diplomatic plane, and he could fly to Ecuador, and then he could begin living under asylum in Ecuador, and he would be free for from any kind of prosecution. They learned of this and they issued an indictment. They charged him. That was when the first charge was issued against him. And they got an international arrest warrant so that they could intimidate and scare the Ecuador government.

And it worked because then they backed off and they were no longer willing to give him diplomatic status and they abandoned the plan on Christmas Day to try and get Julian Assange out of the embassy and that was learned by eavesdropping on his lawyers in the conversation that they were having. And they might have learned some details while people were meeting in the women's bathroom because that's another thing. They were bugging the ladies' toilet in the embassy. There's actually a folder on David Morales' computer for the bathroom. And so they had these like bugs planted all over the embassy, even in places where people would think might be off limits.

Yeah. I mean, the idea that this guy could possibly get a fair trial when the CIA is spying on him talking to his lawyers for years leading up to this. It's completely crazy. But of course, the persecution is the punishment, right? This whole thing. They know he's got to spend years trying to appeal his extradition and all this, you know, locked up in solitary while awaiting trial trying to get out of ever being tried. So they're getting their pound of flesh Absolutely And things crazy Well listen I don't know if this is for sure true But I interpreted something that

Julian Assange's father told me Here in Austin at a screening of the movie Ithaca which is really great To mean that I think that he hears the show from time to time So I want to say hang in there man If you're listening Julian Yeah And that's the great Kevin Gostola.

Everybody check out his book, Guilty of Journalism, the political case against Julian Assange, and the great website, the decenter.org, where he writes. Appreciate it, Kevin. All right. Thank you.

The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.