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Thread: Trump admin prepares charges to seek arrest of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange

  1. #181
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    Wait a minute! I thought Trump was the 'man with the balls to stand up to the deep state'. CNN may be/is full of $#@!, that doesn't change the fact that Sessions said Assange's arrest was a priority and Pompeo described WikiLeaks as a "A non-state hostile intelligence service".

    These are Trump appointees, his boys talking. This is all on Trump and nobody else. Liberal my ass.
    Yes, +1
    No one here wanted to be the Billionaire.



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  3. #182
    Ron Paul: Donald Trump’s Dangerous Wikileaks Flip-Flop

    By Ron Paul -
    April 24, 2017



    “I love Wikileaks,” candidate Donald Trump said on October 10th on the campaign trail. He praised the organization for reporting on the darker side of the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was information likely leaked by a whistleblower from within the Clinton campaign to Wikileaks.

    Back then he praised Wikileaks for promoting transparency, but candidate Trump looks less like President Trump every day. The candidate praised whistleblowers and Wikileaks often on the campaign trail. In fact, candidate Trump loved Wikileaks so much he mentioned the organization more than 140 times in the final month of the campaign alone! Now, as President, it seems Trump wants Wikileaks founder Julian Assange sent to prison.

    Last week CNN reported, citing anonymous “intelligence community” sources, that the Trump Administration’s Justice Department was seeking the arrest of Assange and had found a way to charge the Wikileaks founder for publishing classified information without charging other media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post for publishing the same information.

    It might have been tempting to write off the CNN report as “fake news,” as is much of their reporting, but for the fact President Trump said in an interview on Friday that issuing an arrest warrant for Julian Assange would be, “OK with me.”


    Trump’s condemnation of Wikileaks came just a day after his CIA Director, Michael Pompeo, attacked Wikileaks as a “hostile intelligence service.” Pompeo accused Assange of being “a fraud — a coward hiding behind a screen.”

    Pompeo’s word choice was no accident. By accusing Wikileaks of being a “hostile intelligence service” rather than a publisher of information on illegal and abusive government practices leaked by whistleblowers, he signaled that the organization has no First Amendment rights. Like many in Washington, he does not understand that the First Amendment is a limitation on government rather than a granting of rights to citizens. Pompeo was declaring war on Wikileaks.

    But not that long ago Pompeo also cited Wikileaks as an important source of information. In July he drew attention to the Wikileaks release of information damaging to the Clinton campaign, writing, “Need further proof that the fix was in from President Obama on down?”

    There is a word for this sudden about-face on Wikileaks and the transparency it provides us into the operations of the prominent and powerful: hypocrisy.

    The Trump Administration’s declaration of war on whistleblowers and Wikileaks is one of the greatest disappointments in these first 100 days. Donald Trump rode into the White House with promises that he would “drain the swamp,” meaning that he would overturn the apple carts of Washington’s vested interests. By unleashing those same vested interests on those who hold them in check – the whistleblowers and those who publish their revelations – he has turned his back on those who elected him.

    Julian Assange, along with the whistleblowers who reveal to us the evil that is being done in our name, are heroes. They deserve our respect and admiration, not a prison cell. If we allow this president to declare war on those who tell the truth, we have only ourselves to blame.

  4. #183
    fake news

    By Julian Assange April 25 at 7:39 PM

    Julian Assange is editor of WikiLeaks.

    Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech rather than on the United States’ actual adversaries. He went after WikiLeaks, where I serve as editor, as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” In Pompeo’s worldview, telling the truth about the administration can be a crime — as Attorney General Jeff Sessions quickly underscored when he described my arrest as a “priority.” News organizations reported that federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring charges against members of WikiLeaks, possibly including conspiracy, theft of government property and violating the Espionage Act.

    All this speech to stifle speech comes in reaction to the first publication in the start of WikiLeaks’ “Vault 7” series. Vault 7 has begun publishing evidence of remarkable CIA incompetence and other shortcomings. This includes the agency’s creation, at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars, of an entire arsenal of cyber viruses and hacking programs — over which it promptly lost control and then tried to cover up the loss. These publications also revealed the CIA’s efforts to infect the public’s ubiquitous consumer products and automobiles with computer viruses.

    When the director of the CIA, an unelected public servant, publicly demonizes a publisher such as WikiLeaks as a “fraud,” “coward” and “enemy,” it puts all journalists on notice, or should. Pompeo’s next talking point, unsupported by fact, that WikiLeaks is a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” is a dagger aimed at Americans’ constitutional right to receive honest information about their government. This accusation mirrors attempts throughout history by bureaucrats seeking, and failing, to criminalize speech that reveals their own failings.

    President Theodore Roosevelt understood the danger of giving in to those “foolish or traitorous persons who endeavor to make it a crime to tell the truth about the Administration when the Administration is guilty of incompetence or other shortcomings.” Such “endeavor is itself a crime against the nation,” Roosevelt wrote. President Trump and his officials should heed that advice.

    Words matter, and I assume that Pompeo meant his when he said, “Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms. He’s sitting in an embassy in London. He’s not a U.S. citizen.” As a legal matter, this statement is simply false. It underscores just how dangerous it is for an unelected official whose agency’s work is rooted in lying and misdirection to be the sole arbiter of the truth and the interpreter of the Constitution.

    Pompeo demonstrated a remarkable lack of irony when he suggested that WikiLeaks “focus instead on the autocratic regimes in this world that actually suppress free speech and dissent” — even as he called for a crackdown of such speech. In fact, Pompeo finds himself in the unsavory company of Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (257,934 documents published by WikiLeaks); Bashar al-Assad of Syria (2.3 million documents); and the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia (122,609 documents), to name just a few who have tried and failed to censor WikiLeaks.

    Pompeo was once a WikiLeaks fan. On July 24, then partisan politician Pompeo gloatingly tweeted: “Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by WikiLeaks.” Pompeo liked WikiLeaks when he perceived it was publishing material revealing the shortcomings of his political rivals. It was only when our publications touched Pompeo’s rice bowl that WikiLeaks became his target. Pompeo subsequently deleted the tweet, but he is learning that in the digital age, the truth is hard to hide. You don’t get to love the truth one day and seek its suppression and the incarceration of its publisher the next.

    As a candidate, Trump tweeted: “Very little pick-up by dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks.” The president mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times during the last month of the election and gushed: “I love WikiLeaks.”
    All democratic governments are managed by imperfect human beings. And autocracies are much worse — the “benign dictator” is a myth. These human beings, democratic and autocratic alike, make mistakes and commit crimes, and often serve themselves rather than their countries. They are the focus of WikiLeaks’ publications.

    The “Pompeo doctrine” articulated in his speech ensnares all serious news and investigative human rights organizations, from ProPublica to Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch. The logic that WikiLeaks, or these organizations, are somehow “intelligence agencies” would be as absurd as the suggestion that the CIA is a media outlet. Both journalists and intelligence agencies cultivate and protect sources, collect information and write reports, but the similarities end there. The world cannot afford, and the Constitution does not permit, a muzzle placed on the work that transparency organizations do to inform the American and global public.

    Fundamental issues of free speech and freedom of the press, and of the interplay between liberty and security, date to the Republic’s founding. Those who believe in persecution and suppression of the truth to achieve their parochial ends are inevitably forgotten by history. In a fair fight, as John Milton observed, the truth always wins.

  5. #184
    Quote Originally Posted by nikcers View Post
    By Julian Assange April 25 at 7:39 PM

    Julian Assange is editor of WikiLeaks.

    Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech [...]
    You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Julian Assange again.



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  7. #185
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Julian Assange again.
    I'd cover you, if I could.
    There is no spoon.

  8. #186
    Bump for @dannno and his secret decoder ring being wrong yet again. Has it ever been right?

  9. #187

  10. #188
    Quote Originally Posted by enhanced_deficit View Post
    Did MAGA team recognize him as a 'whistleblower'?




    In all fairness, many politicians flip flop.
    MAGA team doesn't even have enough thought-out principles to know why a whistleblower should be protected.

    If whistleblower is good for me, whistleblower good. If whistleblower is bad for me, whistleblower bad. That is MAGA.

    Amash seems to be the only liberty-oriented person in Congress still holding to his principles.
    The enemy of my enemy may be worse than my enemy.

    I do not suffer from Trump Rearrangement Syndrome. Sorry if that triggers you.

  11. #189
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti-Neocon View Post
    MAGA team doesn't even have enough thought-out principles to know why a whistleblower should be protected.

    If whistleblower is good for me, whistleblower good. If whistleblower is bad for me, whistleblower bad. That is MAGA.

    Amash seems to be the only liberty-oriented person in Congress still holding to his principles.

    First instict was to say 'orange man bad' but on second thought +rep.

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