The agreement would bring to an end Assange’s lengthy standoff with the White House, which has sparked diplomatic tensions and global concern about U.S. hypocrisy when it comes to advancing freedom of the press.

In 2018, the Justice Department indicted Assange in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on charges of hacking and unauthorized access to classified information. After spending almost seven years living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, he was arrested in 2019 for extradition on the U.S. charges. Last month, a London court ruled Assange could continue to appeal his extradition. 

On Monday, federal prosecutors filed updated charges with the U.S. district court in the Northern Mariana Islands, along with a letter requesting a hearing on Tuesday. According to the letter, prosecutors expect Assange to plead guilty. The remote district was selected “in light of the defendant’s opposition to traveling to the continental United States to enter his guilty plea,” as well as its proximity to Australia, the letter states.

“We appreciate the Court accommodating these plea and sentencing proceedings on a single day,” prosecutors wrote to the district’s chief judge, Ramona V. Manglona, who scheduled a hearing for 9 a.m. on Tuesday, according to the case docket.

The updated charging documents allege Assange “unlawfully conspired with Chelsea Manning” to access and disseminate classified information without lawful access between 2009 and 2011. In January 2017, just before leaving office, former President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence after she was behind bars for seven years. 

As recently as April, President Joe Biden said he was “considering” dropping the charges and extradition attempt against Assange, which press freedom organizations in the U.S. and around the world urged him to do. 

After Biden’s confirmation that negotiations were underway, The Intercept asked the State Department about the progress, drawing the first substantive answer the administration had offered on the question, even as it left little clarity: “One of the crimes that Julian Assange is charged with is helping Chelsea Manning hack into government systems,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in April, “which as far as I’m aware has never been considered a legitimate journalistic practice.” 

Pressure from Australia played a major role in the politics of the prosecution, with the Australian government coming out in opposition to Assange’s extradition to the United States. Australian lawmakers traveled to the United States to lobby their American counterparts, and pressed upon U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy to intervene. Last August, Kennedy floated the possibility of the plea deal now going into effect. 

Press freedom advocates welcomed the end of the Assange saga but worried about the precedent it sets. 

“A plea deal would avert the worst-case scenario for press freedom, but this deal contemplates that Assange will have served five years in prison for activities that journalists engage in every day,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

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“It’s good news that the DOJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga,” said Seth Stern, advocacy director for Freedom of the Press Foundation. “The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come.”

“The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit,” Stern said. “And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.”

Assange’s wife, Stella, struck a more triumphant tone after news broke about the plea deal. “Julian is free!!!!” she tweeted, along with a video of Assange boarding a plane. WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange “left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there.”

WikiLeaks’ publication of over 250,000 unredacted State Department cables beginning in 2010 was one of the most consequential data breaches in U.S. government history. In addition to the cables, which have continued to be a resource for journalists, activists, and anti-corruption investigators around the world, WikiLeaks also published damning information revealing U.S. conduct in the war on terror, including footage from a U.S. military helicopter showing the killing of civilians and Reuters journalists during a 2007 strike in Baghdad, Iraq.

The post Julian Assange Strikes Plea Deal, Will Return to Australia  appeared first on The Intercept.

A judge last week struck down the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists seeking “unauthorized” information, siding with the New York Times in its lawsuit against the government. In response, the Pentagon on Monday added some meaningless window dressing and essentially reissued the same restrictions. The administration pledged to “immediately” appeal the decision on the original policy, and on Tuesday, the Times filed a motion to compel the administration to comply with the judge’s order. 

As alarming as the Pentagon’s antics are, the Times’ lawsuit is not the only case about whether reporters have the right to ask questions. It’s not even the only one in the news this week. 

In 2017, police in Laredo, Texas, arrested citizen journalist Patricia Villarreal under an obscure and never previously used law making it a felony to ask government employees for nonpublic information for personal benefit. Her supposed crime was asking a police officer about two local tragedies — a suicide and a deadly car wreck.

Her arrest was widely ridiculed, and a judge quickly threw out the charges. When Villarreal sued over her arrest and mistreatment by officers, the legal question wasn’t whether the charges against her were permissible but whether they were so obviously bogus that she could overcome qualified immunity, the unjust and expansive legal shield that protects government employees from liability for all but the most blatant violations. That issue went to the Supreme Court twice, but on Monday, the Court declined to review a federal appellate court’s ruling that the officers were shielded from liability. 

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No matter what our severely compromised Supreme Court thinks, the local cops who arrested Villarreal were embarrassingly ignorant of the Constitution. But they were also ahead of their time: The Department of Justice is making the same claims that turned the Laredo police into a First Amendment laughingstock — that reporters simply asking questions to the government is criminal — to federal district Judge Paul Friedman. 

Most discussion of the Pentagon’s restrictions has focused on their conditions for reporters to receive press credentials, which the Pentagon says can be revoked if reporters publish “unauthorized” information. That policy is wildly unconstitutional on its own, and every mainstream outlet gave up their press passes rather than sign on, leaving war coverage inside the Pentagon to the likes of Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s LindellTV streaming service. 

But the Pentagon’s legal filings imply that reporters who don’t follow the rules risk more than their press passes. On March 12, the DOJ filed a brief to clarify its lawyers’ earlier comments in a discussion with Friedman at a hearing of “whether asking a question was a criminal act.” The government argued that although journalists may lawfully ask questions of “authorized” Pentagon personnel, “a journalist does solicit the commission of a criminal act, and that solicitation is not protected by the First Amendment, when he or she solicits … non-public information from individuals who are legally obligated not to disclose that information.”

There you have it. What was once a fringe, failed legal theory concocted by some local cops in one Texas border city is now the official position of the federal government’s lawyers, which it felt compelled to put in writing in case anyone wasn’t sure where it stood after the hearing. Both the rogue cops and the DOJ’s lawyers contend that journalists merely asking questions to government officials constitutes unlawful solicitation. 

As JT Morris, supervising senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (which represents Villarreal) told me in an email last week, the First Amendment “unquestionably protects our right to ask questions, whether it’s a citizen asking police about a local crime or the New York Times asking Pentagon officials about matters of national security. Officials can always respond, ‘no comment.’ But they cannot jail Americans for asking.”

The government’s argument would have turned countless Pulitzer-winning national security reporters into criminals. As Friedman put it in his ruling, the “role of a journalist is to solicit information. … [A] journalist asking questions is not a crime!” (You can tell a judge is miffed when scholarly language fails and they resort to exclamation points.)

The DOJ’s “concession” in its clarification brief (and later in its revised policy) — that journalists can direct questions to authorized spokespeople — makes no difference. That the administration even felt the need to state something so obvious, presumably because they thought it would make them sound more reasonable, signals the extent to which they’ve threatened the First Amendment. 

Government agencies have long routed journalists’ inquiries to PR flacks and instructed non-public-facing staffers not to answer reporters’ questions. That’s unconstitutional in its own right; earlier this month, the Village of Key Biscayne, Florida, became the latest government agency to settle a lawsuit over its employee gag rule. But until this administration, the government at least placed the burden on its own employees to comply with restrictions on talking to reporters. 

Now, the government expects journalists to make themselves a party to its censorship directives, and ignore Supreme Court precedent that they can print any government information they lawfully obtain, even if it shouldn’t have been released. “A contrary rule … would force upon the media the onerous obligation of sifting through government press releases, reports, and pronouncements to prune out material arguably unlawful for publication,” the Court reasoned. 

Journalist Kathryn Foxhall, who has for years sounded the alarm about “censorship by PIO,” including in collaboration with the Society of Professional Journalists, says the press has failed to meaningfully oppose these policies. “The media have done little to fight the ever-tightening rules at federal agencies and elsewhere banning reporters from buildings and prohibiting employees from speaking to journalists without the authorities’ oversight. With amazing negligence journalists just assume whatever reporters get is the whole story, even in the face of the many thousands of gagged staff people. Now these Pentagon policies remind us that people in power will stop literally at nothing to control the story,” she told me.

The Pentagon’s position that newsgathering is a prosecutable offense is not just theoretical. Although the DOJ’s brief didn’t explicitly reference it, just like the officers in Laredo, federal prosecutors have their own archaic and constitutionally dubious law on the books to sane-wash their nonsense arguments — the Espionage Act of 1917. Read literally, that law (Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently introduced a much-needed bill to reform it) arguably prohibits reporters and anyone else from obtaining or attempting to obtain national defense information.

But reading it that way to go after journalists would be unconstitutional and politically toxic, which is why past administrations have refrained. Had the Supreme Court denied the Laredo officers’ qualified immunity in Villarreal’s case, it would have signaled that arguments for expansive interpretations of arcane laws to criminalize routine reporting are a nonstarter. 

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The Court ducked the issue despite being fully aware that the present administration is looking for any excuse to punish reporters that dare to undermine its narratives. They’ve already claimed Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson — whose home they raided, seizing terabytes of data — violated the Espionage Act by obtaining leaked information. The Trump administration is barging through the door the Biden administration left wide open, when, despite warnings from First Amendment advocates, it extracted a plea deal from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Espionage Act charges for obtaining and publishing government records, including about Iraq war crimes. 

The DOJ’s adoption of the Laredo police’s discredited theory is an extension of the Assange and Natanson cases; the claim that publishing leaked documents is criminal has evolved into a theory that merely asking questions is, too. The administration lost in court this time, but it said it will appeal, and may be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s cowardice in the Laredo case. 

If this administration succeeds in chipping away at constitutional protections for journalistic practices as basic as asking questions, reporters who wish to do anything more than regime stenography may risk imprisonment just by doing their jobs. In her dissent to the Villarreal ruling, Justice Sotomayor put it well: “Tolerating retaliation against journalists, or efforts to criminalize routine reporting practices, threatens to silence ‘one of the very agencies the Framers of our Constitution thoughtfully and deliberately selected to improve our society and keep it free.’” 

The post Pentagon Wants It to Be Illegal for Reporters to Ask “Unauthorized” Questions appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Sanchez was first indicted in October on charges of “corruptly concealing a document or record” as a standalone case, but the new indictment merges his charges with those against the other defendants, likely in hopes of burying the First Amendment problems with the case against him under prosecutors’ claims about the alleged shooting.

It’s an escalation of a familiar tactic. In 2023, Georgia prosecutors listed “zine” distribution as part of the conspiracy charges against 61 Stop Cop City protesters in a sprawling RICO indictment that didn’t bother to explain how each individual defendant was involved in any actual crime. I wrote back then about my concern that this wasn’t just sloppy overreach, but also a blueprint for censorship. Those fears have now been validated by Sanchez’s prosecution solely for possessing similar literature.

There have been other warnings that cops and prosecutors think they’ve found a constitutional loophole — if you can’t punish reporting it, punish transporting it. Los Angeles journalist Maya Lau is suing the LA County Sheriff’s Department for secretly investigating her for conspiracy, theft of government property, unlawful access of a computer, burglary, and receiving stolen property. According to her attorneys, her only offense was reporting on a list of deputies with histories of misconduct for the Los Angeles Times.

It’s also reminiscent of the Biden administration’s case against right-wing outlet Project Veritas for possessing and transporting Ashley Biden’s diary, which the organization bought from a Florida woman later convicted of stealing and selling it. The Constitution protects the right to publish materials stolen by others — a right that would be meaningless if they couldn’t possess the materials in the first place.

Despite the collapses of the Cop City prosecution and the Lau investigation — and its own dismissal of the Project Veritas case — the Trump administration has followed those dangerous examples, characterizing lawful activism and ideologies as terrorist conspiracies (a strategy Trump allies also floated during this first term) to seize the power to prosecute pamphlet possession anytime they use the magic word “Antifa.”

That’s a chilling combination for any journalist, activist, or individual who criticizes Trump. National security reporters have long dealt with the specter of prosecution under the archaic Espionage Act for merely obtaining government secrets from sources, particularly after the Biden administration extracted a guilty plea from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the rest of the press — and everyone else, for that matter — understood that merely possessing written materials, no matter what they said, is not a crime.

Guilt by Literature

At what point does a literary collection or newspaper subscription become prosecutorial evidence under the Trump administration’s logic? Essentially, whenever it’s convenient. The vagueness is a feature, not a bug. When people don’t know which political materials might later be deemed evidence of criminality, the safest course is to avoid engaging with controversial ideas altogether.

The slippery slope from anarchist zines to conventional journalism isn’t hypothetical, and we’re already sliding fast. Journalist Mario Guevara can tell you that from El Salvador, where he was deported in a clear case of retaliation for livestreaming a No Kings protest. So can Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, as she awaits deportation proceedings for co-writing an opinion piece critical of Israel’s wars that the administration considers evidence of support for terrorism.

At least two journalists lawfully in the U.S. — Ya’akub Ira Vijandre and Sami Hamdi — were nabbed by ICE just last month. The case against Vijandre is partially based on his criticism of prosecutorial overreach in the Holy Land Five case and his liking social media posts that quote Quranic verses, raising the question of how far away we are from someone being indicted for transporting a Quran or a news article critical of the war on terror.

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Sanchez’s case is prosecutorial overreach stacked on more prosecutorial overreach. The National Lawyers Guild criticized prosecutors’ tenuous dot-connecting to justify holding 18 defendants responsible for one gunshot wound. Some defendants were also charged with supporting terrorism due to their alleged association with “Antifa.” Anarchist zines were cited as evidence against them, too.

Sanchez was charged following a search that ICE proclaimed on social media turned up “literal insurrectionist propaganda” he had allegedly transported from his home to an apartment, noting that “insurrectionary anarchism is regarded as the most serious form of domestic (non-jihadi) terrorist threat.” The tweet also said that Sanchez is a green card holder granted legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The indictment claims Sanchez was transporting those materials to conceal them because they incriminated his wife. But how can possession of literature incriminate anyone, let alone someone who isn’t even accused of anything but being present when someone else allegedly fired a gun? Zines aren’t contraband; it’s not illegal to be an anarchist or read about anarchism. I don’t know why Sanchez allegedly moved the box of documents, but if it was because he (apparently correctly) feared prosecutors would try to use them against his wife, that’s a commentary on prosecutors’ lawlessness, not Sanchez’s.

Violent rhetoric is subject to punishment only when it constitutes a “true threat” of imminent violence. Even then, the speaker is held responsible, not anyone merely in possession of their words.

Government prosecutors haven’t alleged the “Antifa materials” contained any “true threats,” or any other category of speech that falls outside the protection of the First Amendment. Nor did they allege that the materials were used to plan the alleged actions of protesters on July 4 (although they did allege that the materials were “anti-government” and “anti-Trump”).

Even the aforementioned “Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attack” zine, despite its hyperbolic title, reads like a think piece, not a how-to manual. It advocates for tactics like rent strikes and squatting, not shooting police officers. Critically, it has nothing to do with whether Sanchez’s wife committed crimes on July 4.

Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We don’t need a constitutional right to publish (or possess) only what the government likes, and the “anti-government” literature in Sanchez’s box of zines is exactly what the First Amendment protects. With history and leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán as a guide, we also know it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s censorship crusade will stop with a few radical pamphlets.

The Framers Loved Zines

There’s an irony in a supposedly conservative administration treating anti-government pamphlets as evidence of criminality. Many of the publications the Constitution’s framers had in mind when they authored the First Amendment’s press freedom clause bore far more resemblance to Sanchez’s box of zines than to the output of today’s mainstream news media.

Revolutionary-era America was awash in highly opinionated, politically radical literature. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was designed to inspire revolution against the established government. Newspapers like the Boston Gazette printed inflammatory writings by Samuel Adams and others urging the colonies to prepare for war after the Coercive Acts. The Declaration of Independence itself recognized the right of the people to rise up. It did not assume the revolution of the time would be the last one.

One might call it “literal insurrectionist propaganda” — and some of it was probably transported in boxes.

The framers enshrined press freedom not because they imagined today’s professionally trained journalists maintaining careful neutrality. They protected it because they understood firsthand the need for journalists and writers who believed their government had become tyrannical to espouse revolution.

For all their many faults, the framers were confident enough in their ideas that they were willing to let them be tested. If the government’s conduct didn’t call for radical opposition, then radical ideas wouldn’t catch on. It sure looks like the current administration doesn’t want to make that bet.

The post The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine appeared first on The Intercept.

Starting Tuesday, a U.K. court will review Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the United States. At the center of the extradition controversy is concern that Assange will be tortured and put in solitary confinement in what’s known as a CMU — communications management unit — in federal prison. This week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Martin Gottesfeld, a human rights activist who was formerly imprisoned in two of the nation’s CMUs. Gottesfeld shares his experience incarcerated in CMU facilities, where his access to visitors including his wife were severely restricted.

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed, I’m Ryan Grim.

Later today in the United Kingdom a court will be reviewing, over the span of two days, a high court decision made to extradite Julian Assange to the United States. This could be the final appeal, the final hearing that Julian Assange has before he’s sent over here to the United States.

At the center of the controversy over the extradition in the court proceedings has been whether or not Julian Assange will be tortured, will be mistreated, here in the United States, whether or not he will be put in solitary confinement and, specifically, in what’s known as a CMU, a “communications management unit.”

Now, the Department of Justice sort of pretended to make some kind of offering to the U.K. high court that they would not do this. But then, in the very next sentence of their pleading, they said, unless we decide that we actually would need to do this.

So, to talk today about what a CMU is, and why this has been the focus of human rights advocates who are concerned that he may actually wind up in one of these, we’re going to be joined by Martin Gottesfeld, who himself has spent a significant amount of time in an American CMU.

Marty, thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.

Martin Gottesfeld: I’m happy to be here, Ryan.

RG: And so, Marty, before we get to your experience in the CMU, let’s talk about how you wound up in prison in the first place, because I actually think that’s relevant to this conversation. Because it does appear like this is a place where a lot of people who are essentially political prisoners wind up.

MG: Yeah. And I was not the only one, although I do think my case is representative of the larger group, largely representative of the larger group.

So, the government alleges that I am a master hacker with Anonymous. The government also alleges that during a 2014 human rights and child custody matter, I launched one of the largest distributed denial of service —DDoS — attacks that the government had ever seen, to try to free Justina Pelletier, who is being held against her will and against her parents will in a Boston Children’s Hospital psych ward, and then in various residential facilities throughout the state.

The case reached the very highest levels of the political system, with people on both sides, parties on both sides of the aisle commenting on it. Mike Huckabee, Sean Hannity, others on the right, and then the Massachusetts HHS Secretary, uh, Polanowicz; he actually ended up getting involved from the left to eventually send Justina home, which is where most people felt she belonged the entire time.

And before that case, I had been involved — I don’t want to say with, but I guess kind of alongside — Anonymous, protesting the American troubled teen industry, which is also just a political lightning rod, and has been subject to congressional hearings, GAO reports, media exposés, for well over a decade, for the torture and death of American children for profit.

RG: And so, your journey in federal custody actually began in New York. Talk about that a little bit before we get to the CMU, because you actually wrote a piece for us about what it was like in the first jail you were in. And, if I recall correctly, wasn’t Chapo there too? 

MG: So, that wasn’t my first jail. I was arrested in Florida, and then I made a very long extended journey through the federal system to get back to the Northeast. And then I started writing for the Huffington Post, back when you were the D.C. bureau chief. And very shortly after I began writing for the Huffington Post and started a hunger strike seeking pledges from the 2016 election to curtail institutionalized abuse against children and political prosecutions, the Justice Department transferred me to MCC, New York, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York, and it’s 9 South SHU and 10 South Sam’s Unit.

And that is where Chapo was held at the time, and it’s also where Jeffrey Epstein later died. And the communications program they have in those units is kind of connected at the hip to the CMUs. It’s run by the same so-called counterterrorism unit inside the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Justice Department.

And yeah, I wrote a piece there for the Huffington Post — several pieces, actually — about that facility, calling on public officials to do something to reform the facility, because I foresaw, even in 2016, that people were going to die there. And then, sure enough, a few years later, Jeffrey Epstein died there.

RG: It was my sense that your willingness to write for us — both at The Huffington Post and then later at The Intercept — while you were behind bars was one of the things that led to you eventually getting moved to a full-on CMU. Do you think that that’s accurate? What do you think? What drove the decision making that got you stuck in that hole?

MG: Oh, I definitely think it was the journalism. Twelve days after my first Intercept article was when they transferred me to the CMU. And that Intercept article was about El Chapo, his confinement, the conditions of his confinement, the human rights violations, and that was what directly precipitated the move to the CMU.

And then, on top of that, when they transfer you to a CMU, there’s not really a lot of due process involved in that decision, and the courts have tolerated that, but they do have to give you this one-page paper with the supposed justification, right? And mine just basically said, you’re a member of Anonymous, Anonymous is this group that we have to watch. So, therefore, we’re putting you in a CMU.

The problem with that, of course, is that there were other guys in the federal prison system associated much more with Anonymous than I was who never were placed in the CMU. So, Jeremy Hammond was one… And I’m trying to remember the gentleman’s name, but he wrote for the Intercept a lot, but his articles didn’t really challenge federal judges, challenge federal prosecutorial discretion. He just kind of satirized the whole thing. And they were very good, but they didn’t really make people uncomfortable the way my writing made people uncomfortable. I named names.

RG: Right.

MG: And I named facilities. I named specific human rights violations, and that, I think, made them very uncomfortable.

And I can tell you, too, from how I was treated, and the other cases that were there, which I guess we’ll get into in a little while, it certainly seems that I was placed there to suppress my first amendment-protected conduct.

RG: Right. And so, where were you sent, and what’s the place like as you first get there?

MG: I spent time in both CMUs, there are two in the federal system. I was first sent to Terre Haute, Indiana, and that’s kind of the first, and that’s the harsher of the two CMUs. And then, later, I spent time in the CMU in Marion, Illinois.

When you first walk into the CMU, it’s a relatively small unit, there were only about 30 guys there when I first got there.

RG: This is the Terre Haute one.

MG: Yes, the Terre Haute one. It’s actually the old federal death house. So, they built a new federal death row elsewhere in the compound, and then they put the CMU in the old federal death house. So, like, I’ve been inside Timothy McVeigh’s cell. And there are guys who say they’ve seen the old electric chair in the basement, that they have not moved that.

And you can actually see the new death house. Like, we have a very small quote-unquote “outdoor rec area,” right? Where you can go and get fresh air. But they make sure that, within sharp view of that place, whenever you’re outside, you see the actual building, where in 2020 and 2021 they killed 14 people. 

RG: What is your cell like? Because this is the place that people assume we will send Julian Assange if the U.S. successfully extradites him.

MG: The cells are very small. They were built in a former era — the building itself dates to, like, the 1930s — and they were built, I think, for a single person, even back then. So the cells do not actually meet the minimum square footage that the Bureau of Prisons publishes in its own policies, in terms of the minimum needed for a human being.

And then what they did is they went in, and they retrofitted a bunk bed onto each one, so that they can double up, and they did do that in the time that I was there. It’s a sardine can, and it’s smaller than you would get elsewhere in the Bureau of Prisons. It’s a concrete and brick building without air conditioning so, in the summer, you just bake. And if there’s a lockdown, and you’re not out of your cell for three or four days, they’re just baking you, they’re just cooking you like a turkey.

RG: So, while you are there, there are two of you? How much room is [left] after the bunk beds are put in there?

MG: There’s less than 56 square feet in the whole cell, and a lot less if you don’t count the toilet, the actual bunk. Now, I spent time there both single-celled and with a cellmate, it depends on the number of guys they have in the unit. But when you’re a journalist like I am, you’re one of the first people they double.

When they try to double you up as a journalist, they doubled up… They doubled me up with a guy who was a known informant, who was actually in the law library as an informant, right? And when I reacted negatively to that, they acted like I was the one who was misbehaving, you know?

But, again, these are all political cases. So, to force you to bunk with an informant and risk violence, right? Because that’s something that’s a direct risk of violence. And the Bureau of Prisons does not care. They do not care.

RG: Yeah. In general, do people want to be doubled up or not? 

MG: No. People generally want the single cell. You have no modicum with privacy any other way.

RG: Right. So, you’re doubled up. How often can you get … If there’s not a lockdown, how often are you out of that cell?

MG: So, you’re out, actually, most of the day. They pop the doors around six, seven in the morning. During the weekday schedule you’d be out until just before four, and then there’d be a count, and you’d be released after the count anytime between like 4:30 and 5:30.

Sometimes the guards are lazy, right? And they don’t want to do the count right away, or they don’t want to unlock you right away after the count. So, even though the count’s done, you can be in your cell till 5:30, 6 o’clock. Then you’re out for dinner, and then you stay out until about nine o’clock.

On the weekends, there’s an additional count at 10 o’clock in the morning. And so, you lock in at like 9:45 and be out around 10:30, 11.

RG: And so, what’s the communication management part of it? Like, what’s different about Terre Haute or Marion, compared to a typical federal prison? When it comes to your ability to communicate with the public, with your attorneys, with your family, and so on?

MG: So, the unit is entirely self-contained. It’s part of a larger federal complex, but if you’re a regular prisoner in that complex, those times that you’re out, you’re not stuck in your housing unit. You can go to the athletic facilities, you can go to the sports fields. There’s a lot more to do.

In the CMU, when you’re out, you’re still kind of stuck in this sardine can. And the communications management … So, elsewhere in the federal prison system, you get between 300 and 500 minutes a month of phone time, and that’s kind of in flux now with the First Step Act and all that. And you get in-person contact visits; like, your family can come and hug you.

In the CMU, you get two 15-minute phone calls a week, max. You have no contact visits, you basically never leave the little unit until you’re either released or you’re transferred.

Those phone calls elsewhere in the Bureau, they say they monitor, but there’s so much call volume that they cannot really effectively monitor; they kind of keep recordings for a little while in case they have to go back and do something. But in the CMU, your phone calls are monitored in real time, and they can be cut off in real time. And so, several times I was speaking with journalists, and they would just cut the call off. And they would never provide any justification for that.

After NBC dropped the four-part docuseries on my case, they just deleted my wife from my contact information, never provided me any written justification for that, effectively banned me on the phone without providing any written justification whatsoever. And you get lawyers involved, and nothing really happens. The system is completely unwilling to check their discretion. The judges just don’t want to hear it.

The judges in Terre Haute get spun. They hear that this is the terrorist unit for Al-Qaeda guys, and that whatever they file is frivolous. And these judges are mostly former federal prosecutors. Like, you’re dead on arrival in court.

I have a federal habeas pending now that I’ve been released, but it’s been pending since July, fully briefed, right? And the judge won’t rule on it, just to give you an example. And federal habeas is supposed to jump to the front of the list, it’s the very first thing a federal judge is supposed to rule on. And in Terre Haute, it becomes the very last thing. Especially if it looks like you’ve got a case.

RG: Let’s talk a little bit about who goes out there, because I remember from more than ten years ago, there was a lawsuit, or there were complaints against the CMUs on religious grounds, where the argument was, you’re sticking all of the Muslims in these prisons, and you can’t do that, that is discrimination based on religion. The Bureau of Prison’s response to that was, oh, well, we’ve got a couple people convicted of ecoterrorism here and there. And so, they kind of just threw them into it, and said, well, look, it’s not all Muslims anymore, so you don’t have your case anymore.

When you were there, what’s the kind of demographic, and what’s the profile of the kinds of people that you’re with?

MG: At any given time, it’s between about 30 and 45 percent Muslims, most of them. It tends not to be the big cases that you would actually associate with a unit like that. It tends to be, like, some 20-year-old guy who got indoctrinated over the internet and was trying to fly to Syria, and they catch him at the airport, right? And he’s never actually hurt anybody. In some cases, these people were entrapped, right? And it tends to be those kinds of cases.

These are not really the serious terrorism cases that one would think they are, but these cases are worth a lot of money. The Bureau of Prisons gets a lot in their budget based on building these guys up as some international threat, even though they’ve never hurt anybody, and had no serious potential to hurt anybody. That’s the majority of the Muslim cases there. 

Then you have probably about 15 percent political cases. And then the rest… They actually started changing the demographic after I started complaining that there was a high concentration of political cases, so now they’re running through guys who get caught with a cell phone in federal prison. That was largely a reaction to my coverage.

It’s definitely not what the public is sold. And these CMUs, they cost millions of dollars, they hire dozens of so-called intelligence analysts to review the cases there. My understanding is that the qualifications of these so-called intelligence analysts wouldn’t meet the bar at the state department or anywhere else. A lot of cases, these are just former prison guards who have no special intelligence training that I’ve ever seen, right? But they do get these exorbitant salaries, once the Bureau of Prisons kind of designates them as intelligence analysts.

And the CMUs, they were started during Iraq and Afghanistan, and the idea there was that, by mining the communications of these jihadis, they would come up with actionable intel to use in the war effort. And the one thing that — to my knowledge anyway — the CMU has never, ever produced, is actionable intel to use in any war effort whatsoever.

RG: So, how often would you wind up in solitary? What’s that system there?

MG: So, I started doing the prerequisites to file a lawsuit that they didn’t like, and they called that extortion, and they threw me in solitary.

RG: How long, that first time?

MG: So, that was about a month and a half. And then they celled me up with that informant. And when I started talking to the media saying they celled me up with an informant, they threw me in solitary for another three, four months. Those are the two stints that I did in solitary in the CMU.

And the solitary cells in the CMU, by the way, are even worse than the regular cells. They’re insect infested, cockroaches everywhere. There are serious sewage issues. The water is not really drinkable. And so, they go out of their way to make those solitary cells very, very heinous, and it’s something that Julian, I’m sad to say, can expect to experience himself the first time he reaches out to a journalist, the first time someone tries to file a lawsuit to vindicate his First Amendment rights, you know? It’s hell.

RG: What kind of insect infestation? That sounds utterly terrifying.

MG: Spiders, cockroaches, various other insects that we couldn’t identify. I actually, at one point, got in — it took some effort — but I got in a North American field guide to insects and bugs, just so that we could identify all the various creepy crawlies, and so that we would know what’s potentially venomous and what’s not. Because they don’t provide any training, any safety. There’s nothing to tell you, don’t get stung by that one, don’t get stung by that one, right?

And there’s an insect there that’s called a “cow killer,” OK? And it’s called a cow killer …

RG: That doesn’t sound good.

MG: Yeah, it’s not because its sting is so venomous that it would actually kill a cow, but the sting is so painful that it can cause a stampede. So, one of these things stings one cow, the cow bucks because it’s in so much pain. This causes a stampede, and you end up with a herd of dead cows, right? And that insect was crawling around the rec yard out there. And, again, there’s no signage, no warning, no anything. If you don’t have the knowledge of the guys who are already there to say, hey, don’t get stunned by that guy, you might step right on it.

RG: What’s it like trying to sleep, knowing that the cell’s crawling with bugs?

MG: In my cell I always slept on the top bunk, even when I didn’t have a cellmate, because they’re just less likely to get at you up there. But yeah, I’ve woken up there with a cockroach staring at me, like, on my chest, just staring at me, and I’m like, oh hi. Had to brush him off the bed.

Guys wake up with spider bites, you know? Like, a big rash going all the way down the leg.

Yeah. Just, nothing is done. I filed remedies all the way up to Washington, in the Bureau of Prisons, saying, you guys got to do something about this. And they basically said, we don’t see any bugs, you guys are fine. And they just lie. I mean, they lie, in writing, on federal documents, they sign them … You know, if you see something, anything from the government talking about the conditions in the CMU, from my perspective, they’re just lying.

RG: And this is all related because — as people I’m sure have gathered by this point in the conversation — you’re the kind of person that is going to be a squeaky wheel. Like, they can do whatever they want to you, and you’re not going to stop pushing back and fighting for your rights. That is also the kind of person that they’re going to retaliate against constantly.

MG: Yeah. They’re trying to break you. That’s their goal. Really. I mean, they’ll never admit to it, but there’s a widely known thing among the CMU prisoners that, if you kind of go to them and you say, hey, look, I’ll stop, just get me out of here. And you drop all your lawsuits, and you stop complaining, that’s the one time they’ll let you out.

And no staff ever threatened me, but I’ve talked to a lot of guys who were threatened, who staff told them, if you don’t stop, we’re going to make sure you never see your kids again. If you don’t stop, we’re going to keep you here. Or, complaining is not the way to get out of this unit, right? That’s the one you hear the most, is that complaining is not the way to get out of this unit. 

RG: The way you got into it, and the way you stay in it.

MG: You stay in it. Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the implication.

RG: Right. And Julian Assange is not the kind of person, either, that is just going to just sit back and accept the fate that he’s dealt. He’s somebody that’s always been completely about transparency.

MG: I mean, the only reason they’re prosecuting Julian — let’s just be real here — is because he told the truth about some things that people in power found really embarrassing.

RG: Yes.

MG: Without that, there would be no prosecution. They’re, they’re, they’re grasping at straws to try to make a federal violation out of something that is arguably protected press conduct. And that’s why the Obama administration didn’t prosecute him in the first place. They had the so-called “New York Times problem.” If we prosecute him, how do we justify that we’re not prosecuting the New York Times?

So, I understand he’s become somewhat of a controversial figure because of a lot of the media narrative that has been run against him. But there was a time in this country ten years ago when he was widely perceived as a hero, and very little in terms of his conduct has changed since that time. 

So, his case, my case, many other cases that are at the periphery of prosecutorial discretion, right? Those are the kinds of cases that end up in the CMU. And we as a country, I think, have to ask ourselves an existential question of, can we tolerate these kinds of units?

Because you go to prison, and you’re supposed to keep your first amendment rights, right? There’s no valid, what they call penological reason. There’s nothing relevant to protection of the public, rehabilitation, any of what the supposed goals of prison are that says you shouldn’t be able to speak, you shouldn’t be able to speak to the media, you shouldn’t be able to file in court. But those are the things the CMU exists to curtail, right? That’s why those units are there.

And the actual stated purpose of the unit — keep the public safe, help fight the war on terror — again, the units never produced a single piece of actionable intel for that. And they’ve slept. They’ve missed more than a few of these things.

There was a shootout in Texas where the mass shooter was trying to get a female federal prisoner freed from the female-equivalent of these CMU’s. And there was no intelligence to say that he was going to do that, they didn’t stop that. She was in one of these units, supposedly to stop that very kind of mass killing. And these people missed it, and Americans died.

And had they not put her there in the first place, frankly, it wouldn’t have happened. I’m not saying that justifies the shooting, of course. But if you’re going to put people in these kinds of units to stop terrorist actions, and you’re going to take millions of dollars from taxpayers to do it, then you ought to at least stop the terrorist actions. And they’re not even doing that. They failed at that.

RG: Let’s even grant them, though, in some imaginary world, where they actually managed, at some point, to do that with somebody who was convicted of a charge of terrorism. How do they justify putting Julian Assange or you in a CMU, when there’s not even any claim that you’re even remotely connected, that either of you are remotely connected to terrorism?

MG: We actually had a district court ruling in my case. The federal judge, who’s not a pro-defendant judge, he’s known as a hanging judge, a very harsh sentencing judge, right? He was Aaron Swartz’s judge. And we actually had that judge rule that the government could not say, could not imply that anything I did was terrorism, right? Mine was an activism case. We actually had a ruling from the bench before the trial and sentence, right? That argument would literally be frivolous in my case, because a district court already decided the matter, and the government never appealed it to challenge it, right?

So, the thing is, they don’t really have to justify it at all. That’s, really, the scary thing. The relevant precedent in the Supreme Court is called Sandin v. Conner, OK? And the Supreme Court basically said, unless what the prison is doing is an atypical and significant hardship as compared to the normal hardships of prison life, then the prisoner has no due process to challenge his placement, wherever the system wants to put you.

So, what they do in the CMUs … You asked before, how often are you out of your cell? So, you’re out most of the time. The reason you’re out most of the time is not out of the goodness of their heart. It’s because they have to say we treat them just like any other prisoner. This is a general population unit, they actually try to maintain that the CNUs are a general population unit. But then you look elsewhere in what they say and in what they do, and it becomes very clear that this is not really a general population unit. But, so long as they keep lying and saying it’s general population, and as long as the federal courts continue to credit them that it’s a general population unit, they can really put whoever they want in these CMUs.

RG: And I guess when it comes to the definition of atypical, it’s in the eye of the judge and the prison. Because when I think about what you said about getting just, what, two 15-minute calls a month? That to me feels like an atypical and radical departure.

MG: Yeah. That’s mentioned with no-contact. I wasn’t able to hug my wife for four years.

RG: I feel naïve asking as if they’re going to give some rational answer to it, but what did they say to you when you would challenge them, and say, this is an atypical deviation from the rest of the federal prison system?

MG: No, they just say it’s a general population unit. You have all the same things everyone else on the compound has. It’s because we have to manage your communications to ensure public safety.

RG: They go back to the public safety argument.

MG: Yeah, even though we had a federal judge rule that mine was an activism case with no real public safety ramifications. And the government in my case failed to prove that anything that I did affected a single human individual. They put it before the jury, right? They asked the jury to find that something I did had affected, or even potentially affected a single human being, and the jury would not convict on that.

So, they got me for financial damage to multimillion- and multibillion-dollar institutions that tortured and crippled a human child, but that’s actually what I was convicted of. And when the government sought to convict me for actually being a potential danger to even one human person, they were not able to convict me of that. But they still sent me to a CMU.

RG: What was the time in solitary like for you? What are the phases that you go through?

MG: So the first time I was in solitary I was on a hunger strike, and that actually lasted 42 days; it was the second longest hunger strike I did in federal prison. The longest one, which we covered together at HuffPost, was a hundred days, and that was during the election.

So, after that hundred-day hunger strike, I had lost a lot of muscle mass. I prepared for that hundred-day hunger strike for six months. People ask me all the time, how do you do that, how do you survive a hundred days? And the answer is: you prepare ahead of time. I prepared for nine months to survive that.

So, the second time, I didn’t have that preparation. I had lost a lot of lean body mass. It was actually much more concerning from a health perspective the second time than the first time, but that colored my experience in CMU solitary quite a bit. Because it’s one thing to be in solitary, it’s another thing to be in solitary and reject, I think it was, 105 straight meals where I did not eat.

I was trying to fight my case at that point, I was still up on appeal, I was trying to change attorneys. Your legal calls are pretty much entirely at their discretion. They open your legal mail, they opened and read my legal mail right in front of me when I was in solitary the first time, even though they’re not supposed to do that. Legal mail is supposed to be kind of sacrosanct. Like, they can inspect it for contraband, they can like make sure no drugs fall out when they open the envelope, but they’re not supposed to read it.

But they went through my incoming legal mail, reviewing for content, and actually confiscated things; like, parts of my appellate brief they would not let me have. When I was trying to change lawyers, they made that very, very difficult, and it was something that, had I not had my lovely and talented wife Dana on the outside fighting for me — and that’s something most of these guys do not have, a spouse, a significant other — I wouldn’t have been able to do that.

So, they make it very, very hard to fight your case, and that adds a lot of stress, too. If you feel you have meritorious claims, you want to get these claims heard before the court.

So, the first time I’m in solitary in the CMU, I’m on a hunger strike, I’m trying to change attorneys, they’re interfering with my legal mail. I mean, they’re basically trying to drive you to kill yourself. To me, that seemed like what the goal was. Like, if I had hanged myself in that cell, they would’ve just wiped their hands of it, and they would all consider that, you know, a squeaky wheel, as you put it, had now been silenced.

RG: Right. Do you have books in solitary? Do you get to leave at all to go outdoors, but only by yourself? Like, how does that work?

MG: So, there are books. The Bureau provides, really, kind of shoddy, like, pulp fiction kind of stuff. Thankfully, in the CMU, since you have this concentration of political prisoners, and it’s really a very smart crowd in that unit compared to the rest of federal prisons. So, the books have been interspersed with books that other guys received from their families. So, you actually have really good reading material, it is one of the best libraries in the Bureau of Prisons, is the irony.

But it’s not that way because the Bureau provides good reading materials, it’s that way because they only allow you to keep so many books in your cell. So, you either can donate them or give them away, but what ends up happening is that the library gets filled with really interesting… And a lot of the classics, a lot of the Western canon. I’d say there’s a better selection there than there is in most public high school libraries. So, that’s one of the good things, I did get a lot of good reading.

RG: So, how much time did you spend in both of these CMUs?

MG: So, I was in Terre Haute from April 1st, 2019 through January 21st, 2021, then I was in Marion from January 21st, 2021 to, I think, November 10th, 2022. And then, again, in Terre Haute from November 10th, 2022 till, I think, June 9th of 2023.

RG: What was it like when you finally got out of there? 

MG: Words fail me, because you’re out in public again. Like, they just put you on a greyhound bus; when I was released, it’s like, they just drop you off at the bus station, and you’re out in public again, and you can talk to people.

RG: Like, 24 hours earlier, you’re just…

MG: Yeah, you’re completely cut off, isolated from the world. They blocked Dana, so I couldn’t talk to my wife for seven months, with no kind of process, no official anything ever handed to me to justify it. And you get out, and you get to the Greyhound station, and it’s just … Can I borrow your cell phone, I need to make a call real quick.

And they didn’t want me to leave with my legal work. So, I had 210 pounds of documents about the CMU, and about my case, between the two, right? And I still have them, but they would not allow my lawyer to come to the prison the day before I was released to pick up my legal documents, even though their own regulations kind of specify that they have to allow a prisoner to exchange legal documents with an attorney, and they knew I was being released. They were really hoping that they would make it logistically difficult for me to bring my legal documents with me, and that I would then trust them to mail these documents home. But, having spoken to guys who had been through the CMU program — and some of them, it’s like their 2nd, 3rd, 4th trip through the CMU program — I was not prepared to rely on the Bureau of Prisons to mail these very sensitive, very compromising legal documents home.

So, I actually had to carry, by hand, 210 pounds of legal documents to the Greyhound stop, and then Dana arranged for somebody to meet me there. And I put the legal documents in that person’s car, and then that person — you know, bless her heart — took them to UPS, and had them shipped home for me. And that’s the only way that I have these documents that show, in detail, the kind of thing that Julian can expect. And the writeups, the bogus disciplinary charges that I got for trying to speak to the media, trying to litigate, trying to tell people what’s going on, trying to help other guys who I feel are wrongfully incarcerated in the CMUs, [to] litigate.

And there’s one case in particular that I really want to mention, and that’s Donald Reynolds, Jr. His case is related to Operation Fast and Furious, which was when the Justice Department walked high-powered, fully-automatic, so-called cop-killing firearms to the Mexican drug cartels. You had mentioned Chapo earlier, right? And so, this was when the Justice Department was actually handing those cartels armor piercing firearms.

RG: Yeah. This became a scandal under the Eric Holder Attorney Generalship.

MG: Yeah. So, Donnie was a Black NRA member, firearms collector. He had a lot of historic weapons, like World War II-era firearms, and a lot of high-powered stuff. And they went to him, they asked him to become an informant for them, he refused. They buried him as a first-time nonviolent offender with a life-plus-75-year sentence; so, they actually hit Donnie off with a longer sentence than El Chapo received. And it looks to me and to others like Donnie is wholly innocent, and they basically just did this to keep him quiet.

And we actually had The American Conservative from the other side of the aisle do a months-long investigation into Donnie’s case. And The American Conservative ended up recommending clemency for Donnie, because of the prosecutorial irregularities. And then a different organization — similar name, The American Conservative Union — on the other side of the aisle, not really known for taking a pro-defendant, anti-law enforcement kind of stance, also recommended clemency for Donnie because of these prosecutorial irregularities.

RG: What charges did they end up hitting him with?

MG: Drug trafficking, and using firearms in pursuit of drug trafficking. But here’s the thing: they never found any drugs on Donnie. Never. They searched his house, they searched his parents’ house. They never found anything.

RG: And he was a player in this entire scandal. So, the thinking is, from your perspective, that holing him up somewhere is an effective way to do PR for this scandal. Is that what you’re thinking? Or what’s the rationale for why in particular they would go after him?

MG: I think that, in his case, you have a lot of what are called Brady violations, which are discovery violations. Donnie’s defense was entitled to information about Operation Fast and Furious to prepare his defense, which he never received. And if it comes out that this information was never turned over to his defense attorneys, well, then that’s a big issue. Because then his conviction is going to have to be overturned, and if they choose to continue to prosecute the case, he’s entitled to all this information about Fast and Furious, which the House committees were trying to obtain from the White House, and the Obama White House asserted executive privilege to quash those subpoenas.

Well, you can’t assert executive privilege to quash Brady, right? Donnie’s entitled to that information if they’re coming for his liberty, which they are. And Donnie had no idea that it was Fast and Furious. It took years for information to come out about Fast and Furious for Donnie to put it together that this was likely Fast and Furious.

And then, when these months-long investigations were done, lo and behold, the names involved in his case are some of the same names involved in Fast and Furious. The dates all line up, as one would expect them to line up. It’s really uncanny. So, there’s a piece at The American Conservative about it called “The Knoxville Kingpin Who Wasn’t,” and that has more of the details about it. 

But this is another great example of a CMU case, right? The Obama administration literally asserted executive privilege to stop any investigation into Fast and Furious. Here you have an innocent guy who is being held in a CMU to keep a lid on that, even to this day. And I’m convinced of that, and I think the facts do bear it out, but if people can read the investigation, then they can come to their own conclusions.

RG: What’s he like?

MG: Donnie’s a great guy, he’s a smart guy. He was a businessman. He ran four businesses before they locked him up, he was married before they locked him up, he’s a father. His father worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, had a security clearance. He’s a great friend to have, and he doesn’t deserve at all what’s happening to him, and I really hope someday the truth comes out.

Donnie is one of the many guys who helped keep me safe while I was there. He was also the unit barber, so he cut everyone’s hair. And he’s a funny guy, he’s got a great sense of humor. You’d think after they do all this to you, it’d be very hard to keep your head up, right? And Donnie maintains this sense of humor.

RG: How old is he now?

MG: He’s a few years older than I am, so he’s in his 40s, he’s in his early 40s.

RG: And looking at life.

MG: He’s doing life. He’s been locked up longer than I was. He’s been locked up since, like, 2011 … I might be off by a year or two there. And he’s been in the CMU practically the entire time.

RG: And you mentioned, keeping you safe. What is the violence like there? It’s a small place, and I don’t know if that makes it less or more violent.

MG: Yeah. Six months before I got there, one of the jihadis garroted to death one of the minimum security prisoners there, and stabbed another guy 11 times. And they just completely covered that up. There was a press release that there had been a death at the Terre Haute federal complex, but they did not mention that it was the CMU. There are multiple theories about what predicated that attack, but the one thing that everyone seems to agree, is that the Bureau of Prisons knew ahead of time that it was going to happen, and did nothing to stop it.

There is sectarian violence, but I’m a brown Jew, and they put me in a unit full of radical jihadi Muslims. Like, it’s hard to say that that itself wasn’t an assassination attempt. What they weren’t banking on, though, is that the government’s saying this whole time that I’m a member of Anonymous, right? And Anonymous has a fairly good reputation in the Middle East after the Arab Spring. So, you know, it didn’t work out the way they thought it would.

RG: So, you were cool.

MG: Yeah, I was cool. And I do a lot of legal work for guys. I’m like the resident jailhouse lawyer, anywhere I go. And so, that always keeps you safe. Like, if you’re headed to federal prison through no fault of your own, pick up a Black’s Law Dictionary and get good with the law, because you will become an indispensable person.

But the thing is, about prison, especially about that unit, is it’s never going to be one-on-one. Like, it’s him and his boys versus you and whoever’s going to get your back. And that’s also what is potentially so very dangerous about these units. These units are a powder keg just waiting for a spark to go off. And, in 2018, before I got there, they had that spark go off and, and one person died, and another person was stabbed 11 times. 

RG: And, since you got out, you mentioned all of that information that you were able to take with you. I know you’ve been in touch with Julian Assange’s legal team. I don’t know what you can say about that. How are they feeling about this upcoming hearing? And were they able to make use of any of the insider CMU knowledge that you were able to give them?

MG: So, in terms of their feeling about the hearing, I’m going to defer to them. You’re going to really have to speak to them on that matter.

They were limited. By the time I got out, the lower-court proceedings had already been concluded, and so, they were limited to that record on appeal. So I don’t know that they were able to actually use any of the documents that I got [over] to them, because it was just too late by the time those documents got there.

Now, if the case gets reversed, if he gets to go back to the lower courts, then I think, potentially, some of the documents that I have are really potentially useful. I don’t know what they’ve used and what they haven’t used. Presumably it’s a public docket and we can see.

But I think unfortunately, very unfortunately for Julian, my experience and my records in the legal sense will not really come to bear until the next CMU extradition case. And, at that point, all this stuff can be briefed in the district court, in the lower court, where it’ll become part of the record of the case, and be arguable on appeal, and on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

RG: I think one thing I just want to leave people with, you know, you’re no fool, you knew what kind of system you were getting into. And the prosecutors offered a plea deal that would’ve given a significant —  because I remember you and I talking about this at the time — would’ve given you a significantly shorter prison sentence. I don’t remember exactly the details now, but I remember you saying, it’s not about that. I am not ashamed of what I did. Like, I was standing up for Justine. I’m going to take this all the way to the jury, and if the jury finds me guilty, then so be it. 

That’s just an unusual amount of courage, I would say, to willingly stare down a much more extended sentence under brutal conditions. And I think that it’s a fact that that is unusual courage, because I think something like 95 percent of federal cases — some extraordinary number of federal cases — end in plea deals. 

MG: Yeah, it’s higher than 95. The trial system is so unfair in the federal system. I mean, it’s not a fair system. And I would invite anyone who finds that shocking, as I did initially… I get that it’s a shocking thing. This is America, you expect the courts to be fair.

Go do a little research on the federal system, look at cases like mine. They would not even let me plead defense of another, right? Like, they wouldn’t let my jury consider it, that I acted to defend a human life, right? They found that defense inconvenient, so they simply prevented the jury from hearing it.

RG: Yeah, I think any system that has a 95-plus percent success rate for the prosecution, you can pretty fairly say is tilted in their favor. And that’s why so many people take deals.

MG: Well, they want you to believe that these prosecutors are just that good, and they’re just that righteous.

RG: Absolute geniuses. Yes.

MG: Yeah. But, again, just look at it, and just look at the cases they’re bringing. Look at the case they’re bringing against Julian. Look at the case they brought against Barrett Brown or Jeremy Hammond.

RG: Now, Barrett Brown, that’s who you were trying to think of earlier.

MG: Yeah, yeah. But just look at the cases they bring, and look at the cases that they do not bring, right? You had the 2008 financial crisis, right? Who went to jail? The whistleblower. You have the Bush torture program, right? Who went to jail? The whistleblower.

RG: Right. And look at the war crimes that Julian Assange exposed, the only people to go to prison, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, right?

MG: Julian, yeah.

RG: Well, Marty, thank you for fighting, and thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

MG: Thank you for having me, Ryan.

RG: That was Marty Gottesfeld, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Jose Olivares is our lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal Review by David Bralow and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief. And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

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The post Life Inside the Brutal U.S. Prison That Awaits Julian Assange appeared first on The Intercept.

When Julian Assange abruptly found himself back in Australia and freedom this week after reaching a plea deal with the U.S. government, I found myself thinking back to my own marathon legal fight with the U.S. government and how it finally and suddenly ended. 

I waged a seven-year legal battle against the George W. Bush administration and later the Obama administration, both of which demanded I reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for story I wrote about a botched CIA operation. I wrote about the CIA operation for the New York Times, but the paper’s editors suppressed the story at the government’s request, so I published it in my 2006 book, “State of War.” The government then launched a leak investigation, subpoenaing me in 2008 to try to force me to testify and reveal my sources. The government threatened that if I didn’t comply, I could be thrown in prison for contempt of court. I refused and fought them all the way to the Supreme Court. 

In 2015, as negative publicity mounted on the Obama administration for its campaign to put a reporter in prison, I was called to attend a court hearing. When the prosecutor asked me whether I would go to prison rather than reveal my sources, I said yes. This time the government backed down, abandoning its efforts to force me to testify. At the end of that hearing, I drove home and had a glass of champagne with my wife to celebrate. I felt free for the first time in seven years.  

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that began in the post-9/11 era and has continued ever since. The Assange case was part of that same anti-press campaign, one that the government has continued to conduct under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

My personal experience has made me sympathize with Assange, even as so many other Americans have turned on him. My legal fight left me exhausted, both mentally and physically, especially during the long periods when my case was being ignored by the press and the outside world. I learned firsthand that the Justice Department’s primary legal strategy in such cases is to try to bankrupt people and wear them down so that they cut deals rather than go to trial. 

My personal experience has made me sympathize with Assange, even as so many other Americans have turned on him.

I emerged victorious when my case finally ended; I never revealed my sources. But the result of facing down the government for so long made me far more I suspicious of power and much less willing to accept authority.  

I am sure that as Assange returns to Australia to try to put his life back together, he will recognize that he has changed in surprising ways as well.     

To be sure, there are stark differences between Assange’s experience and my own. Assange was a polarizing figure long before he faced prosecution, with enemies on both sides of the American political divide. Republicans hated him for what he did in 2010, when he published classified documents from the Pentagon and the State Department on his WikiLeaks website, while also sharing those documents with mainstream news organizations like The Guardian and the New York Times. Those documents led to a wide range of disclosures about the dark and abusive actions of the United States in the post-9/11 era, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond in the global war on terror. 

Democrats, meanwhile, learned to hate Assange for what he did in 2016. Knowingly or not, he served as a go-between for Russian intelligence. Moscow hacked the emails of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and then turned them over to Assange, who published the emails and related Democratic Party documents on WikiLeaks, while also doling them out to reporters for mainstream news organizations during the 2016 presidential campaign, damaging the Clinton campaign and helping Donald Trump. 

As if all of that wasn’t enough, many others grew to hate him for evading sexual assault charges in Sweden. 

When Assange was first charged in 2019 by the Justice Department under the Espionage Act for his involvement in the 2010 leak of classified documents from the State Department and the U.S. military, very few people, liberal or conservative, came to his defense. Democrats went along with his indictment by the Trump administration, even though he was not charged in connection with the hacking of Democratic Party emails and Russian election interference in 2016. And when Joe Biden became president, his Justice Department continued the Assange prosecution without extending the charges to cover his involvement in the 2016 election.  

Now, after years in prison in Britain while fighting extradition to the United States, Assange has finally cut a deal with the Justice Department. He pleaded guilty this week to violating the Espionage Act and in return was released from prison for the time he has served in Britain. He was able to enter his plea agreement at a federal court in Saipan, a U.S. territory, and then fly directly to Australia. 

Many of his supporters have declared this a victory for Assange. But by obtaining a guilty plea, the Justice Department can also claim victory and ominously may use the same tactics to go after other reporters.  

Assange’s unpopularity means that few have viewed him as a martyr in the cause of press freedom. But he is a victim of an abusive prosecution by a government seeking to silence whistleblowers, and his case has set a dangerous precedent that could severely damage press freedom in the United States.

Few have viewed Assange as a martyr in the cause of press freedom. But he is a victim of an abusive prosecution by a government seeking to silence whistleblowers.

Though his legal saga has come to an end, the role he has played in journalism has never been fully resolved or even accurately defined. 

Assange was a strange hybrid figure in journalism. WikiLeaks, the online organization he co-founded, obtained documents from sources inside governments and other organizations and then made them public, either by publishing them on its own website or by sharing them with major news organizations. Journalists learned to cultivate relationships with Assange in order to get their hands on the secret documents that WikiLeaks had obtained from whistleblowers.

Did that make Assange a go-between, a source, a journalist, or all three rolled into one?  

The Justice Department arbitrarily sought to decide itself how to define Assange’s role by declaring that Assange did not act as a legitimate journalist when he interacted with Chelsea Manning, the former Army analyst and whistleblower who leaked the classified State Department and U.S. military documents to Assange.  

The notion that the U.S. government gets to decide how to define journalism might prove to be the least understood, but most dangerous, precedent set by the long and messy case against Assange. 

The post Like Julian Assange, I Know How It Feels to Be Prosecuted for Acts of Journalism appeared first on The Intercept.

Reps. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., are asking their colleagues in the House to sign on to a letter to the Biden administration by Thursday, noting that opposing Assange’s prosecution is important not only for press freedom, but also to maintain credibility on the global stage. 

McGovern, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who co-chairs the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in Congress, told The Intercept that the charges against Assange are part of an alarming global trend of increasing attacks against the press, including in the U.S. “The bottom line is that journalism is not a crime,” he wrote in a statement. “The work reporters do is about transparency, trust, and speaking truth to power. When they are unjustly targeted, we all suffer the consequences. The stakes are too high for us to remain silent.”

The lawmakers will send the letter to Biden as well as Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The letter follows a similar effort by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., earlier this year and comes amid Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to the U.S. this week. Buoyed by cross-partisan Australian support for the cause to free Assange, an Australian citizen, Albanese himself has previously expressed frustration with Assange’s situation, saying it had gone on far too long.

“The fact that it’s a bipartisan effort is extremely important, showing that Julian’s issue is not a left or a right issue, but it’s an issue of principle,” Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, told The Intercept. 

Assange has been held in a London prison since 2019 as he has combated U.S. extradition efforts. He faces 18 criminal charges in the U.S., 17 of which allege violations of the Espionage Act. The charges stem from the whistleblower’s publication of classified documents about the State Department, Guantánamo Bay, and U.S. incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The letter, which was first reported by Fox News, appeals to Biden by citing his former boss’s administration. “We believe the Department of Justice acted correctly in 2013, during your vice presidency, when it declined to pursue charges against Mr. Assange for publishing the classified documents because it recognized that the prosecution would set a dangerous precedent,” the letter reads. (The Obama administration had also commuted the sentence of former U.S. Army soldier and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who had provided the hundreds of thousands of documents — and infamous video of an Apache helicopter strike killing Iraqi civilians and two photographers working for Reuters — to Assange.)

“We note that the 1917 Espionage Act was ostensibly intended to punish and imprison government employees and contractors for providing or selling state secrets to enemy governments, not to punish journalists and whistleblowers for attempting to inform the public about serious issues that some U.S. government officials might prefer to keep secret.”

In their letter to colleagues, McGovern and Massie cite Chinese officials calling the United States “hypocritical” when it comes to supporting press freedom by targeting Assange. Tlaib also raised the undermining of U.S. standing abroad in her letter to Garland in April. 

“Every day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home,” Tlaib wrote.

As part of WikiLeaks’s release of documents, Assange coordinated with outlets like Spain’s El País, France’s Le Monde, the U.K.’s The Guardian, and the New York Times to release classified cables revealing the inner workings of bargaining, diplomacy, and threat-making around the world. Since the mass documents leak in 2010, Assange has faced legal pressure. He sought asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, where he remained until his 2019 imprisonment. 

Shipton described the support for Assange’s release across the Australian and American political spectrums as a “growing recognition” that the whole affair is a complete scandal. “Publishing this information related to the Iraq War, the Afghanistan war logs, and the Chelsea Manning leaks, to be prosecuted for the act of journalism is being seen as a growing scandal. And I think it’s time for wiser heads to prevail.”

The post Members of Congress Make New Push to Free Julian Assange appeared first on The Intercept.

A quick request: If my book has arrived and you’re enjoying it, please give it a review. If you are not, well, please do not, I suppose.

And some news: The Intercept is proud to partner on the Belmarsh Tribunal at the National Press Club this coming Saturday, December 9, 2023. 

Inspired by the Russell-Sartre Tribunal of the Vietnam War, the Belmarsh Tribunal brings together a range of expert witnesses to call for the release of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange as his potential extradition from the U.K. to the U.S. reaches its denouement, with his final U.K. court hearing expected in early 2024.

This D.C. sitting of the Tribunal will be co-chaired by Amy Goodman, the host of “Democracy Now!”, and by me. It’ll be livestreamed, and details are below. 

Members of the D.C. sitting of the Tribunal include Marjorie Cohn, professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild; Michael Sontheimer, journalist and historian (formerly Der Spiegel); Mark Feldstein, investigative correspondent and chair of journalism at the University of Maryland; Trevor Timm, co-founder of Freedom of the Press Foundation; John Kiriakou, former CIA intelligence officer; Rebecca Vincent, Reporters Without Borders; Ewen MacAskill, journalist and intelligence correspondent (formerly Guardian); Ben Wizner, lawyer and civil liberties advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union; Maja Sever, president of European Federation of Journalists; Ece Temelkuran, author; Lina Attalah, co-founder and chief editor of Mada Masr, 2020 Knight International Journalism Award recipient; Sevim Dagdelen, member of the German Bundestag; and Abby Martin, journalist.

The Intercept invites you to book your place to attend in person or follow the proceedings online by visiting https://act.progressive.international/belmarsh.

The post Julian Assange Could Face Extradition to the U.S. by Early 2024 appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy told the Morning Herald that there could be a “resolution” to Assange’s now-four-year detention in Britain. Assange, an Australian citizen, has been held in a London prison since 2019 while combating U.S. extradition efforts. He faces 18 criminal charges in the U.S., 17 of which allege violations of the Espionage Act.

Kennedy’s comments come weeks after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rebuffed Australia’s calls to end the prosecution against Assange. After a July meeting with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong in Brisbane, Blinken said the whistleblower was “charged with very serious criminal conduct” for his role in publishing classified American government materials. The files Assange shared in 2010 included footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad that killed 18 civilians — including journalists — and hundreds of thousands of field reports from the Iraq War.

“There is a way to resolve it,” Kennedy said on Assange’s detention, adding that a plea deal would be “up to the Justice Department.” The Department of Justice declined to comment. The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“The administration appears to be searching for an off-ramp ahead of [the prime minister’s] first state visit to DC in October,” Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, told The Intercept. “If one isn’t found we could see a repeat of a very public rebuff delivered by Tony Blinken to the Australian Foreign Minister two weeks ago in Brisbane.”

Dan Rothwell, an international law expert at Australian National University, told the Morning Herald that he believes a likely outcome would involve American authorities downgrading the charges against Assange in exchange for a guilty plea, while taking into account the four years he has already spent in prison.

In May, Kennedy met with a cross-party delegation of parliamentary supporters of Assange. “The U.S. and Australia have a very important and close relationship, and it’s time to demonstrate that,” Independent MP Andrew Wilkie said at the time.

Assange’s case has raised major press freedom concerns around the globe. “The United States is applying extra-territorial reach by charging Assange, who is not a US citizen and did not commit alleged crimes in the US, under its Espionage Act,” a group of former Australian attorneys general wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week. “We believe that this sets a very dangerous precedent and has the potential to put at risk anyone, anywhere in the world, who publishes information that the US unilaterally deems to be classified for security reasons.”

As part of WikiLeaks’ release of documents, Assange coordinated with outlets like Spain’s El País, France’s Le Monde, the U.K.’s The Guardian, and the New York Times to release classified cables revealing the inner-workings of bargaining, diplomacy, and threat-making around the world. 

Assange has faced legal pressure since his mass documents leak in 2010; he sought asylum in Ecuador in 2012 and lost it before being imprisoned in London. In June, the Morning Herald reported that the FBI was seeking new information about Assange, disturbing the sense of optimism in Australia that had come from Kennedy’s meeting with lawmakers.

The ambassador’s latest comments have renewed hope from Assange’s family for a solution to the 13-year-long limbo he has faced.

“This is a sign that they don’t want this playing out in American courts, particularly during an election cycle,” Shipton told Sky News on Monday, “so the U.S. administration is really looking for an off-ramp here for what is an extremely, extremely controversial press freedom prosecution.”

The post U.S. Official Hints at Possible Plea Deal for Julian Assange appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept, is still in the signature-gathering phase and has yet to be sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The Justice Department has charged Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified information. The Obama administration had previously decided not to prosecute Assange, concerned with what was dubbed internally as the “New York Times problem.” The Times had partnered with Assange when it came to publishing classified information and itself routinely publishes classified information. Publishing classified information is a violation of the Espionage Act, though it has never been challenged in the Supreme Court, and constitutional experts broadly consider that element of the law to be unconstitutional.

“The Espionage Act, as it’s written, has always been applicable to such a broad range of discussion of important matters, many of which have been wrongly kept secret for a long time, that it should be regarded as unconstitutional,” explained Daniel Ellsberg, the famed civil liberties advocate who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The Obama administration could not find a way to charge Assange without also implicating standard journalistic practices. The Trump administration, unburdened by such concerns around press freedom, pushed ahead with the indictment and extradition request. The Biden administration, driven by the zealous prosecutor Gordon Kromberg, has aggressively pursued Trump’s prosecution. Assange won a reprieve from extradition in a lower British court but lost at the High Court. He is appealing there as well as to the European Court of Human Rights. Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, who has been campaigning globally for his release, said that Assange’s mental and physical health have deteriorated in the face of the conditions he faces at Belmarsh.

Tlaib, in working to build support, urged her colleagues to put their differences with Assange the individual aside and defend the principle of the free press, enshrined in the Constitution. “I know many of us have very strong feelings about Mr. Assange, but what we think of him and his actions is really besides the point here,” she wrote to her colleagues in early March. “The fact of the matter is that the [way] in which Mr. Assange is being prosecuted under the notoriously undemocratic Espionage Act seriously undermines freedom of the press and the First Amendment.”

“In the future, the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information.”

Tlaib noted that the Times, The Guardian, El País, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel had put out a joint statement condemning the charges, and alluded to the same problem that gave the Obama administration pause. “The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well,” she wrote. “In the future, the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information. Or, just as dangerous, they may refrain from publishing such stories for fear of prosecution.”

So far, the letter has collected signatures from Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush. Rep. Ro Khanna said he had yet to see the letter but added that he has previously said Assange should not be prosecuted because the charges are over-broad and a threat to press freedom. Rep. Pramila Jayapal is not listed as a signee but told a Seattle audience recently she believes the charges should be dropped. A spokesperson for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that she intends to sign before the letter closes.

Chip Gibbons, policy director for Defending Rights & Dissent, said that the relative silence from Congress on the Assange prosecution has undermined U.S. claims to be defending democracy abroad. “In spite of the rhetoric about opposing authoritarianism and defending democracy and press freedom, we really haven’t seen a comparable outcry from Congress — until now,” said Gibbons, whose organization has launched a petition calling on the Justice Department to drop charges. “Rep. Tlaib’s letter isn’t just a breath of fresh air, it’s extremely important for members of Congress to be raising their voices on this, especially those from the same party of the current administration, at this critical juncture in a case that will determine the future of press freedom in the United States.”

A significant number of Democrats continue to hold a hostile view of Assange, accusing him of publishing material that was purloined by Russian agents from the inbox of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. The indictment, however, relates to his publication of government secrets leaked by Chelsea Manning more than a decade ago. “In July 2010, WikiLeaks published approximately 75,000 significant activity reports related to the war in Afghanistan, classified up to the SECRET level, illegally provided to WikiLeaks by Manning,” the indictment reads. “In November 2010, WikiLeaks started publishing redacted versions of U.S. State Department cables, classified up to the SECRET level, illegally provided to WikiLeaks by Manning.”

The U.S. government has made the general claim that Assange’s publication of classified information put sources and allies of the U.S. in harm’s way, though the government has been unable to provide any example of that. Meanwhile, the U.S. government itself has left thousands of Afghan civilians, who collaborated with the U.S., to their fates after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, raising questions about the sincerity of their lamentations over the security of those who work with the U.S.

The word “publish” appears more than two dozen times in the superseding indictment of Assange, in which he is accused of “having unauthorized possession of significant activity reports, classified up to the SECRET level [and] publishing them and causing them to be published on the Internet.”

The full letter is below.

Dear Colleague:

I’d like to invite you to join me in writing the Dept. of Justice to call on them to drop the Trump-era charges against Australian publisher Julian Assange. 

I know many of us have very strong feelings about Mr. Assange, but what we think of him and his actions is really besides the point here. The fact of the matter is that the in which Mr. Assange is being prosecuted under the notoriously undemocratic Espionage Act seriously undermines freedom of the press and the First Amendment. 

Defendants charged under the Espionage Act are effectively incapable of defending themselves and often are not allowed access to all the evidence being brought against them, or even to testify to the motivation behind their actions. The information that Mr. Assange worked with major media outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian to publish primarily came from the documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. These documents exposed a number of extremely serious government abuses including torture, war crimes, and illegal mass surveillance.

Mr. Assange’s prosecution marks the first time in US history that the Espionage Act has been used to indict a publisher of truthful information. The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well. In the future, the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information. Or, just as dangerous, they may refrain from publishing such stories for fear of prosecution.

The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel have taken the extraordinary step of publishing a joint statement in opposition to the indictment, warning that it “sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.” They are joined in their opposition to Mr. Assange’s prosecution by groups like the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Numerous foreign leaders have also expressed their concern and opposition, including Australian PM Albanese, Mexican President AMLO, Brazilian President Lula da Silva, and parliamentarians from numerous countries including the UK, Germany, Brazil, and Australia.

If you have any questions or would like to sign on to this letter, please contact Rep. Tlaib’s Policy Advisor… Thank you for your partnership in defending the freedom of the press and the First Amendment.

Sincerely,

Rashida Tlaib
Member of Congress

Dear Attorney General Merrick Garland,

We write you today to call on you to uphold the First Amendment’s protections for the freedom of the press by dropping the criminal charges against Australian publisher Julian Assange and withdrawing the American extradition request currently pending with the British government.

Press freedom, civil liberty, and human rights groups have been emphatic that the charges against Mr. Assange pose a grave and unprecedented threat to everyday, constitutionally protected journalistic activity, and that a conviction would represent a landmark setback for the First Amendment. Major media outlets are in agreement: The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel have taken the extraordinary step of publishing a joint statement in opposition to the indictment, warning that it “sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

The ACLU, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Defending Rights and Dissent, and Human Rights Watch, among others, have written to you three times to express these concerns. In one such letter they wrote:

“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely—and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do. Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret. In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices.”

The prosecution of Julian Assange for carrying out journalistic activities greatly diminishes America’s credibility as a defender of these values, undermining the United States’ moral standing on the world stage, and effectively granting cover to authoritarian governments who can (and do) point to Assange’s prosecution to reject evidence-based criticisms of their human rights records and as a precedent that justifies the criminalization of reporting on their activities. Leaders of democracies, major international bodies, and parliamentarians around the globe stand opposed to the prosecution of Assange. Former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer and the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic have both opposed the extradition. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called on the U.S. government to end its pursuit of Assange. Leaders of nearly every major Latin American nation, including Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Argentinian President Alberto Fernández have called for the charges to be dropped. Parliamentarians from around the world, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, have all called for Assange not to be extradited to the U.S.

This global outcry against the U.S. government’s prosecution of Mr. Assange has highlighted conflicts between America’s stated values of press freedom and its pursuit of Mr. Assange. The Guardian wrote “The US has this week proclaimed itself the beacon of democracy in an increasingly authoritarian world. If Mr. Biden is serious about protecting the ability of the media to hold governments accountable, he should begin by dropping the charges brought against Mr. Assange.” Similarly, the Sydney Morning Herald editorial board stated, “At a time when US President Joe Biden has just held a summit for democracy, it seems contradictory to go to such lengths to win a case that, if it succeeds, will limit freedom of speech.”

As Attorney General, you have rightly championed freedom of the press and the rule of law in the United States and around the world. Just this past October the Justice Department under your leadership made changes to news media policy guidelines that generally prevent federal prosecutors from using subpoenas or other investigative tools against journalists who possess and publish classified information used in news gathering. We are grateful for these pro-press freedom revisions, and feel strongly that dropping the Justice Department’s indictment against Mr. Assange and halting all efforts to extradite him to the U.S. is in line with these new policies.

Julian Assange faces 17 charges under the Espionage Act and one charge for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.  The Espionage Act charges stem from Mr. Assange’s role in publishing information about the U.S. State Department, Guantanamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of this information was published by mainstream newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, who often worked with Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks directly in doing so. Based on the legal logic of this indictment, any of those newspapers could be prosecuted for engaging in these reporting activities. In fact, because what Mr. Assange is accused of doing is legally indistinguishable from what papers like the New York Times do, the Obama administration rightfully declined to bring these charges. The Trump Administration, which brought these charges against Assange, was notably less concerned with press freedom.

The prosecution of Mr. Assange marks the first time in U.S. history that a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act. The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well. In the future the New York Times or Washington Post could be prosecuted when they publish important stories based on classified information. Or, just as dangerous for democracy, they may refrain from publishing such stories for fear of prosecution.

Mr. Assange has been detained on remand in London for more than three years, as he awaits the outcome of extradition proceedings against him. In 2021, a U.K. District Judge ruled against extraditing Mr. Assange to the United States on the grounds that doing so would put him at undue risk of suicide. The U.K.’s High Court overturned that decision after accepting U.S. assurances regarding the prospective treatment Mr. Assange would receive in prison. Neither ruling adequately addresses the threat the charges against Mr. Assange pose to press freedom. The U.S. Department of Justice can halt these harmful proceedings at any moment by simply dropping the charges against Mr. Assange.

We appreciate your attention to this urgent issue. Every day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home. We urge you to immediately drop these Trump-era charges against Mr. Assange and halt this dangerous prosecution.

Sincerely,
Members of Congress

CC: British Embassy; Australian Embassy

The post Congressional Effort to End Assange Prosecution Underway appeared first on The Intercept.

The news that the FBI is taking fresh investigative steps came as a surprise to Assange’s legal team, given that the U.S. filed charges against the WikiLeaks founder more than three years ago and is involved in an ongoing extradition process from a maximum security prison in the United Kingdom so that he can stand trial in the United States. 

Assange is charged under the Espionage Act with obtaining, possessing, and publishing classified information that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes that themselves have gone unpunished. 

The Morning Herald reporting also comes amid heightened hopes in Australia that a resolution to the case, which has raised serious press freedom issues in the U.S. and abroad, was near at hand. The country’s ruling party has spoken in defense of Assange, as has the nation’s opposition party leader. In early May, a cross-party delegation of influential Australian lawmakers met with the U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging that a deal be struck to return Assange to Australia before U.S.-Australian relations were harmed further by the prosecution. 

The U.S. has otherwise complicated its relationship with Australia in recent weeks even as it seeks closer ties in order to compete with China in the region. Australia spent weeks preparing for Joe Biden to make a major visit to the nation in May, only to see him cancel the trip at the last minute to fly back from Japan to continue with debt ceiling negotiations. And this week, the U.S. also warned Australia that some of its military units may be ineligible to cooperate with U.S. forces due to their own alleged war crimes in Australia. It is not lost on the Australian public that Assange is being prosecuted for uncovering and publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

In May, the Morning Herald reported, the FBI requested an interview with Andrew O’Hagan, who was brought on more than 10 years ago to work as a ghostwriter on Assange’s autobiography. The FBI may have thought he would be cooperative because O’Hagan’s relationship with Assange soured; O’Hagan publicly criticized Assange as narcissistic and difficult to work with and published an unauthorized version in the London Review of Books instead. But O’Hagan told the Morning Herald he was not willing to participate in his prosecution. “I might have differences with Julian, but I utterly oppose all efforts to silence him,” he said.

In 2010 and 2011, in conjunction with major papers around the world, WikiLeaks published leaked documents and videos related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of war crimes, and other documents that exposed corruption on a grand scale. The disclosures helped trigger the Arab Spring, popular revolts against dictators across the Middle East and North Africa. 

The Obama administration considered prosecuting Assange but decided they couldn’t overcome “the New York Times problem”: They couldn’t figure out, in other words, how to prosecute him but not the Times. 

The case is now under the zealous guidance of Gordon Kromberg, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, though the reopening of the investigation suggests the government has doubts that its case will hold up in court. 

A coalition of major newspapers around the world has urged the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange. Yahoo News reported that the Trump administration considered ways to kidnap or assassinate the journalist. 

The U.S. State Department was not immediately able to comment.

Update: June 1, 2023, 12:25 p.m.
The original headline of this story said the FBI has reopened a case “against Assange,” though the precise target of the FBI’s new investigation is not publicly known. The FBI relayed to O’Hagan that it wanted to interview him about his participation in Assange’s autobiography.

The post FBI Reopens Case Around Julian Assange, Despite Australian Pressure to End Prosecution appeared first on The Intercept.

Unlike any other point in history, hackers, whistleblowers, and archivists now routinely make off with terabytes of data from governments, corporations, and extremist groups. These datasets often contain gold mines of revelations in the public interest and in many cases are freely available for anyone to download. 

Revelations based on leaked datasets can change the course of history. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of military documents known as the Pentagon Papers led to the end of the Vietnam War. The same year, an underground activist group called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office, stole secret documents, and leaked them to the media. This dataset mentioned COINTELPRO. NBC reporter Carl Stern used Freedom of Information Act requests to publicly reveal that COINTELPRO was a secret FBI operation devoted to surveilling, infiltrating, and discrediting left-wing political groups. This stolen FBI dataset also led to the creation of the Church Committee, a Senate committee that investigated these abuses and reined them in. 

Huge data leaks like these used to be rare, but today they’re increasingly common. More recently, Chelsea Manning’s 2010 leaks of Iraq and Afghanistan documents helped spark the Arab Spring, documents and emails stolen by Russian military hackers helped elect Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016, and the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers exposed how the rich and powerful use offshore shell companies for tax evasion.

Yet these digital tomes can prove extremely difficult to analyze or interpret, and few people today have the skills to do so. I spent the last two years writing the book “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: The Art of Analyzing Hacked and Leaked Data” to teach journalists, researchers, and activists the technologies and coding skills required to do just this. While these topics are technical, my book doesn’t assume any prior knowledge: all you need is a computer, an internet connection, and the will to learn. Throughout the book, you’ll download and analyze real datasets — including those from police departments, fascist groups, militias, a Russian ransomware gang, and social networks — as practice. Throughout, you’ll engage head-on with the dumpster fire that is 21st-century current events: the rise of neofascism and the rejection of objective reality, the extreme partisan divide, and an internet overflowing with misinformation.

My book officially comes out January 9, but it’s shipping today if you order it from the publisher here. Add the code INTERCEPT25 for a special 25 percent discount.

The following is a lightly edited excerpt from the first chapter of “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations” about a crucial and often underappreciated part of working with leaked data: how to verify that it’s authentic.

You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, and juicy documents or datasets that anonymous people send you are no exception. Disinformation is prevalent.

How you go about verifying that a dataset is authentic completely depends on what the data is. You have to approach the problem on a case-by-case basis. The best way to verify a dataset is to use open source intelligence (OSINT), or publicly available information that anyone with enough skill can find. 

This might mean scouring social media accounts, consulting the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, inspecting metadata of public images or documents, paying services for historical domain name registration data, or viewing other types of public records. If your dataset includes a database taken from a website, for instance, you might be able to compare information in that database with publicly available information on the website itself to confirm that they match. (Michael Bazzell also has great resources on the tools and techniques of OSINT.)

Below, I share two examples of authenticating data from my own experience: one about a dataset from the anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors, and another about leaked chat logs from a WikiLeaks Twitter group. 

In my work at The Intercept, I encounter datasets so frequently I feel like I’m drowning in data, and I simply ignore most of them because it’s impossible for me to investigate them all. Unfortunately, this often means that no one will report on them, and their secrets will remain hidden forever. I hope “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations” helps to change that. 

The America’s Frontline Doctors Dataset

In late 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, an anonymous hacker sent me hundreds of thousands of patient and prescription records from telehealth companies working with America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS). AFLDS is a far-right anti-vaccine group that misleads people about Covid-19 vaccine safety and tricks patients into paying millions of dollars for drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which are ineffective at preventing or treating the virus. The group was initially formed to help Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, and the group’s leader, Simone Gold, was arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In 2022, she served two months in prison for her role in the attack.

My source told me that they got the data by writing a program that made thousands of web requests to a website run by one of the telehealth companies, Cadence Health. Each request returned data about a different patient. To see whether that was true, I made an account on the Cadence Health website myself. Everything looked legitimate to me. The information I had about each of the 255,000 patients was the exact information I was asked to provide when I created my account on the service, and various category names and IDs in the dataset matched what I could see on the website. But how could I be confident that the patient data itself was real, that these people weren’t just made up?

I wrote a simple Python script to loop through the 72,000 patients (those who had paid for fake health care) and put each of their email addresses in a text file. I then cross-referenced these email addresses with a totally separate dataset containing personal identifying information from members of Gab, a social network popular among fascists, anti-democracy activists, and anti-vaxxers. In early 2021, a hacktivist who went by the name “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project” had hacked Gab and made off with 65GB of data, including about 38,000 Gab users’ email addresses. Thinking there might be overlap between AFLDS and Gab users, I wrote another simple Python program that compared the email addresses from each group and showed me all of the addresses that were in both lists. There were several.

Armed with this information, I started scouring the public Gab timelines of users whose email addresses had appeared in both datasets, looking for posts about AFLDS. Using this technique, I found multiple AFLDS patients who posted about their experience on Gab, leading me to believe that the data was authentic. For example, according to consultation notes from the hacked dataset, one patient created an account on the telehealth site and four days later had a telehealth consultation. About a month after that, they posted to Gab saying, “Front line doctors finally came through with HCQ/Zinc delivery” (HCQ is an abbreviation for hydroxychloroquine).

Having a number of examples like this gave us confidence that the dataset of patient records was, in fact, legitimate. You can read our AFLDS reporting at The Intercept — which led to a congressional investigation into the group — here.

The WikiLeaks Twitter Group Chat

In late 2017, journalist Julia Ioffe published a revelation in The Atlantic: WikiLeaks had slid into Donald Trump Jr.’s Twitter DMs. Among other things, before the 2016 election, WikiLeaks suggested to Trump Jr. that even if his father lost the election, he shouldn’t concede. “Hi Don,” the verified @wikileaks Twitter account wrote, “if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do.”

A long-term WikiLeaks volunteer who went by the pseudonym Hazelpress started a private Twitter group with WikiLeaks and its biggest supporters in mid-2015. After watching the group become more right-wing, conspiratorial, and unethical, and specifically after learning about WikiLeaks’ secret DMs with Trump Jr., Hazelpress decided to blow the whistle on the whistleblowing group itself. She has since publicly come forward as Mary-Emma Holly, an artist who spent years as a volunteer legal researcher for WikiLeaks.

To carry out the WikiLeaks leak, Holly logged in to her Twitter account, made it private, unfollowed everyone, and deleted all of her tweets. She also deleted all of her DMs except for the private WikiLeaks Twitter group and changed her Twitter username. Using the Firefox web browser, she then went to the DM conversation — which contained 11,000 messages and had been going on for two-and-a-half years — and saw the latest messages in the group. She scrolled up, waited for Twitter to load more messages, scrolled up again, and kept doing this for four hours until she reached the very first message in the group. She then used Firefox’s Save Page As function to save an HTML version of the webpage, as well as a folder full of resources like images that were posted in the group.

Now that she had a local, offline copy of all the messages in the DM group, Holly leaked it to the media. In early 2018, she sent a Signal message to the phone number listed on The Intercept’s tips page. At that time, I happened to be the one checking Signal for incoming tips. Using OnionShare — software that I developed for this purpose — she sent me an encrypted and compressed file, along with the password to decrypt it. After extracting it, I found a 37MB HTML file — so big that it made my web browser unresponsive when I tried opening it and which I later split into separate files to make it easier to work with — and a folder with 82MB of resources.

How could I verify the authenticity of such a huge HTML file? If I could somehow access the same data directly from Twitter’s servers, that would do it; only an insider at Twitter would be in a position to create fake DMs that show up on Twitter’s website, and even that would be extremely challenging. When I explained this to Holly (who, at the time, I still knew only as Hazelpress), she gave me her Twitter username and password. She had already deleted all the other information from that account. With her consent, I logged in to Twitter with her credentials, went to her DMs, and found the Twitter group in question. It immediately looked like it contained the same messages as the HTML file, and I confirmed that the verified account @wikileaks frequently posted to the group.

Following these steps made me extremely confident in the authenticity of the dataset, but I decided to take verification one step further. Could I download a separate copy of the Twitter group myself in order to compare it with the version Holly had sent me? I searched around and found DMArchiver, a Python program that could do just that. Using this program, along with Holly’s username and password, I downloaded a text version of all of the DMs in the Twitter group. It took only a few minutes to run this tool, rather than four hours of scrolling up in a web browser.

Note: After this investigation, the DMArchiver program stopped working due to changes on Twitter’s end, and today the project is abandoned. However, if you’re faced with a similar challenge in a future investigation, search for a tool that might work for you. 

The output from DMArchiver, a 1.7MB text file, was much easier to work with compared to the enormous HTML file, and it also included exact time stamps. Here’s a snippet of the text version:

[2015-11-19 13:46:39] <WikiLeaks> We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.

[2015-11-19 13:47:28] <WikiLeaks> Dems+Media+liberals woudl then form a block to reign in their worst qualities.

[2015-11-19 13:48:22] <WikiLeaks> With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute.

[2015-11-19 13:50:18] <WikiLeaks> She’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.

I could view the HTML version in a web browser to see it exactly as it had originally looked on Twitter, which was also useful for taking screenshots to include in our final report.

A screenshot of the leaked HTML file.

Along with the talented reporter Cora Currier, I started the long process of reading all 11,000 chat messages, paying closest attention to the 10 percent of them from the @wikileaks account — which was presumably controlled by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s editor — and picking out everything in the public interest. We discovered the following details:

• Assange expressed a desire for Republicans to win the 2016 presidential election.
• Assange and his supporters were intensely focused on discrediting two Swedish women who had accused him of rape and molestation, as well as discrediting their lawyers. Assange and his defenders spent weeks discussing ways to sabotage articles about his rape case that feminist journalists were writing.
• After Associated Press journalist Raphael Satter wrote a story about harm caused when WikiLeaks publishes personal identifiable information, Assange called him a “rat” and said that “he’s Jewish and engaged in the ((())) issue,” referring to an antisemitic neo-Nazi meme. He then told his supporters to “bog him down. Get him to show his bias.”

You can read our reporting on this dataset at The Intercept. After The Intercept published this article, Assange and his supporters also targeted me personally with antisemitic abuse, and Russia Today, the state-run TV station, ran a segment about me. 

The techniques you can use to authenticate datasets vary greatly depending on the situation. Sometimes you can rely on OSINT, sometimes you can rely on help from your source, and sometimes you’ll need to come up with an entirely different method.

Regardless, it’s important to explain in your published report, at least briefly, what makes you confident in the data. If you can’t authenticate it but still want to publish your report in case it’s real — or in case others can authenticate it — make that clear. When in doubt, err on the side of transparency.

My book, “Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations,” officially comes out on January 9, but it’s shipping today if you order it from the publisher here. Add the code INTERCEPT25 for a special 25 percent discount.

The post How to Authenticate Large Datasets appeared first on The Intercept.

In the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean,” the pirates swear by a supposedly ironclad set of rules that determine how they conduct their pirating, thieving, and killing.

But it turns out that there are loopholes in the so-called Pirate’s Code.

“The code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules,” pirate Hector Barbossa explains, as he violates it.

I was thinking about Barbossa’s great line when I read Attorney General Merrick Garland’s new media guidelines, laying out when the Justice Department can go after journalists to identify their sources during criminal investigations into leaks of classified information.

Since the new policy was announced last month, Garland has been praised by media experts and journalists for imposing tight new restrictions on the government’s ability to target reporters in leak investigations.

“This is a watershed moment,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “The new policy marks a historic shift in protecting the rights of news organizations reporting on stories of critical public importance.”

Fred Ryan, the publisher of the Washington Post, added that “the new protections for the news media … deserve recognition and gratitude.”

But Garland’s new policy includes plenty of vague language that could still make it relatively easy for eager prosecutors to go after reporters’ sources. In fact, Garland issued the policy even as the Justice Department is seeking to prosecute Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder; the Assange case suggests that there are already loopholes built into Garland’s new guidelines.

Worse, the policy lacks the force of law, and can be changed or ignored by the next attorney general.

Skepticism is warranted when it comes to the Justice Department and its media guidelines. After all, Garland felt compelled to issue the latest set of guidelines because the earlier ones, issued in 2015 by Eric Holder, the Obama administration’s attorney general, offered only paper-thin protections for journalists.

Holder’s guidelines were also met with effusive praise from journalists when they were issued. But they didn’t impose any real limits on prosecutors’ ability to go after journalists. (I had firsthand experience with Eric Holder’s Justice Department; the Obama administration threatened to put me in prison for refusing to reveal my sources.)

After Trump attacked journalists and vowed to go after leakers during the 2016 campaign, his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, said he would review Holder’s guidelines to see if adjustments were needed. But the Holder guidelines were so weak that they allowed the Trump administration to target whistleblowers and journalists at a blistering pace. They were still in place when the Trump Justice Department secretly obtained the phone records of reporters for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN.

It wasn’t until several months after coming into office in 2021 that the Biden administration publicly disclosed that the reporters’ records had been seized by Trump’s DOJ, raising questions about why the Biden administration had kept the matter secret. Garland then came under pressure to develop new media guidelines. A draft of those guidelines was issued in July 2021, and the final version was released on October 26.

On paper, Garland’s guidelines look much better than Holder’s. They are worded more strongly and seem to include fewer exceptions to limits on subpoenaing reporters or seeking their records. “The [Justice] Department recognizes the important national interest in protecting journalists from compelled disclosure of information revealing their sources, sources they need to apprise the American people of the workings of their government,” the Garland guidelines state. “For this reason, with the exception of certain circumstances set out below, the Department of Justice will not use compulsory legal process for the purpose of obtaining information from or records of members of the news media acting within the scope of newsgathering.”

One new and important provision in the Garland guidelines appears to ban prosecutors from targeting reporters over the processes they use to gather classified information. The guidelines state that the Justice Department now defines “newsgathering” as including “the mere receipt, possession, or publication by a member of the news media of government information, including classified information, as well as establishing a means of receiving such information, including from an anonymous or confidential source.” While that language will certainly be open to interpretation in specific cases, it seems designed to protect investigative reporters from being targeted by the government for talking with and helping their sources figure out how to provide classified information. The Justice Department has previously threatened to either subpoena or prosecute reporters based on whether the government believed that the reporters had coached or aided their sources in handing over classified information.

A supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange protests opposite the Houses of Parliament, in London, on October 8, 2022.

Still, the Garland guidelines come with potential loopholes — what the guidelines call exceptions in “certain circumstances.” The Justice Department can still go after reporters “when necessary to prevent an imminent or concrete risk of death or serious bodily harm, including terrorist acts, kidnappings, specified offenses against a minor, or incapacitation or destruction of critical infrastructure, in which case the authorization of the Attorney General is required.”

Those exceptions could be defined strictly or loosely, depending on the attorney general and the national climate. For example, after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, there were many false alarms about possible follow-up attacks on bridges, airports, and other targets that were considered “critical infrastructure”; another period of that kind of fearmongering could easily see a new crackdown on the press.

The guidelines also state that the protected “newsgathering” process does not include “criminal acts committed in the course of obtaining information or using information, such as: breaking and entering; theft; unlawfully accessing a computer or computer system; unlawful surveillance or wiretapping; bribery; extortion; fraud; insider trading; or aiding or abetting or conspiring to engage in such criminal activities, with the requisite criminal intent.”

Garland’s definition of acceptable newsgathering activities is likely to be tested when Assange is prosecuted. Assange was originally charged during the Trump administration for conspiring to leak classified documents; prosecutors focused on the process by which Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, obtained U.S. military reports and State Department cables and conveyed them to WikiLeaks. Many of those documents were also shared with major news organizations, which published stories about them. That prompted a debate, which has never been fully resolved, about whether Assange is a journalist.

Assange is now in prison in Britain and is facing extradition to the United States, where the Biden administration plans to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. He has not been charged in connection with the role that WikiLeaks played in Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

That is a charge that could be leveled against any reporter covering national security.

The indictment says that Assange and WikiLeaks “repeatedly sought, obtained, and disseminated information that the United States classified due to the serious risk that unauthorized disclosure could harm the national security of the United States.” That is a charge that could be leveled against any reporter covering national security. The Assange prosecution thus conflicts with the new Garland guidelines, which clearly state that the Justice Department will not target journalists for the processes they use in obtaining and publishing classified information. To make an exception of Assange, the Biden administration will have to explicitly make the case that Assange is not a journalist.

Of course, the Garland media guidelines will not provide much protection for reporters if Donald Trump ever returns to power. Trump has made it clear that he will try to crush press freedom in America if he is elected president again; at a recent rally in Texas, he insinuated that reporters should be raped in prison to force them to reveal their sources.

The post New Justice Department Media Rules Won’t Help if Trump Wins Again appeared first on The Intercept.

That legislation, the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act, or PRESS Act, stands a real chance of becoming law if the Senate takes it up before the expiration of the lame-duck session. The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he supports the bill, which gives it a boost in its quest for a floor vote.

The PRESS Act is sponsored by Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, and it effectively blocks the federal government from using subpoenas, jail, or the threat of jail to force reporters to turn over sources, and it blocks tech companies from sharing sensitive information from journalists’ devices with the federal government.

This week, Durbin announced in the Chicago Sun-Times that he would be pushing for a vote by unanimous consent on the bill. “At a time when the former president is calling for journalists to be jailed and referring to the press as the ‘enemy of the people,’ it’s critical that we protect this pillar of our democracy,” he wrote. “That’s why I support the PRESS Act and have cleared it for fast-track consideration on the Senate ‘hotline.’”

On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, tried to move the bill through the Senate by unanimous consent, like had been done in the House, but it was blocked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. “The press unfortunately has a long and sordid history of publishing sensitive information from inside the government that damages our national security,” Cotton said on the Senate floor, going on to cite the Pentagon Papers, revealed by Daniel Ellsberg, as an example of such a leak, which he claimed was published by the New York Times in order to turn the public against the war effort. He also criticized reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he claimed similarly undermined those war efforts. “Yet the PRESS Act would immunize journalists and leakers alike from scrutiny and consequences for their actions.”

The act would not, in fact, immunize leakers. The government would still be able to hunt and prosecute them as they do now; they just wouldn’t be able to threaten to jail journalists to pressure them to turn in their sources, as they did to The Intercept’s James Risen. And the laws that criminalize whistleblowing, including the Espionage Act, are themselves constitutionally suspect at best.

“To say, in other words, unequivocally, that it is a crime [to leak classified information] confronts very strong arguments by constitutional lawyers,” Ellsberg said on the Deconstructed podcast last year, noting that the Supreme Court has never weighed in on the Espionage Act. “One is that as an abridgment of free speech and against the First Amendment, that using the Espionage Act against any release of classified information amongst the criminalization of all sources, regardless of the intent, the motive, the impact — and thus, too much of an abridgment, it can’t be allowed of the First Amendment. And I think that’s very solid.” He added that federal agencies under the First Amendment are free to enforce administrative penalties like termination or suspension of a security clearance, but not criminal penalties.

As for consequences for journalists, the First Amendment already bars the government from restricting the publication of any material, including classified information. The government can criminalize leaking but not publishing. That 200-year-old First Amendment protection is currently under threat by the prosecution of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange for publishing national security secrets, though the PRESS Act itself would not cover the case, because the government uncovered his source, Chelsea Manning, without relying on Assange.

“This effectively would grant journalists special legal privileges to disclose sensitive information that no other citizen enjoys,” Cotton falsely claimed. Indeed, all citizens have the right to publish classified information; the crime, again, is in the leaking of it.

Cotton added that he had a particular grievance with the Fourth Estate itself. “If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that too many journalists these days are little more than left-wing activists who are at best ambivalent about America and are cavalier about our security and about the truth,” Cotton said, ironically attacking under the guise of patriotism those working under the First Amendment.

“The PRESS Act does not say, ‘Let’s have a fast-track for the liberals,’” Wyden told The Intercept.

The bill does not restrict protections to professional journalists but to any “person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.”

Given Cotton’s objection, the remaining viable path for the bill is to get included in the year-end omnibus spending legislation, according to congressional sources and those working on the outside to push the bill through. A floor vote, given the need to overcome a filibuster, would eat up too much of the little floor time left in the session. Durbin’s support is crucial for such an inclusion, and the bill would also likely need the backing of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who told The Intercept he was still reviewing requests for the omnibus. Wyden said that he didn’t want to get into individual conversations with other senators but expressed optimism about the potential for the omnibus.

“After the PRESS Act passed the House with unanimous bipartisan support this fall, it came closer than ever to becoming law,” said Raskin. “A federal law to protect journalists in their work against the political whims of the day is a necessary step to defend press freedom. I am hopeful this measure can be included in a year-end omnibus package. It would be a great unifying statement.”

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wasn’t immediately able to comment on the status of the talks, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to do so. “I don’t have anything to say about it right now,” McConnell said Thursday afternoon.

A second problem that has stalled previous press shield bills like this one is fearmongering about a terrorist with a ticking bomb somewhere, along with vague claims like Cotton’s that reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan empowered terrorists. The ticking-bomb situation has likely never occurred in the real world, but Raskin’s bill writes an exception directly into the law for that fantastical scenario.

The bill makes an exception if “disclosure of the protected information is necessary to prevent, or to identify any perpetrator of, an act of terrorism against the United States; or disclosure of the protected information is necessary to prevent a threat of imminent violence, significant bodily harm, or death.”

The final important question the bill addresses is what information is protected, and it arrives at an impressively sweeping definition. “The term ‘protected information’ means any information identifying a source who provided information as part of engaging in journalism, and any records, contents of a communication, documents, or information that a covered journalist obtained or created as part of engaging in journalism.”

Previous press shield laws have included huge gaping loopholes, written into the law at the behest of the national security establishment, which end up gutting the law. James Risen, back when he was at the New York Times, was in a long-running legal battle with the Bush administration and then the Obama administration in which they repeatedly threatened him with jail time for not revealing sources. He refused, and they eventually backed off, but if this bill were passed into law, prosecutors would not have been able to come after Risen. In Risen’s case, there was no imminent threat claimed by the government, just vaguely worded assertions about national security that shouldn’t be taken seriously coming from a government that lies regularly about such threats.

None of this is new for Cotton. He rose to right-wing fame writing to the New York Times from active duty in Iraq, calling for the jailing of Risen and two of his Times colleagues. “I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars,” Cotton wrote.

Tom Cotton on the Senate floor explained why he’s trying to kill the PRESS Act, which would protect reporters from prosecution for doing basic journalism, with quite the argument. Watch to the end. pic.twitter.com/6fi2Zr5IBJ

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) December 16, 2022

Wyden rejected Cotton’s argument. “You can’t get 435 members of Congress to vote for something if the intelligence community is saying it’s going to tie their hands,” Wyden said, pointing to the bill’s exceptions, and noting that he may be the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee in American history.

The bill would have also protected Risen from government prosecutors looking to go straight to tech companies for his data. Before a tech company could turn anything over under the new law, they’d have to let the journalist know about the subpoena and give them a chance to respond in court, unless doing so would undermine an ongoing investigation, in which case the government can get a delay of no more than 90 days.

The bill also narrows what can be requested by subpoena down to information needed to confirm that what was reported is true. In other words, if a journalist exposes a crime with his or her reporting, that’s often not enough for a prosecutor to use against the perpetrator, because a news article is technically hearsay. This bill limits what can be obtained “to the purpose of verifying published information,” which would block fishing expeditions from prosecutors trying to find out the identity of every person a journalist spoke to over a specific period of time.

A coalition of advocates of press freedom is urging the Senate to move the bill before the term expires. Wyden said he plans to stay in Washington the next few days to work on the upcoming tax package and will be focused on the PRESS Act as well. “We’re going to pull out all the stops to get this in,” he said.

Update: December 16, 2022
This article has been updated to include a quote by Daniel Ellsberg.

The post Journalism Source Protection Bill Gets a Last-Minute Senate Push appeared first on The Intercept.

As she watched his hearing, though, she wondered if that wasn’t what Rhodes wanted too. She’d expected him to express some conciliation — support, perhaps, for police affected by the riot at the Capitol. Instead, he attacked his trial as rigged and antagonized the judge who’d decide his fate. “A steep sentence here won’t help or deter people,” he said. “It will make people think this government is even more illegitimate than before.” He called himself “a political prisoner.”

Adams was considering how the harsher a sentence Rhodes received, the greater a cause célèbre he’d become on the right. This, she told me, as she followed the hearing on Twitter, would increase his chances for a pardon in a future Republican administration. In fact, Rhodes’s sentencing was playing out as one skirmish in a larger battle to determine how the history of January 6 will be written. From behind the bench, District Judge Amit Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee who also sits on the powerful Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, told Rhodes, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the Republic, and the very fabric of our democracy.” In his remarks beforehand, Rhodes, 58, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, had already issued his reply: “My only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”

Mehta sentenced him to 18 years in prison, the longest term handed down in a January 6 case to date.

The version of Rhodes that Adams described in her statement and divorce filing is a man driven by a will to control and influence, feeding off the adulation of crowds in public while keeping a tight grip on his family in their remote Montana home. These impulses are twisted inextricably with real fear in her stories: that stronger forces are coming for him, disaster is inevitable, his control is slipping. He imagines erecting tripwires outside the house that will trigger a blast of AC/DC music to alert him to the start of a federal raid. He leaves his children bruised from trainings in martial arts and knife fighting designed to teach them to fend off attack and rape. He warns darkly of apocalypse. The power goes out, and he outfits his teenaged son with a rifle and body armor and rustles his family out into the night.

The 2018 divorce filings were unsealed last month. Rhodes responded to Adams’s allegations, in a sworn affidavit, by saying that she and her attorney had “twisted over 23 years of facts in an attempt to accomplish Tasha’s true goal of keeping the children from me.” He noted that her request for a temporary protection order had been denied and claimed his infidelity was the real cause of the rift in their marriage. Yet Adams’s portrayal of Rhodes as someone engaged in a long-running and complicated dance with power offers one way to interpret the contradictions he embodied at his sentencing. He expressed deeply held fears of tyrannical government power, yet he’d also grabbed for it: In open letters before January 6, Rhodes urged Donald Trump to overturn the election and volunteered the Oath Keepers to help enforce this. He was declaring himself a dissident and preparing to begin a very long prison term. He also seemed to be appealing to those powerful enough to one day free him of it.

Trump, who has a commanding lead in Republican primary polls, has made clear in recent months that support for those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 will be not just part of his campaign, but its essence. In March, he held his first official campaign rally in Waco, Texas, home to a deadly 1993 standoff between the federal government and an armed Christian sect whose bloody end has long been a defining event for right-wing militant groups like the Oath Keepers. Standing on a stage at the start of the rally, Trump held his hand over his heart as loudspeakers played a rendition of the national anthem that had been recorded from jail by people arrested in connection with January 6. The recording, which is overlaid with Trump’s voice reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, is credited to the “J6 Prison Choir” and had reached No. 1 on iTunes two weeks before the rally. As Trump and the crowd stood in reverence, video of the attack on the Capitol played above him on a pair of jumbotrons.

It’s the most revealing question for every candidate in the primary just beginning to take shape: If you’re elected president, will you pardon people who’ve been convicted for January 6?

In the first year after January 6, Trump had expressed sympathy for the rioters, but his backing wasn’t full-throated. When I met with Rhodes in January 2022, a week before his arrest, he told me he wouldn’t in the future vote for Trump, who he said had failed to support January 6 defendants and had used the Oath Keepers as “cannon fodder.” After his arrest, Sidney Powell, Trump’s onetime lawyer and a close ally, reportedly stepped in to fund the defense of Rhodes and three other Oath Keepers via her legal foundation, which had raised more than $16 million in the year following the 2020 election. Now Trump has made pardons for January 6 convicts a central promise of his campaign. “I hope Trump wins in 2024,” Rhodes said at his sentencing, adding that many on the right view January 6 defendants as “political prisoners” and “patriots.” For Republicans, the issue of pardons may become a litmus test showing not just the extent to which they’re willing to downplay or excuse what happened on January 6, but also how enthusiastically they’ll embrace it. It’s the most revealing question for every candidate in the primary just beginning to take shape: If you’re elected president, will you pardon people who’ve been convicted for January 6?

On the day Rhodes was sentenced, Ron DeSantis, currently Trump’s top challenger, was asked this question in a radio interview. “On Day One, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who are people who are victims of weaponization or political targeting,” he replied. “And we will be aggressive at issuing pardons.”

In his testimony at sentencing, Rhodes compared himself to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian dissident writer, who spent eight years incarcerated in Soviet prisons.

It reminded me of my first conversation with Rhodes in early 2020. I said I thought his frequent invocations of civil war were dangerous and that civil war is the worst thing in the world. He disagreed, saying the totalitarian nightmares that had unfolded under Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and other dictators showed the need to fight a repressive government before it’s too late. He cited a passage from “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn’s acclaimed book about his imprisonment:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests […] people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

FBI agents approached Rhodes outside a Texas hotel in May 2021 to serve a warrant for his phone. He handed it over, volunteered the passcode, advised the agents that he had a gun in his backpack, and told them that, if they ever needed to arrest him, they could call and he’d turn himself in. He went peaceably when the FBI eventually showed up to take him to jail. So perhaps he realizes that America is nowhere near the kind of dictatorship about which Solzhenitsyn was writing.

Or maybe he’d argue that, as it had been for all the prisoners Solzhenitsyn met in the gulag, submission was the only feasible choice, at least in the moment of arrest.

Rhodes has long considered himself a dissident, even at times on the right. He drew criticism from his group’s own members over his support for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange at a time when they were still heroes of the left. (“Your banner stating ‘Snowden honored his oath’ is sickening and infuriating,” read one letter of resignation I found in a cache of leaked Oath Keepers files. “I have honored my oath for 27 years and will not be associated with an organization that supports a traitor.”) During the George W. Bush administration, when his only claim to public notice was as a blogger, Rhodes was writing about the post-9/11 assault on civil liberties and the growth of the national security state and warning that America could be on a path to tyranny. His talk about dictatorship went into overdrive during Obama’s presidency — though by then it was infused with the blunter and dumber rhetoric of the Tea Party — and hyperdrive under Trump. His open letters to the then-president after the 2020 election called the day of its certification in Congress the last chance to stop the coming tyranny. He urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, overturn the vote, and call up “the militia,” saying he and the Oath Keepers would be in D.C. to help.

Instead, Trump gave an incendiary speech near the White House and returned to the Oval Office. Protesters descended on the Capitol, and two columns of Oath Keepers joined the crowd as it surged into the building. Rhodes remained outside, comparing the rioters to America’s founding patriots in group messages on the encrypted app Signal. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy and two other charges after a trial in which prosecutors didn’t show that there’d been a plan among Rhodes and his members to storm the Capitol or that they’d played a role in the initial breach.

Defense attorneys often refer to the conspiracy charge as a prosecutor’s “darling” because it requires the government to show only that defendants agreed to carry out an illegal act and then took a step to further it. In Rhodes’s case, prosecutors argued that he’d given his members the idea that they needed to do something to stop the transfer of presidential power, and when the riot at the Capitol commenced, they’d seized the opportunity. They focused on the guns the Oath Keepers had stashed in Virginia as a contingency and on the kind of incendiary language I’d critiqued on our first call. They pulled from his Signal messages: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.” They also cited passages from his open letters to Trump: “If you fail to do your duty, you will leave We the People no choice but to walk in the founders [sic] footsteps, by declaring the regime illegitimate, incapable of representing us, destructive of the just ends of government — to secure our liberty. And, like the founding generation, we will take to arms in defense of our God-given liberty.” Those letters had been published on the Oath Keepers website, which, along with their accounts on Twitter and Facebook, has since been purged from the internet.

The Russian writer didn’t have the tacit backing of potential future leaders of his country and a political movement with a near-even chance to soon retake power.

Among the many differences between Solzhenitsyn’s situation and Rhodes’s is this: The Russian writer didn’t have the tacit backing of potential future leaders of his country and a political movement with a near-even chance to soon retake power. Yet I imagine that Rhodes has kept in mind how Solzhenitsyn was arrested for political opinions expressed in letters to a friend. Afterward, as Solzhenitsyn recounts in “The Gulag Archipelago,” his writings were cast into a prison furnace and incinerated. “I had expressed myself vehemently,” he writes, “and had been almost reckless in spelling out seditious ideas.” At one point in his miserable imprisonment, he laments, “Only one life is allotted us, one small, short life! And we had been criminal enough to … drag it with us, still unsullied, into the dirty rubbish heap of politics.” Elsewhere, he takes solace in the fact that without his prison sentence, “I would not have written this book” and recounts how “very early and very clearly, I had this consciousness that prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning point in my life.”

The first time I spoke with Adams, in the summer of 2020, she asked me to keep the conversation off the record. (She’s since lifted that request.) “I don’t want anyone to know I talked with you,” she said, adding that her divorce proceedings were under seal and a gag order was in effect.

Her separation from Rhodes was only two years old. He’d left their small Montana community for Texas at the start of the year, and Adams was reassessing her views of him and the Oath Keepers after years writing blog posts for the group and helping with its administration.

It was always going to be a right-wing organization, she told me, but at its outset, it existed at the edge of mainstream politics. She and Rhodes had been die-hard supporters of the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, volunteering on his 2008 campaign, and many of the group’s early members were drawn from those circles. Others came over from a web forum called the Mental Militia, whose mission statement held that “Mentalitians are people who believe that ‘consciousness works!’, and who prefer the art of reason over violence … And we are concerned about the direction of today’s industrialized, militarized, economized, high-tech, post-Atomic, government-controlled world.” Some, Adams said, had even been supporters of the anti-war liberal politician Dennis Kucinich.

She told stories in that conversation and others about the paranoia that had prevailed in the family’s remote Montana household: their fears that the home was bugged, waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and tripping over piles of guns. At first, Adams found Rhodes’s conviction that the government was hunting him hard to take seriously, but after the Oath Keepers got involved in standoffs with federal agents at Bundy Ranch in Nevada and elsewhere, the FBI really did summon Rhodes to a meeting, and he really did find himself on what seemed to be a no-fly list, even as his group edged closer to the heart of Republican politics. By the second half of 2020, the Oath Keepers and other right-wing militants were patrolling racial justice protests and aligning with Trump over fears of antifascists and a stolen election. Adams struggled to say how much of his own dystopian talk Rhodes really believed: “Sometimes I think he did and sometimes he didn’t.” She noted the times he’d become convinced that “a world-changing event” was approaching and that he’d emerge as a leader within it.

Now Rhodes is living out the role he wrote for himself long ago, caught in the contradiction of someone both on the fringe and at the core of America’s power structure. As his sentencing approached, he kept up the drumbeat of his political prisoner narrative and at times, seemed to be working at cross-purposes with his own attorneys, who cast Rhodes as a beacon of community service, focusing on his time in the Army and the periodic disaster relief operations the Oath Keepers had conducted and urging that he be judged by those actions. Meanwhile, Rhodes wrote a 46-page letter from jail that was excerpted in the Epoch Times, a pro-Trump news outlet. In it, he said he had been convicted for “who I am” and “what I said.” He warned conservatives that his conviction was “only the beginning of a political persecution campaign aimed at all of you.” He concluded, “They can take my liberty and imprison my body, but they cannot imprison my mind.”

Before Rhodes’s sentencing, Thomas Massie, the iconoclastic, up-and-coming congressional Republican from Kentucky, tweeted, “Stewart Rhodes never entered the Capitol and didn’t commit acts of violence or destruction, yet he’s going to be sentenced Thursday for ‘seditious conspiracy’ … Weaponization of speech?” The idea taking hold on the right that people charged over January 6 are political prisoners feeds on real problems, such as the fact that many of them have been jailed for more than two years without trial, and on the embrace of tools such as censorship and conspiracy charges in the name of protecting democracy. It also feeds on the fervor of the Trump era and the election lie.

Part of the falsity of this movement is that it exists within its own sphere of power and on the coin-flip edge of controlling the country; they talk about the gulag as they set their sights on the presidency. I think about how, under Trump, the Justice Department used a conspiracy charge to threaten more than 200 people who’d protested against the inauguration with decades in prison because a smaller group of them had rioted. The charges against most were ultimately dropped, but only after they spent more than a year in legal jeopardy. I think about how the governor of Texas has vowed to pardon a man who shot a Black Lives Matter demonstrator dead in the street, the celebration of the Kenosha shooter, and laws like the one passed by the Republican statehouse in Iowa in 2021 that shields drivers who run their vehicles over protesters. I think about a country that, after the post-9/11 construction of a domestic surveillance and national security state, has facets of dictatorship already in place and how it always seems primed to tilt further down that path. I think about real dissidents and how badly we need them.

The post Oath Keepers Leader Stewart Rhodes Says He’s a Political Prisoner. Republicans Are Listening. appeared first on The Intercept.

A relic of World War I, when the government sought to stifle anti-war dissent, the law is so vague and yet so draconian that it has become a handy weapon for federal prosecutors to use against a wide array of targets — often individuals considered politically dangerous by mainstream America. For generations, it was used against American communists; in the 21st century, the Espionage Act has been repeatedly employed against whistleblowers who disclose embarrassing government secrets to the press. The Biden administration is now fighting to extradite Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, so he can be tried under the Espionage Act, among other charges.

It’s easy to see why prosecutors love this antiquated law. Unlike other measures that might be used to prevent the disclosure of classified information, the Espionage Act carries extraordinarily heavy penalties, including life in prison. Prosecutors use the Espionage Act like a cudgel, convincing whistleblowers to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like mishandling classified information, to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. That way, prosecutors get quick convictions without going to trial.

Because prosecutors find the Espionage Act such a useful tool, it is probably not going away anytime soon. It is an abuse of the legal system, but the Justice Department has no incentive to stop using it.

The occasional efforts by members of Congress to reform the Espionage Act have never gotten very far. In recent years, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has tried, and failed, to change it; now Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, is trying again. In an amendment to the massive 2022-23 Pentagon spending bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, Tlaib would, among other things, allow whistleblowers charged in leak cases to defend themselves by arguing that their disclosures to the media were in the public interest.

One of the worst things about the current law is that there is no way for whistleblowers to argue in court that they had a valid, even laudable reason to reveal government secrets. They are not allowed to explain that what they did was designed to help the American people know the truth about the government’s actions. A so-called public interest defense would be thrown out of court.

That gap in the law led to hypocrisy and tragedy in the case of Reality Winner. The former National Security Agency contractor was arrested in 2017 for anonymously leaking to a news outlet an NSA document showing that Russian intelligence tried to hack into U.S. state-level voting systems during the 2016 election. But while Winner was in jail awaiting trial, the Senate intelligence committee issued a report revealing that federal officials did not adequately warn state officials of the threat to their voting systems from the Russian hackers. Instead, the Senate report found that state officials only found out about the hacking threat from the press. That meant that The Intercept, which published the document along with a story about its significance, provided a critical public service. But even as the Senate implicitly lauded Winner’s actions, she wasn’t allowed to make the same argument in her own defense. Winner eventually pleaded guilty to avoid a longer prison term. (The Press Freedom Defense Fund, of which I am the director, supported Winner’s legal defense. Like The Intercept, the fund is part of First Look Institute.)

Like previous efforts to reform the Espionage Act, Tlaib’s amendment is likely to be rejected, perhaps in the next few days, as the House Rules Committee considers hundreds of amendments to the Pentagon budget bill. (Since the Pentagon budget must pass every year, it gets decked out like a Christmas tree with measures totally unrelated to Pentagon spending. This year, it has become an especially attractive platform for conservative culture warriors. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and close ally of Donald Trump, has submitted an amendment that would express the sense of Congress “that combating extremism in the military should not be a top priority for the Department of Defense.”)

The Espionage Act will likely continue to withstand reform because few in Congress want to be labelled soft on national security. Like others who go against conventional wisdom, whistleblowers have very few allies.

The post Rashida Tlaib Is Trying to Fix the Espionage Act, but Whistleblowers Are Probably Out of Luck appeared first on The Intercept.

The 1917 Espionage Act has become controversial. Despite its name, it isn’t really used much anymore to prosecute spies. In recent years, both Democratic and Republican administrations wielded it as a weapon to intimidate media as well as sources who have provided important information to the public — raising the ire of civil rights advocates.

This isn’t Trump’s first brush with the Espionage Act, though it is the first time he’s the one being accused. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, Trump’s Department of Justice charged five journalist sources — none of them spies — under the Espionage Act. (Several more journalistic sources were prosecuted under lesser statutes.) Here’s how the Espionage Act charges went for the people Trump used it against.

Reality Winner

During the 2016 presidential election, Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU, launched cyberattacks in support of Trump’s campaign. In one of them, GRU sent spearphishing emails to local election officials in swing states hoping to trick them into opening the malicious attachment that would hack their computers. At the time, Trump called all of this “fake news.”

In 2017, then-National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Reality Winner, who was 26, leaked a classified NSA document to The Intercept that described this GRU plot in detail. Trump’s Justice Department charged and convicted her under the Espionage Act. Midway through a trial, Winner entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to one charge. She was sentenced to five years and three months in prison, and three years of supervised release: the longest sentence ever given for the unauthorized release of classified documents to the media. (In June 2021, Winner was released early from prison.)

State election officials first learned about GRU’s spearphishing attack against them because of media reports, but only thanks to Winner; the NSA had failed to warn them. Two former election officials told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that Winner’s disclosure helped secure the 2018 midterm election.

Terry Albury

In early 2017, The Intercept published a series of revelations based on confidential FBI guidelines from an internal FBI whistleblower, including details about controversial tactics for investigating minorities and spying on journalists.

In 2018, Trump’s Justice Department charged and convicted Terry Albury, at the time an FBI special agent, under the Espionage Act for leaking. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to four years in prison and three years of supervised release.

During Albury’s distinguished 16-year counterterrorism career at the FBI, he “often observed or experienced racism and discrimination within the Bureau,” according to court documents. The only Black FBI special agent in the Minneapolis field office, he was especially disturbed by what he saw as “systemic biases” within the bureau, particularly when it came to the FBI’s mistreatment of informants.

Joshua Schulte

In early 2017, WikiLeaks began publishing a series of documents and hacking tools detailing the CIA’s offensive cyber capabilities, collectively known as Vault 7 — the single largest leak of classified information in CIA history. These releases lead Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo to declare WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service.” The CIA even considered kidnapping or assassinating Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, over this release of documents and hacking tools.

This was a wild reversal of Trump’s attitude towards WikiLeaks. Less than a year earlier, during the 2016 election, WikiLeaks had published GRU-hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, perfectly timed to distract the public from a video of Trump bragging about sexual assault. Trump declared, “I love WikiLeaks.”

In 2018, the disgruntled CIA software developer Joshua Schulte, who worked on programming the hacking tools that WikiLeaks published, was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking the Vault 7 documents to WikiLeaks. Last month, Schulte was convicted in a trial by jury on nine Espionage Act counts. He hasn’t been sentenced yet, but he faces up to 80 years in prison. He also faces additional charges related to sexual assault and child pornography.

Daniel Hale

In 2015, The Intercept published a series of stories that provided the most detail ever made public about the U.S. government’s unaccountable program for targeting and killing people around the world, including U.S. citizens, with drones. The disclosures were based on leaked classified documents.

In 2014, FBI agents raided the home of whistleblower Daniel Hale, a former NSA drone operator and later an outspoken anti-war activist, who they suspected of being the source. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, though, declined to file any charges. The Trump administration, on the other hand, was more than happy to prosecute the case. In 2019, Trump’s Justice Department charged Hale under the Espionage Act. After pleading guilty to one of the charges, he was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison.

Henry Kyle Frese

In 2018, CNBC published eight articles containing classified information about China’s weapons systems, including that China had installed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missile system in the South China Sea.

In 2019, Henry Kyle Frese, a counterterrorism analyst for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking documents about China’s weapons systems to the CNBC reporter, who he was dating, and her colleague at NBC News. Frese pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years and six months in prison.

Donald Trump

Now, Trump has found himself on the other end of an Espionage Act investigation. (President Joe Biden’s Justice Department authorized a search of Mar-a-Lago that cited the Espionage Act in its justification, but no charges against Trump have been filed yet.)

Unlike most of the people charged with the Espionage Act under the Trump administration, except perhaps Schulte, Trump’s theft of classified documents wasn’t aimed at exposing attacks on democracy, shining a light on government atrocities, or adding anything newsworthy to the public discourse.

In their allegations, authorities have not offered any explanations about Trump’s motives for retaining classified documents on his way out of the White House in 2020. Knowing Trump, it wasn’t anything altruistic. We do, however, know that Section 793 of the Espionage Act carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The post Donald Trump Has His Own History With the Espionage Act appeared first on The Intercept.

The new book “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy” by investigative journalists Claire Provost and Matt Kennard reveals how the world actually works: the international structures and laws that preempt most attempts at any kind of economic democracy in most of the countries around the world. This week on Deconstructed, Provost and Kennard join Jon Schwarz to discuss this “silent coup” by powerful multinational companies.

Jon Schwarz: I’m Jon Schwarz, a writer at The Intercept, filling in for Ryan Grim on this week’s episode of Deconstructed.

Imagine if you and millions of Americans successfully fought to stop a multinational corporation from mining copper in your state and destroying the rivers and environment for everyone. And you won. You get a law passed forbidding the company from opening the mine.

But then the Supreme Court steps in and says, nope, this law is unconstitutional, we’re striking it down, the mine can open, and they can pollute your state. Now, that might be easy to imagine, given our own corporate-owned and -operated Supreme Court is busy making decisions like this all the time.

But the point is, that’s not just here; it’s essentially how life is in most countries on Earth, except it’s even worse. Over decades, corporations have quietly created supreme corporate courts that operate on an international level, that can and do overrule mere people.

Claire Provost and Matt Kennard have written an amazing new book about why and how this happened; because it didn’t just happen, it was all planned. The book is called “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.” And let me tell you, if you are angry at how the world seems unfair, if you haven’t read this, you are not angry enough.

Provost is co-founder and codirector of the new nonprofit, Institute for Journalism and Social Change. Kennard is cofounder and chief investigator at Declassified U.K., a news outlet investigating British foreign policy.

Claire and Matt, welcome to Deconstructed.

Matt Kennard: Thanks for having us.

Claire Provost: Thank you.

JS: The title of your book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy,” which is pretty straightforward. But tell us about what this title means, exactly, and what are the specifics about what corporations want to get with their power?

CP: So, when we think about democracy, we think about ourselves having some kind of say and role in the decision-making about our futures. And what the book charts in very broad terms is how there was a very structured, and strategic, and infrastructural attempt to overthrow this, in a sense, from the beginning.

From the beginning in the sense that there was a moment in the 20^th century when things could have really, really shifted towards people power. At the time of dramatic decolonization independence movements, as well as labor movements, movements for freedom all around the world. And there was a really strategic attempt to not only confront those movements at that moment, but also to overrule them for perpetuity, in perpetuity, forever.

And so, the book looks at ways in which international systems and strategies have been set up over the last 75-plus years, to make that promise of democracy an impossibility.

MK: There’s a lot of work that’s been done, and a lot of literature that’s been produced over the years, about how corporations have captured the political systems domestically in places like the United States, and in Britain, and other places. And it’s clear every day, when you look at the societies we live in, that corporations have penetrated more and more areas. And that’s quite a well analyzed and covered topic, I think.

But what our book focuses on is how this is the international system that was constructed to enshrine corporate power after the end of the Second World War. This is an important time because, at a rapid clip — particularly in the 50s and 60s — huge amounts of countries were becoming independent. People who had been literally fighting the imperial powers on the ground were becoming prime ministers and presidents, nationalizing resources, expropriating assets.

And the traditional owners of the world — the people that owned the world for hundreds of years, the Western imperial powers — were freaking out, and they thought, what are we going to do in the face of these kinds of liberation movements around the world that were making the ground shift beneath [our] feet?

So, they quite consciously came up — and this sounds like tinfoil hat stuff, but it’s all there in black and white, when you go to the World Bank archives and other places, which we did — they quite consciously thought, we need to construct an international system that works above the heads of national governments and enshrines foreign investors’ rights, and enshrines multinational corporations’ rights. And they worked very quickly to start constructing that.

The major moment in this system was the Bretton Woods meetings in 1944 in New Hampshire, when the World Bank — or what became the World Bank — and the IMF were created. And then, four years later, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs was created, which later became the WTO.

Now, these three institutions were kind of the most important bodies which controlled the global economy afterwards, and controlled how countries were developed. And they were all about, from the start, enshrining corporate power, and allowing and easing the movement of corporations into new markets. And, in our book, we went specifically to look at some of the systems that were put in place.

Now, the first one we looked at was what’s called “investor-state dispute settlement,” ISDS, and, for me, this is kind of the emblematic system of this whole infrastructure, because it was created in 1966 as part of the World Bank, and 1966 is not a coincidental date. It was in the early 60s, huge amounts of countries in Africa, particularly, were becoming independent, and ICSID — the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes — was a system that would allow multinational corporations to sue states at supranational venues when they enacted policies they didn’t like.

So, if you nationalize a resource, there’s cases where if you raise a minimum wage; anything that a corporation doesn’t like, this gives them the right to sue the states. The book is in four parts, and we start with ISDS, but there were many, many other systems which were created and are enshrined in free trade agreements, and bilateral investment treaties, and all this, this web of agreements that crisscross the world.

And what it really does is — the reason we call it a silent coup — was [because] barely anyone knows about this stuff. This is an international system that was consciously set up to put to bed the democratic movements which had arisen after the Second World War, and barely anyone knows about it.

In a sort of broad sense, this book describes the construction of an international system that enshrines corporate power, and works above the heads of national governments. And, in 2023, we call it a silent coup, I believe that the coup is complete now. Effectively, it’s extremely difficult to go up against this system because it has such overwhelming power.

The only place that there’s been real resistance to it — successful resistance, particularly in recent history — has been Latin America. Funnily enough, there’s three countries which tried to extricate themselves from the ICSID in recent history, and that was: Venezuela under Chávez, Bolivia under Evo Morales, and Ecuador under Rafael Correa.

And they did, but it’s extremely hard to even extricate yourself from the system, because a lot of these agreements have what are called “sunset clauses,” which means, even if you pull out of an agreement, it will only happen ten years later. And then, obviously, they’re hoping [that] in ten years time there won’t be a liberation government that has the same predilection to get out, and they can just stay in.

When what was called antiglobalization really exercised the left, everyone talks about what Thomas Friedman called “the golden straitjacket.” You know, they said that there’s a straitjacket that the Bretton Woods institutions put on the economies of most of the world. He thought it was golden, but it’s not golden.

The point is, what it’s about is nullifying democracy.

JS: Yes, I think it’s great to bring up that Thomas Friedman quote, the golden straitjacket, because, as you say, the golden part turned out not to be real, but the straitjacket part absolutely is.

CP: The golden part is real if you’re on the winning side of this battle, it really is real. The golden side of the straitjacket is that, if you’re a powerful economic elite or corporation and you want to protect and expand your power, you can do that in so many different ways. And if you get to the point where you come across extreme defiance, extreme defiance — including from the Latin American countries that Matt mentions — then you can go to these international systems and have your will implemented by those international systems. So, for some, it is absolutely golden.

For the majority, it is the opposite of that, but it is a good system for some people, and that’s part of the problem. If it was a universally bad system for everybody, it would be easier to dismantle it. There are some extraordinarily powerful and wealthy individuals and companies that are benefiting extraordinarily from the status quo, which makes it hard to dismantle.

JS: Yes. And that, of course, is a very important point, and it fits in with the overall arc of history that you described. I think in America in particular, probably in Europe as well, the fact that Europe and the U.S. colonized, I think, literally every square inch of planet Earth, with the exception of, I believe, Japan and Ethiopia … That was a system where there were rewards for certain people in the colonized countries. And they would help the colonizing countries run the country that they were living in. And so, there were big rewards for a small proportion of the population and, as you say, it wouldn’t work if it was terrible for everybody; there is a small number of people for whom it was good.

And I wanted to ask you if you are familiar with this, from the Obama White House website, where they explain it very straightforwardly. I have rarely seen anybody talk about this, or have never seen anybody talk about this, but here’s what the Obama White House said:

“Before we had investment rules, an ISDS,” that’s the Investor State Dispute Settlement System. Before we had that, “unlawful behavior by countries that targeted foreign investors tended either to go unaddressed or escalate into conflict between countries. In fact, early in our history, the U.S. had to deploy gunboat diplomacy or military intervention to protect private American commercial interests. ISDS is a more peaceful, better way to resolve trade conflicts between countries.”

CP: It’s as if he’s reading from a script. That is the script. That is the script that was written in the 50s, and it’s the script that was shopped around the world by elite Europeans, the head of the Deutsche Bank, and other chairs and board members of major European corporations.

They shopped it around, didn’t get success at the U.N., didn’t get success at the OECD. Then they get success in Washington, D.C. at the World Bank, convincing the Americans to take up the script that, unless you set up the system, you’re going to have infinite armed conflict. That rebellious people are going to rise up, they’re going to demand things, there’s going to be wars, there’s going to be violence, so this is like a route to peace. It’s a peace without democracy.

That’s a really old sort of narrative, it comes from the foundation of the system, so it’s super-chilling to hear that in a more contemporary context from the Obama administration. That’s not a new argument; that is the foundational argument of this system, and it’s a really terrifying one.

MK: I think that he’s right, in a way, because, as Claire mentioned, that was the way that this system was sold by its godfathers, and its godfather, particularly, was a German banker called Herman Abs, who made this speech in 1957 in San Francisco to a group of industrialists from the U.S. and around the world, and he was making this exact same point.

So, this was 1957, and he referenced three things: he referenced the coup in Iran, in 1953, when the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, because it nationalized the Anglo-Iranian oil company, what’s now BP. Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala who had enacted quite a mild land reform program, but stepped on the toes of the United Fruit Company, who had chatted to their friends in the CIA, and the CIA had organized to overthrow democracy in Guatemala.

In 1956, President Nasser — again, a big bête noire of the era for the Americans and the British — he nationalized the Suez Canal and was invaded by Israel, France, and Britain. And he said exactly what the Obama administration said in 1957; he said, we don’t want to have to do this stuff anymore. We don’t have to go in with coups. We don’t want to have to overthrow leaders, maybe even assassinate the ones that nationalized stuff, so we need a system that works above their heads.

So, it doesn’t matter if you get a Mossadegh in, it doesn’t matter if you get an Arbenz in, it doesn’t matter if you get a Nasser in. They can’t move, they’ve got the straitjacket on. And that’s what the ISDS system was about, and that’s kind of what the quote that you mentioned, Jon, from the Obama administration [is about], that’s kind of celebrating this fact.

And it’s also done silently. Barely anyone knows about this ISDS system, barely anyone knows about the history of it. But I think part of the reason that this system, particularly, is so little known is that there’s very, very weak justification for it. Because, as you know, most of these systems that make capitalism run in the interest of the 1 percent, they all have very sophisticated ideologies bolted on top of them, to justify them to the people within the system, but also to the general public. There’s barely any justification for the ISDS system, so they just keep it secret, you know?

It was quite interesting hearing the Obama administration gives such a full-throated defense of it. It goes to the heart of what Naomi Klein talks about in “The Shock Doctrine,” that there’s this theory that was built up — again, it’s part of the whole ideology — that freedom and capitalism, democracy and capitalism, are intertwined. When it’s the opposite, you know? That they have to work above the heads of democratic governments, to make sure that it will run smoothly and all in their interests. And that’s the system that they erected.

JS: Yes. And I think one especially interesting comment from an especially interesting guy about this, and how we transformed from a system of sort of formal colonialism into something that was invisible and worked in kind of the same ways is Pope Francis, who, in 2015 said, “We see the rise of new forms of colonialism which seriously prejudice the possibility of peace and justice. The new colonialism takes on different faces, at times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon, corporations, loan agencies, certain free trade treaties, and the imposition of measures of austerity, which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor.”

CP: I mean, good for him saying that, I don’t disagree with that, but it frustrates me also as a person who lives in Italy. The Vatican state is within our peninsula, and we are facing an extreme case right now from a British company that is challenging — through this international investor-state dispute settlement system — is challenging a popularly supported ban on offshore oil and gas exploration and activity very close to the shore.

And that case, that is still ongoing, so far the tribunal in Washington has sided with the company, meaning that Italy will either have to continue to allow oil and gas exploration close to the shore, or it will have to pay hundreds of millions of euros. Italy has tried to appeal. The final hearing will be behind closed doors in the first quarter of 2024.

It’s an extreme example of what Matt mentioned before, of how people don’t know about this system, and how it affects our lives and decisions that are made around us. This case facing Italy, it’s not mainstream news in Italy, it’s not something everybody knows about. It’s not something that we’re publicly all aware of and talking about, the fact that a corporation can challenge a democratically introduced, following-popular-mobilizations-for-a-decade ban on oil and gas exploration near the shore.

So, it’s great that he says that, but it’s not very specific, and I think, until people get specific on these things, it doesn’t necessarily mean enough, perhaps.

In addition to Italy, there are a number of other countries facing extraordinary cases, that if you are — as Pope Francis sounds to be — concerned about the balance between multinational corporate power and people power, we need support for, also, other communities and governments that are fighting extraordinary cases, including Honduras.

Honduras is a case that is ongoing right now, and I want to mention it because it’s not in our book, because it’s a more recent case. But that case is from an American company that wanted to build a very dystopian special economic zone / private city in Honduras. And the Honduran government is in the process of changing the laws, so that you can no longer build such dystopian cities and dystopian private special economic zones.

And so, the company has taken the government. to the same institution at the World Bank — ICSID, the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes — and that case is worth a third of the country’s national budget. So, we’re talking about a threat to democratic decision-making, but also your ability to maintain public services for an entire country, so it’s so extreme.

So, you know, it’s great that Pope Francis said what he said, but we need really serious solidarity with countries that are facing these cases and, we need more specifics.

MK: I, I agree with what he’s saying, and it’s really important to attack the narrative that decolonization happened, because it didn’t. It was replaced with a different system, and it got a whole new terminology.

After the Second World War, the U.S. and U.K. — who primarily built this system — they came up with a whole new vocabulary to cover this new system, and the word they use is “development.” It was all about, we want to develop the rest of the world.

And even the word development itself now is used to describe … It sounds very innocent. But what it describes is the economic policies that are pushed on the rest of the world that basically decide how the majority of humanity runs their economy, so it’s important stuff. These institutions don’t care about the development of the poor world. It’s not a coincidence, the massive levels of inequality is the result of these institutions, not despite them.

So, it’s a massive PR operation, and this new system works in the shadows, but effectively just enshrines, as I mentioned, foreign investor power and corporations in a much more insidious way.

JS: Well, the overall system is interesting in the abstract, but your book is also full of these extremely concrete specifics about how this plays out in various countries, and I wonder what you think are the most startling stories that you tell in the book.

CP: For me, one of the ones is South Africa. South Africa, after the end of apartheid — which was, obviously, a global news story that involved a lot of global attention and pushing for the end of apartheid — after that moment, a huge range of new laws get revised and passed to try to move the country on from apartheid and, also, redress issues from the past.

Among those are a new mining charter, which changes the rules of the game for the mining industry and, in particular, requires mining companies to hand over a certain small minority percentage of their power to people who had been historically disadvantaged under apartheid.

After that act gets passed, a group of European investors sued South Africa, saying that they were not allowed to redress historical injustices under international investment law. And that case did not finish, because it settled before a conclusion in the actual case.

And, in the settlement, South Africa conceded, and gave those investors a more favorable treatment than they would have received under the new law. So, they had to hand over a much smaller percentage of their power to historically disadvantaged individuals.

So, this surprised me on a number of different levels. On the level of how the investor-state dispute settlement system can come in conflict with other things that we kind of globally agree are important, like universal human rights and not having racially-based systems of discrimination. And also, how it showed how our industry, the media, hasn’t been really fulfilling its function, and explaining to people how decisions are really made, and who really holds power.

MK: Yeah, the South Africa case was crazy, and it was an amazing experience going there, because it wasn’t like El Salvador.

Basically, the whole book started in El Salvador, because there was a case that was brought by a Canadian mining company for $300 million against the Salvadoran government for not granting them an environmental permit for a mine to dig for gold.

And when we went to El Salvador, the whole … It was amazing. The whole of the society basically knew about ICSID, which I mentioned, which is known as CIADI, by its Spanish acronym. So, you’d speak to normal people on the street and they’d understand it, they’d see it, they knew it was a massive attack on their sovereignty.

But then, in South Africa, where we went, barely anyone knew about it. And that was because the South African government didn’t want to publicize it, because they didn’t want to incentivize other companies suing them for their Black empowerment policies.

I also went to India, to look at the first Asian special economic zone in Gandhidam. But they’re also coming back to the Western world, and this is the whole trend that we look at in the book, and we called it “the boomerang effect.” A lot of these systems and models which were created to enshrine corporate power and Western domination in the developing world are now coming back to eat the states that created them.

So, we went to Germany, and to Hamburg, where Germany was being sued for billions by a Swedish energy company for decommissioning its nuclear power. And Germany, as I said, was kind of the godfather of … Well, this bank was the godfather of this whole system. And many people in Germany were saying, oh, we knew this system existed, but we never thought it would hit us.

And on the SEZ model where I live, in London, the government here announced two years ago that we’re going to have 13 free ports. Now, “free ports” is another name for a special economic zone, so it’s just a corporate utopia within Britain that they can do what they want [in].

We’ve got nothing left in Britain after Thatcherism; now they’re just selling off the land itself.

CP: So, I grew up in North America, I grew up in the U.S. and Canada, sort of half-and-half. When I think about what we looked at in our book and what it shows — and particularly when I try to talk to North American audiences about it — it also explained to us [how] we are really living in the world that NAFTA created.

Like, all of the concerns that we had had when NAFTA was proposed, about the shifting to corporate power, about environment health workers being disempowered, all of that has happened. But also, an important related point is the power of local entrepreneurs and small businesses has decreased.

The only companies that can file suits at the International Investor State Dispute Settlement System are multinational companies and investors. Like, you cannot file a case like this if you are a small entrepreneur and you have a problem with your government. If you have a problem with your government, you go through local courts. If you’re an international investor or international company, you have a second option: you can go to this international system. It completely, also, changed the game.

And the interests of local entrepreneurs and small businesses really don’t align with these multinational corporations that have this access to these international systems that serve them, not the mom-and-pop shops.

MK: Well, just to add, as well, the ISDS system, investor-state dispute settlement, where corporations can sue states, it’s a complete violation of how they tell us capitalism works, which is that, you take a risk, and the higher the risk, the bigger potential reward, but you have to evaluate whether that risk is worth it, right?

So, if you go to the Congo, and you’re a mining company, you might get your asset expropriated by the government, or you might get attacked by paramilitaries. Or there might be a new government that comes in, and a military dictatorship takes over. But you’ve taken that risk, because you’re in the Congo, you know about it.

But this de-risks the whole thing, because you have access to an international venue where you can pay for powerful corporate lawyers to back you up and take these countries to those courts. And they have to go, because the other thing is, no one’s ever done a no-show, because there’s a very powerful enforcement mechanism that exists for any country which kind of says, well, we don’t want to show up.

Claire mentioned the Honduras case; they’re being sued for $11 billion for trying to shut down a special economic zone on Roatan, one of the Honduran islands, and they don’t know what to do. They can’t afford it, it’s an absolute crisis for them. But I don’t think they’re considering not showing up, because you can’t. If you do that, your credit lines from the Bretton Woods institutions will be slashed.

There’s a thing called The New York Convention on Arbitral Disputes [a/k/a “The Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards”], which everyone’s kind of signed up to. And that means that any country has to expropriate any assets you own. So, even a presidential jet, if it landed in a certain country, they’d have to take it if you don’t pay up or you don’t attend these hearings.

It’s a system that is extremely powerful and extremely difficult to ignore, and extremely difficult to get out of.

JS: OK, so we’ve talked about El Salvador and South Africa; South Africa, of course, being an especially stark example. But one example that you also have in your book that is possibly even more startling, and is particularly timely right now, is the section called “Occupation Incorporated in Palestine.”

I was wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about that.

MK: Yeah. So, I went to Palestine, and that was in 2016, and I wanted to work on the role that the privatization of the occupation was having on Palestinians. I realized quite quickly that the privatization of the occupation was happening rapidly.

So, for example, we’d go to checkpoints, and the checkpoints wouldn’t be manned by the IDF — the Israel Defense Forces, or so-called defense forces — they’d be manned by private contractors; there was one called Modiin Ezrachi, and these people had killed people. And the subcontracting out of security in Palestine by Israel allowed them complete impunity.

I mean, the IDF has near complete impunity anyway, but there are formal mechanisms that offer redress for Palestinians who have been killed. With the private contractors, there’s no accountability, because they’re private companies. And you see that across the world, that the privatization of the military and security is a boon for states, because it allows them plausible deniability when anything goes wrong. Again, it’s a story that isn’t really covered that well, but it also is a way for the Israelis to privatize it, to make a lot of money.

And another story I did in Palestine, which was really heartbreaking, is how the Israelis use the West Bank — and Gaza as well, but I actually wasn’t allowed into Gaza — [in] the West Bank and Gaza they use as what people have now called a “laboratory.” And a very good journalist called Anthony Lowenstein has just written a book called The Palestine Laboratory, and it’s about how having this captive population in the West Bank and Gaza has allowed the private security, arms industry, surveillance industry, all these industries that the Israelis are kind of leading in is because they have this captive population where they can test all this stuff out. And in a world that’s becoming more and more securitized, Israel’s kind of like the place that everyone looks at.

And I went to Ramallah, and talked to the head of the resistance committee in Bil’in, which is a town which was being cut in half, effectively, by the annexation wall that Israel was still building then — I think it’s finished now — but which has been ruled illegal by the U.N. But he was saying, yeah, we saw all this stuff being thrown at us.

It was nonviolent demonstration; I went on one. And when I went to the demonstration in Bil’in, they shot live ammunition at us. And no, [the demonstration] was all nonviolent. But, anyway, he was saying that this sort of skunk gas, I think it is, which is just putrid smelling gas, was pioneered in Bil’in, that’s what he told me.

And then I went to another investigator, a Palestinian human rights investigator. And I went into his house, which was round the back of Ramallah Hospital, and I’ll never forget it. Like, I walked in, and there was just a table with all this spent ammunition and different weapons, because he was investigating what would happen.

He was just showing me all this newfangled weaponry, which had been built up over the years, and he said that they try out on us. And he said that, in all the years that he’s been investigating them, they’ve had complete impunity. And he said that’s got worse with the prevalence of private security and private military within the Israeli establishment, because he said, often, you’d see uniforms and not even know who they belong to.

So, yeah, Israel is the center of the export of surveillance technology, of newfangled arms, and all sorts of stuff, and it’s because they’ve got a captive population. And I mean, I don’t need to talk about the morality of using an imprisoned population of 2 million people as a kind of lab to try out your newfangled weaponry so you can sell it to market. And, actually, they do use in their brochures, they use the term “battle-proven,” and sometimes even mention the war that it was used in.

So, yeah. It was a really sickening experience.

JS: Again, this is a fascinating book, it is called “The Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.” Really, anybody, if you want to understand how the world truly works, you should get this, and read it.

And before we wrap up, I was hoping that the two of you could talk just a little bit about the person “The Silent Coup” is dedicated to, Gavin MacFadyen.

MK: Yeah. Gavin was an amazing man. He died in 2016, towards the end of our fellowship at the Center for Investigative Journalism, which is where all this research started. And he had this ability to be wherever history was being made.

So he was in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution, he was banned from apartheid South Africa, he was banned from the Soviet Union. He made about 40 different documentaries for national TV in the U.K. when you could actually get good journalism on the TV. You can’t do that anymore.

But he was an American guy and he, interestingly, he was the political mentor to Bernie Sanders in Chicago in the 60s; so, he politicized Bernie Sanders, which I didn’t know about until after he died. And then he later became the mentor and very close to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

So, he was a kind of unique figure, in a sense, that he ran the CIJ in a very free way. It was totally different to the institutions that I’d been in. I was at the Financial Times before, and the journalism that I was allowed to practice was extremely corporate, essentially; there were only certain things you could say.

And Gavin, when we started there in 2014, he said to us, look, you’ve got two years to do whatever you want. You’ve got a wage. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to live on, definitely. And you’ve got a travel budget as well. I don’t think many people will ever get that opportunity, we probably won’t again.

But that was a testament to Gavin, that he just believed that you’ve got to give people freedom to look for the stories that they want, and also, the backing to be brave as well. Because I knew that, whatever we did, as long as it was truthful, fact-based, he would back us.

And the other thing about him, which everyone who knew him says is, he was just an amazingly warm person, and funny. And it was quite interesting, because a lot of people like that, [who] have seen so much human suffering and been witness to it, it hardens them in some ways, or at least makes them, I don’t know. A bit withdrawn? Whereas he was the opposite.

He would light up any gathering. He was happy to work in the shadows doing his journalism, and doing his activism, because he was an activist as well. He was really into this idea of direct action journalism. Like, he was saying we should go and chain ourselves outside the Department of State until they gave us a certain bit of information, which I’d never heard of before, and I haven’t seen done, but I quite like that idea. And he was also extremely democratic.

CP: Gavin, our mentor, also mentored and influenced many investigative journalists. I keep running into them. People who really understand what it means to be a journalist, also, because of Gavin. And that understanding means that you’re also not afraid of trouble, and that’s a core part of it.

I think, in professional journalism, you can be trained to avoid trouble, and Gavin almost did the opposite. And that’s where the dedication “good trouble” also comes from.

JS: So, you’ve heard about the man that they dedicated this book to, that he was very good at getting into trouble, he was very good at causing trouble. I would say, if you read this book, you, too, are going to cause some trouble, probably. You definitely will be in trouble if people have found out that you’ve read it. It is fantastic. I really recommend it to everyone.

Claire and Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

MK: Thanks for having us.

CP: Thank you so much. Cause some trouble, please.

JS: That was Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, and that’s our show. Their new book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.”

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief. And I’m Jon Schwarz.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference. Finally, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear each new episode, and please go leave us a rating or a review. It helps people find the show.

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Thanks for listening.

The post Unraveling Democracy: The Corporate Takeover appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.K. High Court ruling that Julian Assange should be extradited to face trial in the United States — a decision that Amnesty International has called a “travesty of justice” — came as no surprise to me. It’s what the U.K. government always wanted. I know because the British deputy minister of foreign affairs told me.

Many pundits and politicians talk of the extradition proceedings against Assange as if they were an unforeseen legal outcome that came about as Assange’s situation unfolded. This is not true. My experience as the foreign minister of Ecuador — the South American country that granted Assange asylum — left me in no doubt that the U.K. wanted Assange’s extradition to the United States from the very beginning.

One encounter I had with Alan Duncan, the former British minister of state for Europe and the Americas, in October 2016 really let the cat out of the bag. At our meeting in the Dominican Republic, Duncan went on extensively about how loathsome Assange was. While I didn’t anticipate Duncan to profess his love for our asylee, I had expected a more professional diplomatic exchange. But the most important moment of the meeting was when I reiterated that Ecuador’s primary fear was the transfer of Assange to the United States, at which point Duncan turned to his staff and exclaimed something very close to, “Yes, well, good idea. How would we go about extraditing him to the Americans?”

His advisers squirmed in embarrassment. They had spent the last four years trying to reassure Ecuador that this was not what the U.K. was after. I responded that this was news indeed. I then wondered whether Duncan left the meeting feeling he had made a mess of it.

I was particularly surprised by Duncan’s candor because my June 2016 meeting with his predecessor, Hugo Swire, in Whitehall, had been quite different. It’s not that Swire wasn’t equally contemptuous of the irritating South American country that had granted Assange asylum; it is more that Swire actually knew the case well.

Swire stuck to the U.K.’s position: Nobody wanted to extradite Assange to the United States. The Ecuadorian government was “deluded” and “paranoid.” This had nothing to do with the issue of freedom of expression or even WikiLeaks. The case was all about accusations in Sweden against Assange. Ecuador should stop protecting a potential sex offender.

Events since have demonstrated that the British argument that Assange was “holed up” in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid facing sexual assault allegations in Sweden was deceitful. The case was always about Assange’s publishing activities as the head of WikiLeaks. In fact, my government had made it clear to both its British and Swedish counterparts that if Ecuador received guarantees of nonextradition from Sweden to the United States, Ecuador would have no problem with Assange traveling to Sweden to face questioning. Assange himself agreed to this. But Sweden refused to offer such guarantees, which obviously further heightened Ecuador’s suspicions that Assange was being persecuted.

Had Swire been telling the truth, the Swedish prosecutor’s decision not to press charges against Assange in May 2017 would have enabled Assange to walk free from the embassy. The remaining claim that he breached his bail by successfully applying for political asylum should have been easily resolved after the European arrest warrant was dropped. But the U.K. refused to let Assange slip away, and he remained in the Ecuadorian Embassy for two more years before a new Ecuadorian government, heavily leaned on by the Trump administration, consented to having him brutally removed in April 2019.

Maybe it was simply that Duncan’s hatred for Assange, whom he referred to as a “miserable little worm” in Parliament in March 2018, was too pure to be tempered in our meeting. Duncan’s published diaries certainly attest to the fact that Assange’s arrest became an overriding obsession and eventually a personal trophy. When the time came, Duncan watched Assange’s extraction from the embassy — which he refers to as Operation Pelican — on a live feed and later held “drinks in my office for all the Operation Pelican team.”

Duncan’s deeply felt disdain for what he called “the supposed human rights of Julian Assange” are probably part and parcel of his fervent allegiance to the Anglo-American security partnership. Duncan served on the U.K.’s Intelligence and Security Committee in 2015–2016. He is also a member of the secretive, transatlantic organization “Le Cercle,” an ultra conservative think tank with strong links to the intelligence community in Europe and the United States.

We can only speculate whether Duncan’s close relationship with whom he calls his “good friend and Oxford contemporary Ian Burnett,” the Lord Chief Justice who gave the green light to Assange’s extradition, interfered with the judicial process. But the extradition proceedings have been problematic from the beginning. A coalition of major human rights and press freedom organizations — including Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, and First Look Institute’s Press Freedom Defense Fund — have urged the U.S. Justice Department “to dismiss the indictment of Mr. Assange” on the grounds that it “threatens press freedom” and marks a precedent that “could effectively criminalize … common journalistic practices.” The top editors of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, and others have agreed with these experts.

The attempt to extradite Assange to the United States is a clear breakdown of the rule of law, which is continuing in the post-Trump era. The yearn to punish and send a warning to others has been given precedence over human rights, rule of law, and freedom of expression. The persecution must end now.

The post The U.K. Wanted to Extradite Julian Assange to the U.S. From the Start appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, federal officials arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, accusing him of having leaked hundreds of pages of classified Pentagon documents on a Discord server, a social messaging program. The documents offer rare insights into the war in Ukraine and the extent of military casualties and reveal the presence of U.S. and other NATO nations’ special forces clandestinely operating in the war zone. They also document how the conflict is spilling over into the Middle East and shed light on U.S. penetration of Russian military plans and U.S. spy efforts, including against American allies and the United Nations secretary general.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, and national security editor Vanessa Gezari discuss the document leak and analyze what we know and don’t know about the young airman accused of distributing the documents, initially to a small group of gamers and gun enthusiasts in a private internet chatroom. They also discuss the media’s role in identifying the suspect using open source clues left by Texeira and his friends in the months leading up to his arrest as well as what the accused 21 year old might face in an Espionage Act trial.

[Intercepted theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain. Today our colleague, Vanessa Gezari is joining us. She’s the National Security Editor for The Intercept.

Vanessa Gezari: Hi.

JS: Hey Vanessa. Thanks so much for being with us here on Intercepted, and we asked you to come on the show today because there’s a wild national security story that’s been simmering or brewing that involves a leak of some top-secret U.S. documents.

And the reason that I say it’s been simmering instead of exploding onto the scene — like the Edward Snowden documents, or when the Chelsea Manning documents were revealed by WikiLeaks — is that these documents that we’re going to talk about today began circulating online months ago, we understand, last December. And they began circulating on the internet, apparently, without the U.S. government knowing that they were out there, without any media outlets knowing they were out there. And, in fact, a pretty small group of what we understand to be teenage gamers or young adult gamers, they had privileged access to top secret documents. Some of them were even classified at the sensitive compartmented information level, which is a very high classification level.

And these were real-time documents that related to the war in Ukraine, to U.S. spying and hacking capabilities against Russia, to Chinese military planning, to the state of Taiwan’s missile defense and air defense system, to information on the U.S. spying on its own allies, and a whole slew of other sensitive information. And, as we currently understand the facts, there are potentially hundreds of these secret documents that began appearing on a Discord server that was known as Thug Shaker Central last December.

And what’s particularly fascinating about all of this is that the FBI or the Justice Department has now charged a 21-year-old airman in the U.S. National Guard in Massachusetts. His name is Jack Teixeira. And, according to his friends, his motive for disseminating these documents had nothing to do with blowing the whistle, or trying to change U.S. government policy, or highlighting a wrongdoing, or a violation of constitutional rights. It seems as though, from what we understand, based on interviews that some of his friends have done, and from the Justice Department indictment —  And the caveat here is that the Justice Department indictment doesn’t necessarily mean that those are facts, this is what the government is asserting. But his friends also have sort of said that he really just wanted to kind of make sure that the young people, who he was the leader of their Discord group, that they really understood these documents that he was sharing with them and understood what was going on in the world.

So it seemed like his motive was to basically show off to a bunch of his gamer buddies who shared this love of guns, and wargaming, and concocting racist memes. And there’s been reports that there was a video of Jack Teixeira where he’s, like, spitting out racist terms before emptying his magazine at a gun range. And one of his friends mentioned something about him being very disturbed by the raid at the Waco compound in the 1990s, or the Ruby Ridge standoff. So it seems like there’s something going on there with racist memes and racist attitudes. But whether that has anything to do with this leak, we have no clue at this point.

And so, a couple months after these documents first start appearing on this small Discord server, some of them start to trickle out and appear elsewhere, outside of this small group of friends, which was, we understand, numbering maybe 20, 25 people. And they weren’t just American citizens, according to members of the group; some of them purported to even be Ukrainian or Russian.

But some of these documents then start to appear on 4chan, on other Discord servers, and also on Russian Telegram channels. And, and some of them, we now know, were altered before they were put on Russian Telegram channels to sort of make it look like Ukrainian casualties were higher in some of the documents and Russian casualties lower, but they seemed to have been doctored after they had already been released by the initial disseminator.

But it wasn’t until April 6th that The New York Times did the first media report on the existence of some of these documents. And, since then, dozens of these documents — Washington Post is saying 300 documents that they’ve seen — have been located and reported on. And the documents we’ve seen have been photographs of what would appear to be printed pages of classified documents that were then folded in four, and supposedly smuggled out of the SCIF or the secure facility where this airman was based in Massachusetts.

And whatever the motives turn out to be — and right now the motive that’s being stated by the friends is that he essentially just wanted to be cool in front of this group of young people that he was sort of the default leader of, “The OG” as they called him — it doesn’t mean that these documents are any less interesting or valuable to the public understanding of really serious current events, including the War in Ukraine that the U.S. is a major participant in.

But I’ll just say, Vanessa, that as far as I can recall, from my knowledge of history or my involvement with leak stories, this is probably the most wacky leak of sensitive documents in American history. So, there’s a lot to unpack here but, first, Vanessa, just your initial thoughts on how this developed, and what you see as the most significant revelations, or some of them.

VG: Thanks Jeremy. Yeah, I think that’s right. It is a wacky story, and this is not the way documents of this kind usually come into public view at all. For those of us who are not involved in the online gaming world like me, I was just pretty intrigued at the beginning that there are these platforms where people from all over the world are playing these games, and they’re sharing all kinds of things, including this information.

There was a good story in The Washington Post about one of the people who was on this Discord server, talking about their relationship with this guy who they called The OG, and I find it really hard to tell at this point what his motivation was. Different people have said that he just was trying to have clout and show that he was the “big man” on the Discord server, but I think there might be more to it than that.

I think that one of the things that that other person on the server said was, he kind of wanted us to know what was really going on. And I think something that we’ve noticed in, really, the last two  decades as the United States has been involved in the so-called war on terror and been operating increasingly secretively all over the world, militarily, and with its int intelligence services. I think that people who, even people who are involved in that fight in one way or another, often have the feeling that they’re not getting the full picture. And that is true, I think.

And so, in one way, I sympathize with young people who are not in the military or in the intelligence world, as well as those who are, who sort of get the feeling that they’re not seeing a lot of what’s really happening. They’re not understanding a lot of what’s really happening in terms of the way the U.S. is conducting itself militarily, and with regard to intelligence, around the world. And, in this case, a lot of these documents focus on the war in Ukraine, where we’ve been able to get very little actual information. I mean, some very basic things we still don’t know after this war has gone on for more than a year. You mentioned the document about casualties; so, that’s the one document I think that we’re totally sure was doctored in one of the versions that was posted on this Russian Telegram channel. But this is something that we’ve talked about internally at The Intercept for a long time. We don’t know, actually, what the casualty figures are for Russia and Ukraine.

There’s another document in this set that talks about the number of special operations forces that belong to NATO, the United States, and other countries that are on the ground in Ukraine. And that document said — and I forget, it’s from March, I think — it says that there are 14 U.S. special operations forces on the ground in Ukraine, and there’s something like 79 State Department people on the ground in Ukraine. And, you know, when I looked at that document, my first thought was, this is not earth shattering news that there are 14 special operations forces.

It just, it really is kind of —  And I’m getting to your question about the significance of these documents. Some of these documents, there are revelations in them, but there’s a lot of stuff in here that, arguably, we should have already known about. This is not information that should be classified, first of all.

And, secondly, it’s not that remarkable, it’s not that earth shattering. So, I think there are things like battle plans that are very time sensitive in this document cache that, you could argue, really could compromise the safety of forces involved in those battle arrangements., right? But there are other things. Like, one document that comes to mind is one about officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency who are visiting nuclear sites in Ukraine. And one of them is upset because they’re not going to be able to go, because there’s fighting there, and they’re trying to figure it out.

And I read this — it’s just kind of a summary in one of these documents — and I just thought, literally nobody cares about this. Like, inside baseball over whether they’re going to actually be able to go to this nuclear site in Ukraine or not, you know? So, I think there’s a range of things in these documents, and I just want to start by tamping down the alarmism that a lot of people have expressed about how much this compromises national security.

I think it really depends [on] what you mean by “national security,” and what you mean by compromise.

MH: So, it’s interesting. I think, for many years, at The Intercept, we had a cache of documents — classified intelligence documents, The Snowden Archives — which you reported on for many, many years. I think those of us who spent a lot of time looking at them came to a similar conclusion to Vanessa. That, although many of them were very important or embarrassing or sensitive, many of them were not. Or perhaps there’s a degree of great over classification of mundane details.

And I think that what that often fosters, this level of caginess about information which is not dangerous, or could help public understanding and not harm anyone, it fosters the level of paranoia or distrust of the government, when their actions are so opaque, anyways, and when there’s such a track record of failure, as it’s been for many, many years in certain foreign policies and military engagements.

So I think that the defensiveness of information, which oftentimes is not that important or interesting, or not that harmful for the public to know, it kind of feeds a desire for more leaks like this, or more distrust, and more suspicion of the government in general. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about this leak —  There’s actually two things. First, I remember that watching a Daniel Ellsberg interview many years ago talking about the mechanics of leaking The Pentagon Papers, and he said that one of the hardest things of doing it was actually physically getting papers and making photocopies, and not being detected, and carrying the papers and things like that. That was a much more analog era for people doing leaks, and that was a barrier of doing so.

In this case, this young man, he had a cell phone camera, he was able to print one page at a time, he was able to transcribe things, and he had no problem disseminating or broadcasting it to those whom he wanted to hear it. He had a Discord channel of, you know, God knows who was in it. Not very hard to share information there if you’re in it, though. And social media, other platforms as well, make it a lot easier.

So I think that you’re likely to see the confluence of these two things. Like, a young generation which is kind of reared in distrust or suspicion of the government. And, secondly, much lower barriers to leaking information and so forth. So I think that, in the future, if things are going to be classified, they should be judicious in what they classify, but also they can devote more energy to classifying and protecting what’s truly important, as opposed to over classifying and generating a demand and a pull for these documents, and for people to give the information like this, which is, in many ways, easier than ever, on a technical basis. 

JS: You know, it’s also interesting when you contrast this. I mean, first of all, you could contrast it on, on one level with the, the motive of an Edward Snowden, or the posture of Julian Assange, or the kind of conscience motivation of Chelsea Manning, but I think that the times in which we live call for, also, another layer of comparison, which is that, we right now have Donald Trump under federal investigation for having absconded with classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.

It’s almost like, in a way — and also Joe Biden and Mike Pence are known to have mishandled classified documents and taken them to their private residences — and Biden seems likely that it’s part of the kind of general, “I’m above the law,” egotistical posture that many, many, many Washingtonian insiders have taken over the decades, where they just feel like the laws don’t apply to them and they can take documents home. I mean, it’s possible there’s something nefarious there involving Hunter Biden, and China, and Ukraine, and the big guy, and all that stuff. I mean, maybe that’s true.

But, the facts, as we understand them, it seems like Joe Biden probably did what scores of Washington insiders do, and they just feel like it doesn’t apply to me, I can take these home to use at my thinktank or whatever. With Trump, though, it does seem a little bit like there is a parallel here. It’s like, Mar-a-Lago is Trump’s Thug Shaker Central. Like, he took a bunch of documents that he just wants to be able to show people in Mar-a-Lago. It’s also possible that he was trying to blackmail people or what, you know, whatever. I mean, we don’t know all the facts.

But I do think that it is, it’s really interesting that we’ve had a leak of this nature. And Shane Harris of The Washington Post has been doing some really interesting reporting on this specific case, and one of the things that U.S. officials have been telling him, according to his reporting, is floating the idea that foreign spies are kind of populating some of these gamer chat rooms in the hopes that they stumble across someone who is U.S. military.

And one of the things that came to my mind when I first heard that this guy was an airman, and what he was doing, and that he was also into gaming, was how much capital the U.S. military has spent on trying to make war seem like a video game. And to appeal to that kind of personality — people that already are fluent in the joystick or the controller, and that they already are doing this, and they’re achieving skills that in our modern era are applicable to bombing people half a world away while you’re sitting in a Conex box in the desert somewhere or, in this case, somewhere in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So there are layers of this that I think are really interesting.

It also comes at a time when the President of the United States himself —  We just saw a press conference from the Attorney General weeks ago dealing with Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, with Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, with Mike Pence’s mishandling of classified documents. We have Julian Assange rotting in a prison across the Atlantic, we have Daniel Hale serving a 48-month prison sentence where he is basically being psychologically tortured. You had Reality Winner getting hit with the longest sentence — for one document — for the longest sentence of any whistleblower convicted under the Espionage Act. You had Terry Albury, all of these other people have had the book thrown at them, and this is an interesting moment for this young guy to have done this on the Discord server when the sitting president of the United States, and the just recently former President of the United States, and Vice President of the United States, are also under investigation for the very same issue of mishandling government documents.

VG: Yeah, I think that’s a great point, and I think it’s really interesting. I haven’t read any stories that have actually mentioned that context about Trump and Biden and the classified documents in stories about Teixeira. There was just a really interesting wrinkle in this over the weekend which you guys may or may not have seen about how these documents made their way to some of these Russian Telegram channels. And, actually, The Wall Street Journal reported that this was because a recently retired Navy non-commissioned officer was running a sort of pro-Russian pro-Kremlin —  Was one of, I guess, according to the Journal, 15 administrators of a site called Donbass Devushka.

And that’s where this  one-doctor document, and maybe some others as well, related to Ukrainian and Russian casualties, showed up a few weeks ago, leading many people to kind of think, oh, this is a big disinformation op. But what’s interesting is this, by my reading so far — and I haven’t read everything about this — but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Teixeira. It seems to have to do with this having gotten picked up by, actually, weirdly, somebody else who was formerly in the U.S. military, and has some kind of ties to Russia, or some interest or allegiances in that direction, and it getting kind of passed over there.

So I actually don’t have a lot of hope that Teixeira is going to —  I mean, I think he’s likely to be one of these people who gets the book thrown at him, because of his age, because of the way that he did this, if it does indeed emerge, as they’ve alleged, that he’s the leaker, and the number of documents and things that seem to be out there.

But I do think that’s a great point. And because the Espionage Act is structured the way it is, he will be very limited in terms of what he’s able to say in his defense. 

JS: He also can be simultaneously —  There can be court-martial proceedings against him. You know, he’s active duty, he could be charged. I know the law is complicated on this. You can’t be tried for the same crime in two different venues, because of double jeopardy issues, but he still can be tried under the Uniform Code of Military Justice if they hit him with charges that are not too closely related to this. So, he also could be looking at a whole world of hurt within the military justice system.

And, Maz, I want to talk about some of the specifics, though, because I don’t know that it’s that I disagree with you, Vanessa, but I share the point and perspective that there wasn’t a whole lot here regarding the war in Ukraine that came as a shock. But I do think that, seeing that there are 50 British special operations forces on the ground in Ukraine, yes, we’ve been suspecting this, and yes, we know from how the U.S. and Britain and other countries operate, that it would be implausible to believe that they don’t have people on the ground. But when you get validation for these facts, it does move the ball forward in terms of public interest and understanding.

But I do think that there are some other really interesting revelations that maybe are not directly about the state of Ukraine’s military capacity and what might happen in the next year that relate to other players in the world. And, Maz, you had an interesting article you wrote with Ken Klippenstein about this in The Intercept about how some of what’s happening in Ukraine can end up bleeding into the Middle East. Maybe you can lay a little bit out from your piece.

MH: Yeah. Pertaining to Ukraine very briefly, too, I think the one piece of information which was very interesting was what we alluded to earlier, with the casualty figures in Ukraine, the estimated casualty figures, which the government has been so cagey about, and now we have at least a ballpark of what they think is true. So I think that, definitely to your point, Jeremy, moves the ball forward a little bit in public understanding, despite a lot of the other documents being less interesting. 

JS: Wait, Maz, on that point, do you have those numbers in front? Because I think this is worth pulling up. I was saying, and I talked about this in my interview with Noam Chomsky, and we’ve talked about this a lot internally, but, you know, I’ve said, almost from the very beginning, there’s been this systematic attempt on the part of Ukraine, the U.S., and the allies, to radically downplay Ukrainian losses, particularly militarily, and to inflate or emphasize Russian military casualties. And I think some people are starting to realize that this has gone a lot worse than people have been told, that it’s a lot more dire for Ukraine than people have been led to understand by the immense propaganda, the incredible propaganda campaign that Ukraine and its allies have waged.

And, at the end of the day, it does seem like these documents indicate what a lot of critics have been saying was the case, which is: Why continue this on if it’s going to end in the same place? And I’ve seen people who have been big proponents of arming Ukraine and keeping it going in recent weeks, starting to say, listen, there has to be a negotiated solution.

I mean, this was the line that the so-called realists were taking very early on, getting attacked for, but there does seem to be a validation in part, in some of these documents, of what I think were very legitimate lines of inquiry and critique of the U.S. strategy in Ukraine.

Anyway, Maz, do we have the statistics of what these documents assess the U.S. believes the casualty figures look like?

MH: So, according to documents, the U.S. military estimates that Ukraine has suffered between 15,000 to 17,000 troops killed in action during the war, and also over a hundred thousand, almost 113,000 wounded in action. Russia, meanwhile, estimated to have 35,000 to 43,000 forces killed in action, and 150,000 to 180,000 wounded in action. So, we’re talking about very, very high numbers of casualties on both sides. Higher on the Russian side, especially in terms of killed in action, but certainly the total number of people being previously wounded or taken off the battlefield has been very, very high.

And, secondarily, those figures, a separate document reported a few days later, showed that the Russian elite units, the Spetsnaz, have taken very, very high casualties in the course of the war. Which has very, very important consequences for Russian military effectiveness, but also in terms of the future types of troops they are going to be deploying to Ukraine.

It kind of actually explains a bit why they’re sending mercenaries and former prisoners into the war. A lot of their elite troops, who take a long time to replenish and to rebuild after they’ve been destroyed, have been dying in Ukraine over the past year or so. So, very, very jarring figures.

And, initially, there was a doctored document circulating on Telegram which seems to show the numbers flipped, but when we saw the original documents, they showed these numbers, which I just reflected, which show relatively higher Russian casualties than Ukrainian. So, on that score, it was very enlightening, those documents, for sure.

One thing I found really interesting — and the story me and Ken did last week shed a bit of light on it — was the impact of the war on the Middle East as assessed by U.S. Intelligence. So, one major ongoing theme of the conflict has been, Israel has sort of been in the middle a little bit, in terms that they are on the U.S. side on many issues. But, in the Middle East, they have a very important working relationship with Russia to deconflict, and to allow them to carry out airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria where Russia has a very strong influence.

So these documents actually shed some light on the fact that this has been a point of contention between the U.S. and Israel in private conversations. While the U.S. has been asking Israel to supply anti-aircraft, anti-tank weaponry to Ukrainians, the Israelis have been reticent to do so for fear of alienating the Russians.

So, internally, U.S. Intelligence has been gaming out scenarios in which a combination of U.S. pressure and changes in Russian-Israeli relations in the Middle East could impel the Israelis to deliver more arms to Ukraine. So it’s a little bit of an interesting slice of how these conversations are happening in the background. We’ve had some sort of inkling that this kind of tension existed, but more details certainly are provided by the documents.

But, you know, also, the documents have little snippets of really fascinating assessments on other countries and other parts of the region as well, too. Very, very interestingly, U.S. Intelligence was accusing the Mossad of helping foment these protests against Benjamin Netanyahu in recent weeks in Israel. And, very, very interestingly, other countries in the region like Egypt and the U.A.E. are accused of or suspected of cooperating with Russia in very, very direct ways. And I think one really interesting document showed that U.S. intelligence believes that Egypt had been providing munitions rounds to the Russian military to help with their offensive, in trying to keep it quiet from the U.S., although apparently their surveillance picked it up.

And, secondarily, the U.S. caught Russian intelligence bragging about the fact that they’ve sealed agreements with the U.A.E. and Emirati intelligence to work against U.S. and U.K. interests in the region. So, really, really interesting private assessments.

I think the disclosure of these certainly is embarrassing, not just to U.S. intelligence, but also to these countries which try to manage a very positive cooperative relationship with the U.S. in private. But clearly there are these subterranean intentions over many, many issues. And at the root of it today is the Ukraine war, which seems to be the new axis around which events are being driven at the moment. 

JS: You know, Vanessa, we also, a couple weeks ago, Maz and I did a whole show looking at China and the emerging strengthening relationship between China and Russia, and China’s role in the world. And in recent days we’ve also had the news out of China where Lula Da Silva, the recently reelected president of Brazil, which is a very large and quite influential country in the world, certainly in the western hemisphere, Lula has been out there just blasting the war in Ukraine, the U.S. role, Europe’s role. He’s accused Europe of basically now becoming a direct participant in the war itself.

And I think if you look thematically at some of what’s going on in these documents — which of course, as far as we know, a curated set of documents — but there is a common thread through some of these when you look at some of what Maz was just talking about, when you take into account that the U.S. is spying on the Secretary General of the United Nations, and the U.N. Secretary General himself being quite critical though diplomatic of the Western flow of weapons into Ukraine.

This is all happening at a time when there is a real move underfoot or underway on the part of many nations, including nations who have huge populations, to try to shatter this superpower status of the United States and move toward a multipolar world. And these documents have some whiffs of evidence that that really is quite pervasive among a lot of nations, that they want to be able to develop their own foreign policies without being told by the United States, if you don’t do this, then there will be consequences for you. 

VG: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. I think that the documents do show a world that is much less kind of unipolar or bipolar than what we may have expected. And maybe much less so than what it would’ve been if this were ten years ago and we had seen these documents. I think the degree to which the United States is learning and listening about, you know, what Turkey is doing, what Brazil is doing. A lot of countries.

There are a lot of very interesting tidbits and nuggets in these documents. It reminds me of the State Department cables leak in that way. You know, as one of my colleagues said, it’s going to be B-matter for stories for years to come. One of the most interesting documents I think in there is the one about Lula wanting to broker some kind of a deal, or at least get Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table, and Russia being very interested in that, of course. And, I think, everybody thinking that it won’t fly, because the U.S., it goes against the U.S.’s kind of idea of the way this war, with Russia as the aggressor and Ukraine as the sort of righteous underdog.

You know, some coverage has noted rightly that Brazil has supplied weapons and other material to Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. for the war in Yemen. So it’s not like there’s total good guys here, but I do think that that was an interesting document.

I mean, there’s one document in there that I haven’t seen anybody write about yet, about the killing of an ISIS leader in Syria. And it says that he was responsible for sending $500,000 to the Afghan offshoot of ISIS in August of 2021, right before the United States withdrew, which I found incredibly interesting. And it’s the tip of some kind of a story that somebody could report out, you know? But we just haven’t yet.

So, I didn’t mean to necessarily say that there’s nothing of interest in here. I think there are lots of things of interest, and it’s just, you know, it’s —  But I think you’re right. I think it does show the world as being more fractious, and more countries trying to flex their muscles than we might expect.

JS: Also, Vanessa, The Intercept — and Alice Speri has really been at the forefront of this — has done a lot of really, really good reporting on the Wagner mercenary group. And in the documents, while there’s a lot of focus on the struggles of some other nation states, it does seem like Wagner is operating its own kind of foreign policy as well, and seems to be making quite a bit of progress, even as the Russian military finds itself in trouble in some areas.

Talk a little bit about what we learned about Wagner in the documents. 

VG: Yeah, I agree. I think that’s another really interesting aspect of the documents, what Wagner is doing in Africa, which there’s been some reporting about, for sure. The fact that they are also trying to get involved in Haiti. And, you know, there’s some stuff in these documents about what they’re doing in Ukraine, and how they’re faring there. And maybe they’re not faring as well as it might seem.

I mean, you know, there’s been some news coverage of that, right? How their fortunes have been up and down in Ukraine, and where the sort of nominal head of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, stands in relation to Putin as a possible political rival, and the politics within Russia between those guys.

But I do think that I would definitely opt in for the Wagner feed of these documents. If I could, like, continue getting that in my inbox, if that were a newsletter option, I would totally do it, because I think those are some of the most interesting things in here.

And, again, I didn’t see —  Nothing jumped out at me as being completely earth shattering in what I saw, but I do think that they are doing so much in so many places, and have wrought significant changes in countries like Mali and Mozambique that are very poorly understood here, that I would love to know more, always, about what they’re doing. 

JS: Can I ask you something, Vanessa, that’s not actually about the documents, but just because you’ve edited pieces about Wagner, you follow this very closely? Are they at all independent, do you think, of Putin or the Russian state?

I mean, it’s interesting, because I did a lot of work on Blackwater and Eric Prince, and most certainly there was an element of Blackwater that was operating at the direction of the CIA, or of the State Department, or the Defense Department. But then there was a whole lot of freelancing going on, and work for other governments, and work for private companies. But is it correct to sort of speak as though Wagner is a wholly separate entity from the Russian government?

I’m just asking to your best understanding, to what extent does the Russian State actually control Wagner?

VG: Well, I’d love to hear Maz’s thoughts on this too. I’m not an expert on Wagner, but my sense is that this has changed over time, and that it may continue to change. I think that, at some point in the past, I would’ve said that Wagner was wholly under the control of the Kremlin.

I think that in recent months during this war, we’ve seen some rifts emerge between Wagner’s leadership and Putin. And it’s hard to know what’s real there, right? Because we’re kind of not in a position —  I mean, I’m not in a position to be knowing exactly what’s going on with them and what their chains of command are. It does appear that there’s been some tension between Prigozhin and Putin.

And, as I mentioned that there have been some interesting stories that we’ve talked about internally around whether Putin is beginning to see Prigozhin as something of a threat, because Wagner has been so successful in some areas of the world, and in Ukraine at various times. And because, you know, Prigozhin was doing quite a bit of grandstanding in recent months, with going around and recruiting prisoners, and he was really a very big deal. He became much more of a public person than he had ever been before over the last year.

And, you know, that seems to have died down some now. But, again, I would be interested in Maz’s take as well. He may be following it more closely than I am.

MH: Yeah, I agree with you, Vanessa, in the sense that it’s kind of hard to know, because it’s such an opaque system and so forth, but there’ve been some interesting developments recently regarding Prigozhin. Last week he actually gave a public address where he called for a peace settlement in Ukraine, and said the war had gone on long enough. And it’s hard to say if that’s his own independent foreign policy through Wagner that he’s expressing, or if he’s being used as a trial balloon by Russian elites to float this idea, to ultranationalist sections of the population. It’s hard to say.

But I think that one thing in the documents which is sort of hinted at implicitly is that Wagner has a lot of autonomy in a lot of its actions, or in relations with foreign governments. And I think that one very interesting document in there — which has been covered a little bit, but not really — it sheds light on Wagner and the shadowy world of international arms trading because, according to this document, Wagner has been soliciting arms or trying to purchase arms in Turkey, which ostensibly has been —  They had a lot of PR out of arming the Ukrainian military and selling them drones, and trying to, you know, play a constructive role in the conflict.

But, behind the scenes, it seems like the Turkish government, or elements therein, and Wagner have been talking about arming Wagner to carry out operations in Africa and other places where they’ve been quite a destabilizing force. So I think that you can see some sort of autonomy in their actions. How much of it is intended, or how much is like a leash they get from the government? It’s hard to say.

It does remind me a little bit about somebody else who we covered with classified documents many years ago, which was Cosmo Soleimani. He was sort of a loyal member of the Iranian regime, but he also had his own profile, he was building his own profile. And, according to Iranian documents, which we read and published in later years, there was quite a bit of skepticism or negative sentiment inside the Iranian government about that, but they didn’t feel they could control him, because he’s very popular. And it’s possible that states which are weaker, or which are structured in a different manner, they could have independent actors like this who can carve a role for themselves.

And, you know, very quickly too: on the arms trading part, there’s also another document in there which I think pointed at something we’re often looking for, but you have to read between the lines a bit. There seems to be some coercion in the relationship between the U.S. and Serbia in light of the conflict. Obviously, Serbia has kind of historic ties with Russia — cultural and religious reasons and so forth — and they’ve tried to really walk a fine line in the conflict by staying neutral, because they have a EU relationship, but also a lot of popular background with Russia as well too.

According to a document in here, which the Serbian government later denied, Serbia has been arming the Ukrainian military as well, and ostensibly under U.S. and E.U. pressure to do so. Because that admission would be very, very unpopular with a lot of people in Serbia, and I’m sure it would be against the desires of the Serbian government if they could choose. But, from the beginning, they’ve been pressed between two hard places as a result of this conflict.

And what we see, likely, is that the U.S. government’s allies have successfully convinced them to do something which the population, rightly or wrongly, probably doesn’t like, in terms of arming Ukraine and their side of the conflict.

JS: Yeah. Just on a micro level on this too, Maz, it’s interesting, because the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić was —  I mean, the story of what’s happened politically in Serbia is, under itself — you know, since the fall of Milošević  — is worth talking about on a show.

But, just for people to understand, the current leader of Serbia, Vučić was the, the Baghdad Bob, basically, of Milošević’s regime in the late nineties, and right up to Milošević’s downfall in October of 2000. And he himself has been really walking this line that you’re describing, also around the U.N. vote. Like, at the beginning of this, how was Serbia going to vote? You know, Serbia is under immense pressure right now because of the E.U. membership process and wanting certain powerful elements within the Serbian government wanting to join the E.U.

Then you have very hardline nationalists, you have people that are still constantly talking about the 1999 NATO bombing, and the Clinton administration’s attack on Serbia and Montenegro at the time. But, also, there was a case not that long ago of Serbs who had gone to fight, essentially, on the Russian side in Ukraine, and then returned to Serbia. And, you know, Vu?i? has to deal with that then, and he’s saying, oh, they’re going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

But, remember, too, this was a government that allowed indicted war criminals to sit around in cafes for many, many, many years. And, you know, it’s not that they didn’t know where Ratko Mladić was; it’s that, politically, it would’ve been suicidal to arrest the guy, or to facilitate his arrest. And only when it becomes totally untenable does the Serbian regime cave in and do this stuff.

So, that’s a subplot that maybe not that many people are interested in, but it is a kind of interesting case study in how the U.S. is navigating all of this right now. And, by the way, the situation with Kosovo is also very incendiary right now, where public opinion in Serbia is, Kosovo is Serbia. And the nationalists in Serbia are making that direct connection in defense of Putin’s war in Ukraine, saying, yeah, and Kosovo belongs to us, still.

And so, it’s one of those dynamics that maybe is not grabbing the headlines, but it’s a really interesting microstudy in the proxy politics that are playing out in the world right now.

Vanessa, I wanted to ask you, though, speaking of everything, as we wrap up here — and, you know, anything any of us want to throw out there on the board for people to think about is totally fair game — but I did want to ask about this issue of The New York Times, Bellingcat, other news outlets naming the suspect just before the indictment on of Jack Teixeira came down.

You know, The Intercept did a piece on this, I know our former colleague Glen Greenwald was on Fox News talking about this, and accusing news outlets of collaborating with the government in identifying the leaker, or the disseminator of this information. And, you know, Aric Toler of Bellingcat, who was bylined on The New York Times piece, said that the government already knew the identity, a day before.

Now, I haven’t dug so deep into this part of the story, but my read on it is that the news outlets, yes, they were racing to try to identify this person, because there was such a richness of evidence in the public domain, from the photographs, where you see magazines, a certain kind of table. You know, it’s the kind of stuff that Bellingcat and other open source people sort of spend all night working on.

But I think it’s a little bit unfair to say — I mean, maybe I’m off here — but that doesn’t seem to me like they were aiding the government. I seemed as though there were sort of parallel tracks happening, and that there was a race to try to uncover this part of the story first, because it wasn’t like they were trying to identify who was given to a media outlet. As far as we know, this was a guy posting documents to his chat group and Discord.

And so, I don’t know. I’m unresolved about this, but I’m just being honest, I don’t think it’s a fair critique to say that they aided and abetted the government in identifying him. It really does seem like the government already knew this, and that it’s a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry given how this was done.

I don’t know, maybe you guys disagree with me, but that’s —  Or I’ll get a lot of shit for this. But, I’m sorry, I’m just being honest. I just don’t see the “there” there. 

VG: Well, I think a lot of people agree with you, and certainly a lot of journalists do. I think it’s nuanced, OK? I don’t think it’s a totally black and white situation. But here’s the way I can walk you through what was our thinking in writing that story, and my thinking about this has been: first of all, we don’t know. We don’t know where the government was in its investigation with regard to when these other things were coming out, and we probably never will.

We may not ever know the answer to whether they got the information from reporting, which happens, probably, all the time, right? I mean, the government often probably gets information from public reporting that helps with its investigations. I don’t necessarily think there is anything wrong with that, but I also think that when you do that kind of reporting in this kind of a situation, where there’s a manhunt on, to find the leaker, you have to understand that you may be playing into an ongoing investigation. And, because of the timing of when the Times story ran and when the arrest of Teixeira happened, it felt — you know, the word I think we used in the story was “unseemly” — but, you know, to me, the work of a journalist is not police work.

Let’s just even take away the fact that this is a person who, his crime was sharing information, for whatever motivations. I’m not going to say that he was a classic whistleblower, I don’t think there’s evidence that he was, but he was sharing information that increased public transparency about the workings of government, OK? And that is usually something that, in the press, we want more of, and I know at The Intercept we do.

And so, you know, it feels odd that when Bellingcat and The Times collaborated on that story that was up just hours before Teixeira was arrested — you know, naming him — it felt odd to some of us that there was nothing in that story that treated him as a source. That is, one of my colleagues asked, why didn’t they interview him? Like, what about talking to him, rather than just saying, this is his name and this is where he is?

What the story did was it took a very kind of clear, to my read, investigatory line of, we’re going to find this guy, rather than being curious or interested in what this person might know or who this person might be that would help us have a broader understanding of the story and of these documents. And I also found it troubling that at the same time that The Times was rushing to do that story —  Which is a totally legitimate line of reporting. I don’t know that being packaged the way that it was was exactly what I would’ve done, but sure, it’s a legitimate line of reporting to try to find out who leaked these documents and try to be the first person to talk to that person. I mean, I fully get that.

But, meanwhile, for the last week and a half, they’ve been doing front page stories based on the information in these documents. And it just feels like speaking out of both sides of their mouth, you know? Hey, you got something out of this. Like, you broke news out of this and you drew millions of readers to your site by breaking the news that you read in these documents that this person provided. And then you named the guy, knowing that there’s severe consequences for this person.

So, it feels not quite right to me. It’s not the reporting that I would like to think that I would’ve done if I had been in that job, in that position, to be on the desk or on this story, with the assignment to find the guy.

MH: I was very curious when this story first started leaking, what the origins of this individual were. Because, Jeremy, as you said, it was a very weird, and wacky, and unconventional leak story. So, in one sense, I was reading those stories, documenting, coming closer and closer to the identity of the individual leaking it. At the same time, I think that part of the weirdness of the leak has been used as a tool to distract from the, in some cases, substantive content of some of these leaks as well, too.

So, I think that it is interesting how this guy leaked it. I think there’s also a very interesting part of his age, and the cultural context, and the technological context of it as well too. And I think I give the benefit of the doubt to the journalists who covered, in the sense that I don’t think they were trying to get him arrested. And I do agree with Vanessa that maybe they contributed to it inadvertently, and that’s maybe not the way we would’ve covered it at The Intercept.

But I do think that the most important thing, still, is parsing through all this information, which, very, very rarely do we get unfiltered; you could say more of unspun kind of information and assessments from the U.S. government, and that’s really the important thing. And I also saw that some people, when this was happening, it wasn’t really the journalists themselves who were treating it, characterizing them as hunting for a leaker, trying to stop a leak and so forth. 

You know, some of the people who were cheerleading for a little bit and viewing it that way, there was some writer at The Atlantic who I thought, he said they called the journalists heroes of the hunt, to hunt the leaker, which I don’t think was their intention, but it did seem like that a little bit, and I think that you have to be wary when in a situation like this not to contribute to it.

JS: No, I mean, the discourse around this has been gross, and around that story as well. But my first impression of it was the same as you guys are laying out here. I mean, I was sort of like, what the fuck are they doing? Like, this is insane. This is the job of the police to do this.

But then actually reading it, and seeing, actually — you know, The Washington Post has done some quite good reporting on this — I would make an argument, though, that this guy’s friends are doing interviews where they’re not disguising their voice, where they’re giving people’s handles away, where they’re giving a detailed timeline of things.

I mean, Shane Harris did this really involved story profiling, they even did a video interview with one of the guys on it, who’s laying out all of this detail about it. And it’s like, so many clues were put out there in the public domain by his own inner circle that the sort of pile on, where it’s like, oh, you know, The New York Times helped the Justice Department? I’m not even sure that that’s factually true. I think it’s a totally legit —  Vanessa, what you were saying, I think it’s a completely legitimate discussion to have, where I probably would agree with you, in terms of like, what do you want to spend your time doing?

But I just felt like some of the narrative around it, both from the perspective of, that The New York Times committed this grave crime by naming him, and the narrative that journalists are the heroes hunting down this dangerous threat to national security, were kind of both off. That was my sense of it.

I mean, maybe I’m in the minority view of this within The intercept, and generally I would be like, all in on it. But I just felt like there was something a little bit off about that line in particular. That’s just to clarify.

VG: I want to just say a couple more things about this because this is really the part of the story that, with my media-crit hat on, I’ve really thought about this almost more than any other part of the story. Because I think this is a very tough situation for journalists who are working at big news organizations, and it’s a hot story, right? And this is not easy. So, a couple things I will say about.

First, The Post story that you mentioned, which included video in which a minor asked not to have his voice changed. And they got parental agreement for them to interview him. I would not have run that video, OK? They don’t know what’s going on. It’s fine. A lot of people don’t understand, and we have to think more like anthropologists, and be more really up there about informed consent. And have a duty of care for people who are not media savvy, do not know what the criminal justice system has in store for them.

That’s my view. Other people disagree with it. I would certainly get less scoops, and I always have, because of that belief. I do not think that they knew the consequences of that decision they were making.

And, when we reached out to The Post for our story about this, we got a reply from their head of public affairs saying, as it says in the story, we got the parental OK for the interview. And that was basically it. And it didn’t even go to the beginning of our questions about, OK, why did you then make the decision to run with this? Alright. I do wonder about it.

The second caveat that I think is really important that I just raised in this conversation somewhere is that we reached out to a lot of reporters who tweeted out OSINT analysis on this story. Not just to Toler, Aric Toler of Bellingcat, although we certainly reached out to him as well. We reached out to, like I said, The Post, to NPR, and others. We didn’t get anything back.

And I care about this, and I really don’t think we can have a full conversation about it without hearing from the journalists themselves, and I really hope at some point we can hear those voices. Because I wasn’t in those meetings, I wasn’t in that reporting myself, and I think it’s important to give people a chance to respond. Because it is very hard to tell from the outside what’s really going on in these cases.

JS: Yeah, fair enough. I think I’m also, I’m open to completely changing my stance if new facts emerge. I’m just being honest. I generally agree that there’s a concerning series of developments that took place there. I also was quite uneasy then, watching that video where it’s like, OK, the kids’ parents said that this is fine. And it’s like, yeah, but still, there’s potential legal consequences.

And also, I’m not sure that a kid of that age fully understands —  You know, he clearly was someone who adored this guy, he said he was his best friend. And he’s talking to very seasoned national security journalists who really, really want to get information on this story.

And I listened to an interview that the reporters did on their own podcast about it, and they were saying, you know, we really made it clear to him how serious this is. At the end of the day, it’s a kid. And it’s a very, very tough call in this case, especially because it’s such an unorthodox leak, as far as the facts as we understand them are concerned. It’s a really unorthodox leak.

VG: Look, lot of people on online have come back and said, well, The Intercept should talk, you know? Because, like, look at what’s happened with us and our stories, and all the people you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast. What I would say is that, at The Intercept, we’ve thought as much as anyone in this business about source protection, and about the fact that you never know what could endanger a source, because we have been through it, OK?

We had a conversation internally about whether or not to publish these documents that had already appeared on Discord servers. Well, there were reporters for us at The Intercept who were really keen to publish these documents and be the first to publish them. And, in consultation with our editor-in-chief and our security people, we decided not to, because we do not know, we do not want to be part in any way of compromising some chain of custody in this that we don’t understand. Like, there’s too much we don’t know about these documents and the path they’ve traveled, basically.

So, anyway, I would just say that some of it may seem overboard to some, but we’ve thought a lot about these things here. 

JS: I think it’s totally a fair point to raise, Vanessa, but the other part of this that we also know because of our experience at The Intercept is that the Justice Department, when they issue indictments against leakers and whistleblowers, those often are political documents intended to set a narrative, often to distort facts. To convict someone before they even go to trial. And, in the case of The Espionage Act, the government is able to hurl any number of allegations and assertions, and the defendant is almost entirely incapacitated to defend themselves, except on, did you do it or did you not? There is no, let me explain. There is no necessity defense. There is no justification defense.

So, we also know that, and that’s why at the very beginning I was saying the caveat about the Justice Department assertions, because we know from the indictment that was issued against Daniel Hale, we know from the indictment that was issued against Terry Albury, we know the indictment that was issued against Reality Winner. Those are political documents that are meant to set a political narrative about an individual that the state has determined must go down.

And, regardless of what Jack Teixeira’s motivations were, if he is indeed the person that did all of this, everyone should take everything that the Justice Department — whether Biden is in charge or Trump is in charge — you should take all of it with a mountainous grain of salt, and know that these are political documents intended to convict before trial.

VG: Yeah, I completely agree. And I would also say that people have been — in regard to who knew what, when — the government’s indictment really is a political document, as you said. It is a document from one side in what’s about to be a very contested matter in court. It is not a neutral document.

And so, as we read it, and see how they put their case together, we’re not going to know when things happened, and when they knew, and how the press played into it. We’re certainly not going to know that from their indictment.

And the final thing I would say, I want to come back to something that I started with, and I don’t know if this will be too much, but —  Look, there’s a lot of lack of transparency in the operations of our national security state, and there has been for most of our lifetimes. And so, I feel as if, when there are areas of darkness in our knowledge, this is what’s liable to happen. And people who share this kind of information because they want to keep their friends informed, they’re not wrong that there are things going on that they don’t know. They don’t fully understand —  That people don’t, that we don’t fully understand. Things are being done in our name that we don’t fully understand. To some degree, we’re being lied to.

I just feel like I have to respect the impulse there. They’re right about that. It then just kind of goes through a crazy process and comes out the other side in ways that are unrecognizable to some of us. But I do think that they are onto something, you know? We’re not seeing the full picture.

MH: On that note, we’ll leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today, Vanessa.

VG: Thanks for having me.

MH: That was Vanessa Gezari, the National Security Editor for The Intercept.

[End credits music.]

JS: And that’s it for this episode of Intercepted. Intercepted is a production of The Intercept.

José Olivares is the lead producer. Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted wherever you get your podcasts, and definitely do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other people to find us. If you want to give us feedback, especially if you want to send me hate mail, you can email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. That’s podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill, 

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussein.

The post The Discord Leaker: The Case of the Most Unorthodox National Security Leaks in History appeared first on The Intercept.

Back in 2014, the FBI worked with an attorney-turned-informant to try to stop a meeting between journalist James Risen and a source. This week on Intercepted: Risen, national security correspondent for The Intercept, reveals how the FBI used his reporting to try to catch a person they secretly called “the second Snowden.” Recordings of conversations between an FBI agent and the attorney expose the government’s efforts to prevent Risen from obtaining documents that they feared could expose new details about U.S. government spying.

[Solemn, heavy music.]

Grayden Ridd: We also don’t want to create a situation where, OK, we do it, and we have to meet, but because we’ve kind of had to scramble around and do a Chinese fire drill, we don’t cover it appropriately, or we botch it up … We want to make it count after all the sweat and tears we put into it.

James Risen: FBI agent Grayden Ridd had a secret message for his informant. An FBI team had been given the green light by the Justice Department to ambush a planned meeting between a reporter and a source, and the informant’s job was to let the FBI know when and where the meeting would take place.

The reporter whose meeting they planned to ambush was me. 

[Intercepted theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

JR: I’m James Risen, senior national security correspondent for The Intercept. 

Back in January 2014, I was an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times focusing on national security. The FBI wanted to stop me from obtaining documents revealing the details of massive spying operations by the National Security Agency. 

The FBI was convinced that I was in contact with someone they had secretly nicknamed the “second Snowden,” who was about to give me an archive of documents that went far beyond what former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had leaked about the agency’s spying operations the year before. 

The FBI’s plan to grab my source at our scheduled meeting was approved by top officials at the FBI and the Justice Department during the Obama administration, according to digital recordings I obtained of several phone conversations between the FBI agent — Ridd — and his informant.

This is Ridd:

GR: I have been looking into the device issue. On the one hand, there’s support from on high to do that sort of thing. There are some practical issues that elevate risks of certain things in ways that may not be real obvious. And so I’m not sure how it’s going to shake out; among other things, it makes the chances of your having to testify significantly higher. And I am trying to avoid that, so —

JR: The informant, who I’m not naming and you won’t hear, is sitting in a bar covertly recording his conversation with Ridd in this moment. 

GR: One of the sort of nuts and bolts, making sure all of the pieces are in place and everything can happen, and the other one, that’s sort of the political, going up the chain of command and saying — and right now they’re on board with between the resources and everything, but [indistinct phrase] I have to periodically go up to the throne room and recommit them, so — now, we actually have got a lot of buy-in. 

JR: The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. 

Eric Holder, who was attorney general at the time of the attempted ambush operation, did not respond to a request for comment left with his office. And then-FBI Director James Comey did not respond to a request for comment conveyed through his lawyer. The FBI declined to identify Grayden Ridd as an agent or connect me with him. I also recently visited Ridd’s home, knocked on his door, and no one answered.

[Slow, percussive music.]

JR: The FBI’s attempt to catch my source came as the Justice Department was waging a seven-year legal campaign against me in connection with a separate leak investigation. 

Obama’s Justice Department had subpoenaed me and was demanding that I testify in court and reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for a chapter about a botched CIA operation in my 2006 book “State of War.” I included the story in my book after The Times killed an article on the same topic, under pressure from the White House and the CIA. 

The planned ambush came during a critical period in my legal battle with the Justice Department. In January 2014 — just as the FBI was planning the ambush operation — the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to hear arguments over my subpoena in the leak case involving the mismanaged CIA operation. At the time, I was facing the possibility of going to prison for refusing to reveal my sources if the Supreme Court did not rule in my favor. 

But the Justice Department did not disclose to the Supreme Court that the FBI was simultaneously targeting my reporting on this completely separate story. The Justice Department and the FBI have also never acknowledged to me that they planned to ambush my meeting with a source. 

GR: And that’s the problem with getting in the car under any circumstances is that our ability to back you up at that point is reduced to just about nothing. And, uh, it’s a bad call. But I appreciate your willingness to put your head in the lion’s mouth on that. [Laughs.]

JR: The FBI’s attempt to catch this source underscores the obsession over leaks to the press that has gripped the U.S. national security community in recent years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The FBI, CIA, and other agencies are now willing to take actions that would have been considered far outside the bounds of acceptable policy just a few years ago to prevent stories in the press that will embarrass powerful officials and reveal government wrongdoing. 

The Trump administration went to even greater extremes than its predecessor to target the press. 

In 2017, then-CIA director Mike Pompeo reportedly considered kidnapping WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who, at the time, was living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and bringing him back to the United States. Yahoo News reported that Trump administration officials even raised the possibility of assassinating Assange.

Kieran Gilbert (Sky News Australia): Former United States officials claimed the U.S. made plans to abduct and kill Julian Assange. A Yahoo News investigation found the CIA created a plan in 2017 to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen, while he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. 

Vladimir Duthiers (CBS News): Yahoo News spoke with 30 former U.S. Intelligence and National Security officials for the story, and the former Secretary of State and former CIA director Mike Pompeo is calling for all of those sources to face criminal charges.

JR: Pompeo was reportedly obsessed with targeting Assange after a massive leak of CIA hacking tools, known as Vault 7. WikiLeaks published Vault 7 documents in 2017, revealing that the CIA had the ability to hack the computer systems built into a wide range of consumer products, including cars, televisions, and home appliances. 

Juan González (Democracy Now!): WikiLeaks recently began releasing a massive trove of secret CIA documents, exposing how the agency has developed tools to hack into and spy on principal phones, computers, and televisions all over the world.

Dhananjay Khadilkar (France 24): By the sheer number of these 8,761 documents, they are set to represent one of the biggest leaks of confidential documents that describe different techniques used by the CIA to break into different electronic devices like phones, and surprisingly smart television sets as well.

JR: In April 2017, Pompeo labeled WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service.” 

I have previously been reluctant to write what I know about the FBI’s scheme because the story is so complicated and confused that I am still not sure I fully understand it. But Michael Schmidt, my former colleague at The Times, made some elements of the story public when he wrote about the episode in his 2020 book, “Donald Trump V. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President.” The CIA’s reported discussion of kidnapping or even killing Assange finally convinced me that I should make public what I know about how the FBI also tried to target my reporting. In his book, Schmidt did not name the FBI agent — I am doing so for the first time.

[Upbeat electronic music.]

JR: In late 2013, I met a source who was disgusted by the massive scale of the NSA’s surveillance operations and wanted to expose the full scope of the agency’s global power, which the source claimed went far beyond what Snowden had revealed. He was considering providing me with the NSA documents to prove it. But first, I needed to show him that he could trust me.

Our initial meeting went well. We got along, and we agreed to get together again. The source had scheduled an upcoming trip to Brussels, so we agreed to meet in Belgium. I hoped he might be ready to hand over the documents.

I chose Bruges, Belgium, a historic town where we would easily blend in among the crowds of foreign tourists. To be honest, I also chose Bruges because I wanted to visit the city; one of my favorite movies was “In Bruges,” the dark comedy starring Colin Farrell and Brenden Gleeson.

Colin Farrell [as Ray in “In Bruges”]: After I killed them, I walked home to await instructions. Get to Bruges. [Echoes of other people saying “Bruges.”] 

Elizabeth Berrington [as Natalie in “In Bruges”]: Bruges, where’s that?

Ralph Fiennes [as Harry Walters” in “In Bruges”]: It’s in Belgium. 

CF: For two weeks, in fucking Bruges, in a room like this — with you? No way.

JR: The film’s plot, about two hitmen waiting for something to happen in the Belgian city, made Bruges seem like an appropriate backdrop for a secret meeting with the source. 

After a quick internet search of bars and restaurants, I chose the Café Rose Red in the city’s center as the place for our meeting. It was likely to be packed with tourists.

The source and I would be joined at the meeting by an American lawyer who had originally introduced us. I had known the lawyer for several years. When I first met him, he was in private practice and occasionally handled legal matters for individuals connected to the government’s national security apparatus. Later, he split his time between the United States and Europe. He told me that he was sometimes involved in international arms deals.

The lawyer seemed to be an adrenaline junkie, someone who had found a home on the dark side of the world of international intelligence. I considered him primarily a go-between, someone who occasionally introduced me to people involved in national security matters both in the United States and overseas, as well as people involved in more questionable activities, such as arms deals and money laundering. I found his contacts helpful to my reporting; through him, I gained access and insights into the intelligence underworld. 

But by the time of the planned meeting in Bruges in 2014, I did not know that the American lawyer was not only my go-between: He had also begun to inform on me, and my new source, for the FBI. 

GR: So tell me if these are the two alternates I got. I know you don’t do business in Belgium, but Belgium would be one and Rotterdam — not Amsterdam, but Rotterdam— would be the other.

JR: I am not publicly identifying the American lawyer, so that’s why you’re only hearing recordings of Ridd. I have tried throughout my career to protect my sources, and while the FBI may know who he is, I’m not going to name him, even though he betrayed me.

[Slow, ponderous music.]

JR: As I prepared to travel to Bruges, I tried to take a few precautions to avoid detection. I planned to fly from Washington to Paris, and then pay cash for a train ticket to Bruges. I was hoping that would reduce the digital evidence of my travel. I didn’t know that my efforts were pointless, because the FBI was already closely tracking my movements, based on the information the American lawyer fed them.

GR: As you’re talking to Jim about this and other stuff you’re talking about, about the source, anything you can do to sort of — again as you elicit bits and pieces. If you talk about: Hey, well, if he’s coming back for the holidays — and you firmly believe that he’s not — well that narrows down the group of people that we’re dealing with.

JR: Just before I was scheduled to leave Washington, I received an anonymous email from an odd address that I had never seen before. The email contained a brief, but stunning message. It said: “Don’t go to Bruges.”

Uncertain who was behind the message, I canceled my travel plans and stayed in the United States.

GR: Those sort of tidbits, if you could lock those down, that, again, narrows down our pool of people. And believe it or not, while we didn’t get across the end zone of what we were hoping to do this last time, we actually made a lot of progress in terms of the sort of information that just sort of filters through that process

JR: Much later, I asked the American lawyer if he knew what had happened and whether he had sent the email. He admitted that he was responsible for the warning.

Eventually, he confessed to me that the FBI had been waiting in Bruges to trap my source. He said that the FBI knew about our meeting because he had told them about it and that the source wanted to provide me with NSA documents. He admitted that he had been informing on me. 

GR: And one final thing then, before I let you go: I had to brief our recent adventure to the assistant director and all of his cadre on Tuesday. Thereafter, it was briefed to the chief executive of our [inaudible]. And they asked me to convey to you their thanks and gratitude for the work that you’ve been doing and for sticking with this.

JR: The lawyer told me that, based on the information he had provided, the FBI had sent a large team to Bruges to try to arrest my source. The FBI had told the American lawyer that senior Justice Department officials wanted to grab the source when I was not there, so they asked the lawyer to find a way to prevent — or at least delay — my arrival in Bruges.

Before I got the anonymous email warning me not to come, the lawyer and his FBI handler brainstormed how to stop me from getting to Bruges. In one taped phone conversation, the lawyer told the FBI he would have his assistant pick me up at the train and then pretend to have car trouble so that I couldn’t get to the café in time.

 The American lawyer told Ridd: “I will put my colleague on him for logistical support, and will tell him she’ll be your driver … She would have strict instructions to queer the whole deal, up to and including having the car break down.”

But that wasn’t good enough for the FBI, who wanted the American lawyer to stop me from traveling to Europe. 

Here’s Ridd again: 

GR: I mean, that is a good tool at a tactical level, but that doesn’t save us from the wrath of the attorney general and headquarters. If he shows up in-country, all hell is going to break loose … the higher powers are going to have a conniption if he is in-country or otherwise sort of floating around Europe. So if at all possible, if you can get angry, scared, paranoid, frustrated: “Hey, the other guy on the end of this thing doesn’t want you on the continent. I don’t want you on the continent. This is – you’re gonna have every intelligence service in the world following you around Europe.”

JR: Ultimately, the FBI’s plans for the ambush came to nothing. The source I was hoping to meet did not go to Bruges either, so the arrest never took place. The FBI team in Bruges waited and waited, frustrated and in vain.

The American lawyer later told me that he had also warned the source not to come to Bruges. I am still not sure about his motivations. I don’t know whether he told me not to travel to Bruges because the FBI asked him to stop me, or because he wanted to prevent the FBI’s operation from succeeding. The American lawyer had introduced me to the source and set up our first meeting. Why would he go out of his way to do that, only to turn around and set a trap with the FBI?

I never again heard from the source I was trying to meet, and I never obtained a cache of NSA documents from him. In fact, I am still not sure whether he really had the documents or ever planned to give them to me. 

When the lawyer confessed that he had been informing on me to the FBI, he apparently didn’t tell me the whole story. In his book, Schmidt reported that the lawyer also told the FBI that he had broken into one of my computers. He gave the FBI a flash drive that he claimed included data from a computer that I owned. 

Schmidt wrote that the FBI never opened the flash drive, and that it sat untouched in a safe at the FBI’s Washington Field Office. When officials sought approval from Holder to check the drive’s contents, he denied the request and was furious that it had been put in writing, Schmidt wrote. 

Schmidt also reported that the FBI cut its ties to the American lawyer, that two FBI agents involved in targeting my source and me were disciplined, and that one of those agents left the Bureau. I do not know whether Ridd was one of the agents disciplined or what has happened to him since. The Justice Department briefly considered whether the American lawyer had violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for gaining access to my computer, according to Schmidt, but the Bureau did not tell me about that possibility.

[Low, contemplative music.]

 JR: I may never know the truth, but I doubt that the flash drive the American lawyer gave the FBI actually contained any of my data. Schmidt writes that the lawyer told the FBI he could “install spyware” on my computer, and that he had secretly copied a trove of documents from my computer when I invited him to my house in 2014. But I don’t think he ever had the access or the skill to successfully hack my devices. 

My skepticism is based on my own experience with him. Soon after the FBI’s attempt to arrest my source, the lawyer also gave me a flash drive, one that he claimed included NSA documents from the source. The flash drive could not be opened; the password he gave me didn’t work. I became suspicious of the drive and whether it contained malware, so I turned it over to The New York Times security team for analysis. The security team couldn’t find anything; they also talked to the American lawyer and questioned him about the drive.

I strongly suspect that the lawyer purposely gave me a non-functional flash drive and that he probably played some kind of game with the drive he gave to the FBI as well. In his recorded calls with Ridd, the lawyer discussed putting a flash drive containing secret documents in a microwave to destroy it before giving it to me. I have concluded that the American lawyer loved to play games with everyone, on all sides.

The lawyer told Ridd that he frequently lied to me and my colleagues at The Times. And in the runup to the ill-fated operation in Bruges, the dishonesty had intensified.

But the digital recordings suggest that the lawyer often misled the FBI at the same time that he was informing on and lying to me. In one conversation, the American lawyer told Ridd that I was planning to arrange with European intelligence services to show them any NSA documents I obtained from the new source. That was not true; it was one of several false or misleading statements the American lawyer made to his FBI handler. I wonder if the lawyer told the FBI that he had introduced me to the source, that he had set up our initial meeting, or that he told the source not to come to Bruges. 

After he confessed that he had betrayed me, the American lawyer told me that the FBI had also become very suspicious of him, and that he was resisting their efforts to get him to take a polygraph. The recordings of his conversations with Ridd detail his arguments with the FBI over the issue.

GR: And one particular pain in my ass, up the chain of command, who is interested, sometime before this meeting takes place, he wants to [indistinct word] the polygraph to be taken to kind of complete the cycle. 

JR: The lawyer acted offended that the FBI would question his truthfulness and credibility. He said: “If people are not comfortable with the veracity of my reporting, Grayden, it hits me very much the wrong way. I’m sorry guys at [FBI headquarters] don’t get it … but somebody should let them know that … I’ve been around the block and I’m a nice guy, and I have busted my ass for the benefit of the government on this … either the reporting is good and the facts are good or they’re not — and if they’re not, we should all walk away.” 

It was a masterful performance. 

Jose Olivares: That was Jim Risen, National Security Correspondent with The Intercept. After recording this episode, the FBI returned Jim’s call refusing to comment for the story. Jim also reached out to one of Ridd’s relatives who said they would ask the FBI agents to contact Jim. Ridd did not do so.

[End credits music.]

JO: And that’s it for this episode of Intercepted. Follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast.

Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. José Olivares is lead producer. Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. And Sharif Youssef mixed our show. Vanessa Gezari, National Security Editor at The Intercept, edited this story. And a special thanks to Margot Williams, for help with research for this piece. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

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Until next time.

The post How the FBI Tried to Ambush My Meeting and Arrest a Source appeared first on The Intercept.