Julian Assange： Free Speech Martyr？ ｜ Stella Assange ｜ EP 293 (GRSwDBMiaWQ)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GRSwDBMiaWQ

The New York Times publishes national security defense, national defense information every day. They’re unauthorized disclosures all the time because that is what journalists do. Good journalists at least. They publish if it’s in the public interest. And if you don’t have that ability, then you basically do away with any serious journalism full stop. The division line between public citizen and journalist has also become extremely blurry. If I go to the New York Times and I read an article that has been published without authorization and I share it on Facebook to my relatively numerous followers, although that’s not necessarily relevant, it could be with even a family member, am I now a journalist who’s disclosing state secrets? And the answer to that is by no means clear because I’m certainly publishing it. And so that should make people very concerned because each of us is now a relatively powerful journalist in our own right. Hello, everyone. I’m here today speaking with Stella Assange, who is the wife of Julian Paul Assange. And I’m going to start with his bio in a strange twist since he at the moment can’t speak for himself. And then I’m going to turn to hers. Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. In 2010, WikiLeaks published a series of leaks provided by American Intel analyst Chelsea Manning and attracted widespread international attention and outrage, I would say. In early 2010, Manning, who reported being horrified by the behavior of then his colleagues, to close three quarters of a million classified and unclassified, but sensitive military slash diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, an online news site. The US government then launched a continuing criminal investigation into WikiLeaks. In 2010, Assange began to be pursued, and I say began because it went on for a very long time, began to be pursued by Swedish authorities for alleged sexual misconduct episodes. Those charges were eventually rescinded. UK authorities operating as a consequence of the Swedish call arranged a potential extradition. Assange at that point broke bail, violated UK law and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he remained under different conditions for many years from 2010 to 2019, but was finally arrested and returned to the UK, where he has been imprisoned since in Belmarsh, category A prison in London. He currently faces the possibility of extradition to the US and possible prosecution there on some 18 essentially espionage related charges. According to the Irish Times recently, it’s now a year and a half since Assange completed his 50 week sentence for jumping bail. And this is where the Julian Assange story gets even stranger, if possible, despite the fact that there are no new charges against him in the UK. He is still in the category A prison Belmarsh, where he has spent much of his time in solitary confinement. In May 2019, Assange was brought up on 17 new charges relating to the US Espionage Act of 1917, and they carried with them those charges, a maximum sentence of 170 years. The Obama administration considered charging Assange similarly previously, but decided not to, given concern that it might negatively affect investigative journalism as such and could well be unconstitutional. The New York Times stated that it and other news organizations obtained and obtained documents in the same fashion as WikiLeaks could not see that WikiLeaks publications differed legally from other journalist publications of classified information. After Assange’s arrest and first indictment, the New York Times editorial board wrote that, quote, the case of Mr. Assange, who got his start as a computer hacker, I think this is a crucial insight here, illuminates the conflict of freedom and harm in the new technologies and could help draw a sharp line between legitimate journalism and dangerous cybercrime. And that the administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime, but there’s always a risk with this administration, one that labels the free press as, quote, the enemy of the people, that the prosecution of Mr. Assange could become an assault on the First Amendment and whistleblowers. As I said, I’m talking today with his wife, Nia Stella Morris, and was originally Sarah Gonzalez, and she changed her name to try to maintain a certain semblance of privacy in the midst of this unbelievable chaos and complexity. Ms. Morris was also Assange’s lawyer. The couple was married in 2022, although they had established a long-term private relationship during Assange’s extensive time in Ecuador. They had two sons during that period. Stella Assange was a 28-year-old lawyer when she first met Julian in 2011. Interested in the work of WikiLeaks and believing that the non-profit media organization was shedding valid and necessary light on unacceptable corruption and crimes of war, she has said of her husband, quote, Also, people who are on the autism spectrum, Mr. Assange has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, don’t score particularly high on the agreeableness scale. Both Julian and his wife are freedom of information champions and had experienced similar childhoods, similar parentages and similar extensive mobility, and that gave them something in common in addition to their interest in freedom of expression. She completed a degree in law and politics at SOAS in London, her MSc at Oxford in refugee law, and then a master’s in Madrid in public international law. And so welcome, Stella. It’s very good of you to sit and talk to me with me under these conditions, which must be incredibly stressful. I’ve really never seen someone in as complex and tangled a web as your husband and you, for that matter. And so that’s really something because I’ve met people who have been in very complex webs and your situation is unbelievably extreme. I was struck by the New York Times comments on and proclamation that Julian was really a test case for the limitations on the journalistic front of the new technologies that enable such widespread disclosure of heretofore hidden secrets. I mean, part of this, I would say, is a consequence of just magnitude of operation. The Manning leaks were 750,000 documents. And of course, back in the days of mere print and highly limited access to bandwidth on the radio and TV front, there isn’t a possibility that any journalist could ever cause 750,000 pages worth of trouble at once. And so I see at least in part that the conundrum in relationship to your husband is his whistleblowing proclivity in combination with the mass scale of the operation that computer technology enables. And so it looks to me like you two are caught at the nexus of what radically new technology, personality and law. And so it’s not precisely as if I have sympathy for the fact that he’s been vilified and prosecuted so assiduously. But I can understand the complexity of the situation in some real sense that’s given rise to this. So the first thing I’m kind of curious about, if you don’t mind, is what elements of your husband’s situation would you like to highlight to begin with? The most compelling to me seems to me the fact, obviously, that he’s still in prison and under pretty dire circumstances, despite the fact that in some sense the legal justification for his sentencing has, well, at least arguably expired. And so maybe you could fill everybody in on that and then we can continue with the conversation as it unfolds. Well, I think that Julian is and that he will historically and with time be seen in this way is the foremost political prisoner of the West. He is a critic, he’s a dissident and he’s also an innovator. What Julian did was he brought his past background as a computer programmer and computer security expert into journalism. He understood before anyone else the architecture of Internet communication and how, as journalism moved onto the Internet, as emails were being used to communicate with sources and so on, it was incredibly easy to identify sources and that therefore any meaningful investigative journalism would be over. And so he took that. He also, yes, saw the opportunity of being able to operate at scale. And this is one of WikiLeaks chief achievements, which is to have basically become a library of reliable, truthful information records. And in that sense, WikiLeaks kind of transcends traditional journalism, which was seen as a threat to the legacy journal journalistic outlets like the New York Times and so on. And I can go back to that editorial that you mentioned, but he did things differently and to achieve a much greater impact. And there’s another aspect to this, which is as a computer programmer working on open source software and so on, you’re used to collaborating with others because if you’re just going to work on your software on your own, you’re achieving a suboptimal result. And so he brought the idea of collaboration into the journalistic world, which was completely unheard of, something you now hear with the Panama Papers and so on, a consortia of news organizations coming together to go through these vast material that had never been done before. And WikiLeaks pioneered that. And the first big collaboration came in 2010 with the Chelsea Manning Lakes, which related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US State Department cables and the Guantanamo Bay files. And Chelsea Manning also leaked the collateral murder video, which is perhaps what WikiLeaks is most famous for. But the fact that WikiLeaks operates receives or has a capacity to receive big data sets anonymously from sources doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing that WikiLeaks publishes. And it doesn’t mean that WikiLeaks publishes it wholesale. In fact, as part of the extradition hearings, there’s been a lot of witness testimony, people who were working with Julian at the time of these 2010 publications, who witnessed how Julian took steps and was the one who was taking the most responsibility and doing the most to redact those documents and to put them out safely and to look out for information that could possibly harm a person in the sense of physical harm or arbitrary detention, that that shouldn’t happen. But of course, he was working and WikiLeaks was working in collaboration with other news outlets, and they had other considerations. For example, The Guardian is concerned about being sued by oligarchs. The New York Times had perhaps similar considerations, but these are major players in the media with their own relationships with power players. So WikiLeaks’ impact and Julian’s impact was undeniable at the time. He came onto the stage as a, and he was treated sort of as a rock star. And everyone knew who Julian Assange was, but most people wouldn’t know who the editor of The New York Times is. But in their worldview, they’re far more respectable and important than this Australian newcomer who’s changing the rules of the game. So there were, anyway, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but. No, no. Well, you’re outlining multiple, what would you say, points of potential conflict of interest between the various players. Let me push you on that a little bit, OK, because this is one of the things that popped into my mind. I always try to take both sides of an argument, let’s say, when I’m trying to think it through and to try to make the strongest case I can for both sides. So I started, I would say I’m probably temperamentally sympathetic to your plight and also to Julian’s plight. And so I also have to caution myself against that to some degree, because I’m not a fan of great intrusive organizations, whether they’re state or corporate. But they still, the devil still has to be given his due. When operating at the scale of Revelation that characterized WikiLeaks. So let’s say the seven hundred and fifty thousand documents that were part and parcel of the collaboration with Manning. How is it even possible to be judicious in their release? Because you could imagine and if you have any objections to this argument, please let me know. One argument you could make is that. Secrecy in and of itself is dangerous and that it’s the role of the media to uncover and expose secrecy, especially if it hides potential malfeasance as assiduously as possible. And so the proper role of an investigative journalist is to damn the torpedoes and steam full speed ahead and reveal what there is to be revealed. And the counter argument, I suppose, from the more secretive militaristic side or the more limited state interest side is, well, that’s all well and good. But there are circumstances under which privacy and secrecy, at least temporarily, is both strategically and ethically necessary. And incautious behavior on the part of journalists is very difficult to discriminate between valid from valid threats to national security. And then you might say that the legacy media, when they were in their heyday and reliable, which is not so obviously the case now, was composed of journalists who were able to straddle that judicious line, revealing inappropriately secret acts of malfeasance when that was necessary, but not doing so in such a way that compromised their ongoing relationships, let’s say with the people whose behavior they had to attend to and cover and also not airing into the untested waters of destabilizing state security. Then you ask yourself, well, maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. And you can make an argument in various directions there. But if you release the volume of documents that WikiLeaks releases, is it even possible to take the due care that might be expected from or even demanded of legally by experienced journalists who are operating at a more minor scale? Hey, guys, producer Colton from The Daily Wire here. Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the most important things you can do for your health. Just like your diet and exercise routine are unique to your body’s needs, so are your sleeping habits. That’s why Helix Sleep provides tailored mattresses based on your unique sleep preferences. The Helix lineup includes 14 mattresses, each designed for specific sleep positions and preferences. Side sleeper models with memory foam layers offer optimal pressure relief. Stomach and back sleeper models feature a more responsive foam to cradle and support your body. Plus, Helix mattresses offer enhanced cooling features to keep you from overheating at night. Don’t compromise on comfort. Take the Helix Sleep quiz and find your perfect mattress in under two minutes. Helix mattress ships straight to your door free of charge. Try it for 100 nights risk free. Go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan, take the Helix Sleep quiz and get up to $200offyourmattressorderplustwofreepillows.Tha{t}^{\prime }shelixsleep.comslashJordanfor$200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows. Well, I think you need to break it down. What were these 750,000 documents that were published? So you had 90,000, I think, from the Afghan War Diaries, and of those 15,000 were withheld by WikiLeaks, precisely because it was considered that they needed further review. The Iraq War Logs, there was a different approach, which was to have an automated, what’s it called, redaction. And in fact, there was, I think, an article in Wired, there was criticism over the redactions of the Iraq War Logs, because they said it was being over-redacted. So one example was there had been a document that had been obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, and from the Pentagon, and that was already out there, and that this document that had been released to a journalist was redacted, but it was less redacted than the version that WikiLeaks published. Then you have the Guantanamo Bay files. In that case, it was the files of each of the detainees who were in Guantanamo Bay. Until then, no one even knew who was there, why they were there, how many were there. And there was witness testimony in the extradition hearing from a lawyer who represented one of these Guantanamo Bay detainees, who said that it was through those files that they were able to understand who had incriminated them. The person who had incriminated their client was someone who had confessed under torture, and it was through that that they were able to then win their case. So in relation to the Guantanamo Bay files, the Telegraph, for example, published the exact same data set. In relation to the diplomatic cables, it’s actually very interesting, because WikiLeaks, it’s 250,000 cables. WikiLeaks initially had a consortium of five big publishers. It was The Guardian, The New York Times, El País in Spain, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde in France. And these five big publishers did the initial stories with WikiLeaks, but then they quickly just lost interest. And then WikiLeaks then entered into agreements with about a hundred different media organizations around the world, because these publications concerned every single country in the world. And through sharing these documents with newspapers, in local newspapers, they were able to report, because, you know, The New York Times might not be that interested in Burkina Faso. But for the people in Burkina Faso, those State Department cables were, you know, part of their history, but also of enormous potential impact. And that’s what journalism does. And as part of the agreement with WikiLeaks, when a media organization entered into an agreement with WikiLeaks, there was a written agreement in which they would review the cables. And so cables would be published as stories were published, and they would also review that there was no one named who would be at risk of arbitrary detention or death. And so that was their obligation, and they fed those redactions to WikiLeaks, who then published the cable with the reduction. What happened with the diplomatic cables? Well, The Guardian, in its fight towards Julian, which we can go into, wrote a tell-all book in February 2011. And in that book, against its written agreement with Julian, they published the entire cablegate encrypted file password that had been entrusted to them. And this is just, from a computer security perspective, this is absolute madness. It is just almost a joke. And they published it as a subheading in a chapter. Do you think they knew what they were doing? I mean, they claimed that they thought it was a temporary code from what I’ve read. And do you think they understood what they were doing? They understood that they were trying to undermine Julian in every possible way, including by disclosing, you know, whatever security measures that they were privy to. But I think it was sheer stupidity. And of course, they then tried to justify themselves. And they said, oh, he told us it was a temporary password. But that’s not even what the book says. In the book, you know, it says, and Assange told us this is the long password, and the long password is something like a record of diplomatic history from 1966 to the present day. But the word diplomatic was a word that they were not to write down. They should never write down. And so in the book, they even put the word that you should never write down in there. So I think it was carelessness. It was also a race to getting their narrative out. Because by then, WikiLeaks, Julian and the journalists at The Guardian that had been working on these diplomatic tables, I mean, by then, The Guardian had all the manning leaks. So they had basically used Julian and they didn’t need him anymore. And then they turned on him. And… Why? Why do you… So one of the things that’s popped into my mind continually while I was reading through the unbelievable trials and catastrophes that your husband and you have been through is something like, and I’m not claiming this is the case at all. I’m just saying what popped into my mind. And certainly this is an accusation that’s been levelled at me, is that someone in that much trouble must have done something wrong. And I would say, well, probably that’s true to some degree because everybody has done something wrong. It’s a very dangerous assumption because given that each of us has probably done something wrong, that means that we can be called out on it arbitrarily and with force when that’s in the interest of people whose interests we’ve opposed. And then also the fact that that’s the case, that that sort of doubt can be elicited, means that people who are inclined to take you out for whatever reason have an easy pathway to doing it. And maybe that would bring us to what happened in Sweden. So it wasn’t very… And I have some personal questions to ask you on that front. And you’re obviously welcome to not answer any questions that I might pose to you. And I hope I don’t do it rudely and inappropriately. But it wasn’t long after this vast trove of documents was published. And you’re now making a case that they were actually published with a fair bit of care and maybe even to a lesser degree than they might have validly been published. It wasn’t long after that before the authorities in Sweden brought charges against your husband in relationship to sexual misconduct. That was in 2010. It’s very interesting to me that it was Sweden. Your husband, Julian, described Sweden as the Saudi Arabia of feminism, which I thought was a pretty nice phrase, by the way. And there’s definitely something to be said about that. And that was also at the height or in the prodroma to the believe all women and me too, what would you call it, brouhaha. And the insistence that if any charges of sexual misbehavior were ever brought against someone, that it was incumbent on everyone to assume that the victim was telling the truth. And of course, that violates the presumption of innocence. It often violates your right to face your accuser. And it’s preposterous on the face of it because what that does is enable anyone who’s manipulative or devious or psychopathic to use the entire weight of the legal system as a weapon, which is happening so often now that it’s almost beyond comprehension. And it seems a bit too convenient in some real sense that these charges emerged just at the time that was most appropriate in some real pragmatic sense for the authorities in the UK and the US. But I’d ask you also more personally, I mean, you married this man, you had an affair with him for a long time. You have two children together. For some reason, either you didn’t believe the charges and the allegations, or you saw something in Julian that superseded them of value. And so, and this is a deeper question too. I mean, you’ve got tangled in this pretty deeply and you could have had a much simpler life. And so, why are you on his side? Why isn’t it reasonable just to assume that Julian Assange is a narcissistic troublemaker with a proclivity for sexual impropriety? And why do you believe that so deeply that, well, in some real sense, you were willing to stake your whole life on it? And why aren’t you just being played? And I’m not saying that you are, but obviously those are the questions that all the people who are launching allegations against your husband and you, those are the claims that they’re putting forward, essentially. Well, Julian is the man I know. The man I married, I know, wouldn’t do those things. And in fact, the way he’s described is the exact opposite of who he is. And that’s not how I came into this, though. I came into it in a professional capacity, precisely in the context of these Swedish allegations. And you made a mistake, which is completely understandable because you read everywhere that Julian was charged. But in fact, he was never charged. There was only ever a… Oh, OK. I’m sorry. Yeah, it was only ever a so-called preliminary investigation. And it was dropped on four separate occasions. So why was there an extradition order if it was only a preliminary investigation? Right. Or is that exactly the issue? No. Look, that is a very good question. And in fact, Julian’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost and the UK Supreme Court said he should be extradited to Sweden. And then they said, and we have to change the law, so this doesn’t happen again because you need a charge before we extradite, but it won’t be retrospective. Oh, I see. They legislated, but carved out a little exception for Julian so he wouldn’t benefit from it. And that has been the norm again and again and again that somehow Julian is treated as the exception and then we’re going to fix it afterwards. What were the allegations exactly? What were the Swedish allegations and how many people brought them forward? And why weren’t they pursued? So according… There were two women and according to their own account, they went to police because… to the police because they had found out that both of them had slept with Julian over the… within a week and they wanted Julian to have an HIV test. That is their reason, according to their own account, for going to the police. And you can go to the police in Sweden for that reason? Well, who knows? But just to put this in context… Yeah, OK. So Julian had just published the Iraq war logs, sorry, the Afghan war logs in July, 25th of July, I think it was or so. The Swedish preliminary investigation was opened on the 20th of August. But in between that, even before he went to Sweden, there was an article in the Daily Beast, which said that the US State Department was telling its allies to find a way to stop Julian in his tracks and to find a way to prosecute him. And they knew that Julian still had to publish the Afghan war logs and the diplomatic cables. The Iraq war logs were published in October and the diplomatic cables on the 29th of November. Sweden issued its Interpol arrest warrant on the 30th of November. Julian voluntarily went to the police station and lost his liberty on the 7th of December, 2010. He was put in prison for 10 days, then he was under house arrest for a year and a half. He was in the embassy for seven years, then he was arrested and he’s been in Belmarsh High Security Prison ever since. So the women wanted him to undergo an HIV test, but that’s still not an allegation of misbehavior. Well, although who knows in Sweden, what were the specific allegations? And you said the allegations were dropped before formal charges were brought on four separate occasions. So what were the allegations? So there are four allegations, three in relation to one woman and one in relation to the other. The single allegation, which was most serious, is what they called lesser rape. So there are three degrees of rape in Sweden and this was the lesser degree in the sense that there was no physical coercion. And the allegation is that Julian initiated sex when the woman was asleep. The Swedish police had text messages from the women, which they refused to hand over to the defense. And those text messages exonerated Julian and his lawyers, his defense lawyers, were able to read them at the police station, but were not allowed to take a copy. And Julian would only be able to access those text messages once he was charged. So you have this, he was deliberately placed in this position of complete disadvantage in relation to his own defense. Because at no point during those nine years where Sweden was opening and closing the preliminary investigation, was he formally an accused person. Because once you’re accused, you start getting all these rights of a defendant. And it never reached that point because there was no case. So there was an initial prosecutor who okayed the suspicions. Then three days later, the senior prosecutor of Stockholm reviewed the more serious allegation, which is so-called lesser rape. Sorry, I forgot to mention the other ones were assault and sexual coercion in relation to the other woman. And the prosecutor said, I have reviewed the interview with the woman in relation to this so-called lesser rape. There is nothing that is not credible about the account, but there is nothing in the account that is a criminal offense. That was the most senior prosecutor in Sweden. What happened then? There was a politician, this was about 10 days out of the Swedish general election. A politician for the Social Democrat Party who had been active in the, who had held the role of gender ombudsman. Who was also an attorney, then took on the two women as his clients and contacted a separate prosecutor’s office. They kind of take test cases based in Gothenburg. He pitched this case to the senior prosecutor there and then she took it up. Her name was Marianne Nye. Throughout that period that Marianne Nye was heading up the case, she refused to question Julian. Now imagine this, a sexual assault, lesser rape and so on case where the chief investigator, who was a prosecutor, refuses to question Julian. We’ve learned a lot of things since. We’ve learned the content of those text messages where the woman with the more serious charge, sorry not charge, even I say it, you see it’s so insane. Right, it’s so pernicious. She says, I don’t want to accuse Julian of anything, the police are trying to grab him and I’m being railroaded. This was in her contemporaneous text messages. How was it that both of these charges were brought about simultaneously? He said it. Well yes, it’s like what’s going on here? Because I presume these women didn’t know each other. I mean maybe I’m wrong. And so you think, well it seems a bit too fortuitous that both of these events happened at the same time and then so soon after the other string of events that you described. So obviously there’s a bit of smoke there and of course we’re also debating whether or not there’s fire where there’s smoke. So that’s a difficult problem. But what’s your understanding of how it is that both of these charges emerged simultaneously? These charges. Allegations. Oh sorry, jeez. Allegations, yeah. You know, they didn’t know each other, they met on one occasion, they knew that the second woman contacted the first one and then they spoke to each other. And they found out they had both slept with Julian and then they both went, that’s their story, that they went to the police because they wanted an HIV test because he had slept with them in this short period. I don’t see any point in me speculating about that. What I can speak to is the extraordinary behavior by the Swedish authorities in conjunction with the British authorities. Well, could you speculate about the motivation of the second Swedish agent, so to speak, who took on the two women as clients and who had a political stake in the issue? What exactly was she up to and why? And why didn’t she want to question Julian? It was a man, his name was Klaus Borstum. And it was a close call in that general election in Sweden and he was tipped to be the new justice minister if they won the case, I mean if they won the election, sorry. And incidentally, one of the two women was also running for politics in that same election for a local seat. And she actually, there are text messages as well between the women where they’re talking about that they can get money if they tell their story and stuff. So it’s a little bit, yeah. So there’s lots of moral hazard involved in many different directions. So let me summarize the story so far and you tell me if I’ve got it essentially correct. WikiLeaks is founded, there’s a treasure trove of documents published, let’s say exposing the secrets of many powerful agencies and people who might have wanted those secrets to be kept silent. Coincidentally, at the same time as the publication occurs on a scale that’s heretofore impossible technically, there are allegations brought about against your husband in Sweden, which is the capital, let’s say, of the ideology that makes such allegations possible at a time that’s extremely fortuitous for the people whose interests are threatened by the leaks and whose interests are also furthered personally and politically by the fact of the allegations in Sweden itself. And then despite the fact that no charges are brought against your husband, the UK justice system decides that he should be validly extradited even though they recognize simultaneously that the fact that that is a legal necessity is a violation of a more fundamental legal principle which they decide not to enforce in the singular case of your husband. And then as a consequence, he jumps bail and heads for the Ecuadorian embassy and then do you think that decision was justifiable to jump bail, let’s say, and why did he do it and then why, of all places, the Ecuadorian embassy? Well, why the Ecuadorian embassy? It was because Ecuador at the time had taken a very sort of independent sovereign position vis-a-vis the United States. So the United States had had its biggest naval base, I think, in Ecuador, in the world, well, at least in Latin America, in Ecuador, and they had kicked out the US base and also had a very kind of proud position. They said, well, you can have your base here if we can have our base in Miami. So they were changing the rules of the geopolitical game and so this ballsy attitude of the president at the time, Rafael Correa, suggested that they would be willing to protect Julian. And Julian went into the embassy on the 19th of June 2012, and he had exhausted all his domestic remedies in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom was giving just a few days before he would be taken off to Sweden. In Sweden, you have an extraordinary pre-trial detention regime, so it would make, he would be in prison from the moment he arrived in Sweden, even though he wasn’t charged. And interestingly, because Sweden is a very interesting country and they kind of play the stats, so I think, I don’t know if it’s still true now, but for example, they have very low, or at least they did a few years ago, one of the shortest sentence times for convicted prisoners. And that was partly explained because they also had the longest pre-trial detention time, so that by the time they were convicted, they had already served their potential sentence. So Julian would be going into a Swedish prison in a country where he didn’t speak the language, but most importantly, Sweden had renditioned two asylum seekers. This is one of the most egregious cases of extraordinary rendition in which two asylum seekers were taken on a CIA flight in Sweden, were handed over by Swedish authorities to the CIA, where they were flown to Egypt, which was their country of origin, and they were tortured. And then eventually, they were able to take their cases to the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, and they won. And also the torture committee found in their favor and said that Sweden had violated its obligations not to hand over a person to the country where they risk being tortured or killed. And on top of that, of all the extradition cases that had gone before, from the year 2000, Sweden had extradited every single person that the US had asked for. So Sweden has this self-image, and it also has amazing marketing in the world. It has this image of fairness and so on, and you spoke to Swedes and they’d say, oh well, if he came here, of course, it would be unthinkable. But what I’ve come to learn with Julian is that the unthinkable becomes reality when it comes to him. He is an exception to the rule, but what’s actually happening is that they’re creating a new rule with his exception that is then normalized. So if you look at the persecution that has occurred against Julian over time, now you see a lot of no-platforming by PayPal, for example, of people with platforms that are critical of, for example, the war on Ukraine or whatever. PayPal and Bank of America and Visa and MasterCard, for the very first time in 2010, created a banking blockade against WikiLeaks. They blocked WikiLeaks from receiving donations from people who wanted to donate because WikiLeaks was, on a global scale, this great new phenomenon. And WikiLeaks is always just- That’s an appallingly fascist precedent. And it started. And you see, it reflected recently in Canada with the government’s decision there to seize the bank accounts, or the entire financial operations of anyone who they deemed inappropriate in relationship to their donations to the trucker convoy, which was very much a tempest in a teapot. Yes, it was the most utterly appalling thing that our absolutely utterly appalling Prime Minister has ever done. And that’s really saying something because he’s a real piece of work. And so, yeah, this collusion of corporate enterprise and government in relationship to personal finance and the funding of, let’s say, political or journalistic causes is an unbelievably dire threat. And so, okay, so Julian presumed that if he went to Sweden to face these allegations, which were of insufficient magnitude and credibility to result in formal charges, that the consequence of that would be his immediate imprisonment for an indeterminate amount of time and the overwhelming probability of being extradited to the US. Now, we might say you made a case for why that was a credible concern and also for a case why Ecuador was willing to protect him. Why were the Americans after him? And to what degree? Again, we have the mystery here, right, which is, well, Assange is operating on a scale that’s novel. And you said yourself that’s a consequence of the novel interpenetration of his radically advanced computer programming skills and the international horizon of journalism that that instantly opens up that he pioneered. And the danger for him, of course, is that, well, when you’re uncovering everyone’s secrets, you can make an awful lot of enemies and the probability that at least one set of those enemies is going to successfully take you out, especially given that they’re operating with immense resources is extremely high. And he is also a test case and an exception, and almost necessarily so, because what he’s doing has never been done before. And so it’s not surprising it produces legal conundrums. All right, so the Swedes go after him on specious grounds, attempting to denigrate his reputation. There’s moral hazard involved on behalf of the accusers, both politically and personally. And at the same time, there’s a pronounced threat lurking in the US. Now, the Americans were ambivalent about this, as I read in the bio, because the Obama administration had thought about prosecuting or at least charging Julian, but had decided against it because they thought it would violate, it would pose a threat to the integrity of the press and violate the constitution, which seems like a relevant issue here. But the charges were eventually brought forth nonetheless. And it also seems, interestingly enough, that it didn’t really matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans were in charge. The Americans, at the highest level of state authority, were highly inclined to make life very difficult for your husband, practically and legally, and to prosecute him in some sense to the fullest extent of the law. And so, there was a first charge that had to do with password cracking or sharing, if I have got that right. But then there were 17 more charges developed. And so you have another situation there where a reasonable and uninformed outside observer might say, well, good God, you know, the UK’s after him, the Swedes are after him, the Americans are after him, and not just on one charge, on 18 charges. And these charges carry with them, I think, a maximum sentence of 170 years. And so there just has to be something here lurking under the surface that’s just not kosher. And so, tell me what the Americans are claiming, and also why, even in the face of those claims, which are repetitive and constant and being pursued for a very long time, why you’re on board with his defense, both ethically, practically and personally. So what are the charges? What are the Americans alleging? Okay, so, yes, the Obama administration decided not to charge Julian, but they only decided that in 2013, Julian had already been in the embassy for a year. And as part of the, when they announced that they weren’t going to charge him over the Manning leaks, they did it through a spokesperson called Matthew Miller. And he said, as you said, that they weren’t willing to charge him because there was no way to differentiate what Julian and WikiLeaks had done, even with the same publications, and what The Guardian, The Telegraph, The New York Times, and so on had also done. And then Matthew Miller also said, Julian Assange is not a hacker, he’s a publisher. So they had by then all the evidence, because Chelsea Manning had just been through her court martial, and all the evidence had been presented at the court martial. And so they, you know, they had the full information, they took a position. And at the end of his presidency, Obama also commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence. So that was the political position of the Obama administration. What happened? Well, the single charge that was initially brought was brought in 2018. And that was brought in the context of what we’ve since learned was a complete obsession by the CIA into Julian and WikiLeaks. So as soon as Trump entered in office WikiLeaks after a month or two, published what it called Vault 7, which was about, it was handbooks about the CIA’s hacking unit, which disclosed things like their capabilities of, you know, using exploits, using Android phones or iPhones, and using the vulnerabilities in those phones and computers in order to access them and take over the computer. And the US government a few years before had committed to, if it found a vulnerability, to let the companies know so that they could be fixed because there are security risks which anyone can really exploit. And it also revealed, for example, that the CIA had the capacity to also control cars. Imagine how undetectable assassinations can take place in that context. So the CIA was livid. And in last year there was an investigative piece published by three investigative journalists, national security journalists based in DC. And they had over 30 sources within the national security establishment in the US. And they were people in the CIA and also named sources. So imagine 30. And they spoke to these investigative journalists about what had happened during the Trump era. And they disclosed that there were plans not just to kidnap and rendition Julian but also to assassinate him. And one of the conundrums that the justice department faced, or that the administration faced, was that there were no charges against Julian. And so what do they do? If they kidnap him? Yeah, you might call that a conundrum. Right. They kidnap him, they take him to a black site. Oh, hold on. Well, there are no charges against him. Well, we’d better conjure up some charges. So they then brought a charge in, I think it’s March 2018, which was the single computer charge. Now, the single computer charge is not even a, what they allege is that there was a online chat between Chelsea Manning and someone who they say is Julian, but they can’t prove. In which Chelsea Manning says, I have a hash, which is not a password, a hash. I have half a hash. Can you help me? Anyway, it’s not about, it’s not a password. I’m not a technical person. But basically, the purpose, according to the US, the purpose of eventually cracking the password, there was no attempt to crack the password, and it was Chelsea Manning asking for help, which didn’t result in an attempt. The purpose was so that Chelsea Manning could log in with a different login in order to hide her identity. It wasn’t to access, this is the US’s case, it wasn’t to access information because she already had access to all that information. In fact, she had access to top secret information, which she didn’t leak. But they’re saying that Julian, or someone they say is Julian, agreed to try to help her hide her identity, which is what journalists do all the time. They advise sources about how to stay safe from detection. That is their big computer crime charge. Now, just to put things in context, it’s five years. So that was the first charge. Yep, sorry, go ahead. That is a five-year charge. Julian faces 175 years. And they use that charge as a PR exercise in order to say, oh, look, he’s different from journalists because there is this computer charge. And it’s, you know, the New York Times almost gleefully saying, well, you know, he’s been charged, but not for something that would affect us. That was before they introduced the 17 charges under the Espionage Act. But they fundamentally misunderstood the computer charge, but I think they didn’t even care because it was just a way of putting a wedge between themselves and WikiLeaks. But after those 17 charges were introduced under the Espionage Act, this was about a month after Julian was arrested. The New York Times put out another editorial in which they said that the case against Julian Assange strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. The Washington Post has also put one out. And in fact, all the press freedom groups, the human rights groups, they’re all on the same side in relation to that the case should be dropped and it’s a complete outrage. Right. Well, it looks to me like there’s a fair bit of pragmatic strategic thinking going on here, which is, well, you could make a case that Assange’s activities, partly because they’re so novel and so international and on such a large scale, raise a variety of security concerns and legal issues. And that’s troublesome to many powerful players. And why wouldn’t they attempt to tangle him up as much as possible in as many legal webs as possible, in some sense, regardless of whether or not that would ever result in conviction, because he could easily be dragged as he has been through an incredibly brutal self-defense process that in all likelihood would take at minimum a decade and at maximum longer than that. And so you can imagine strategically that there’s almost no risk at all to the people who are bringing forward these charges because they can parcel out the duties of keeping your husband in a spider’s web for the rest of his life without any risk to themselves whatsoever. And so it seems to be almost inevitable that this would occur as a consequence, again, of the scale at which he was operating and the novelty of the environment that he had produced. And I’m not trying to justify it in the least, but I’m trying again to put myself in the position of those who are bringing about the allegations. What’s the cost to them? Well, some government money is going to be spent. Some people are going to be specializing in his prosecution. That’s not much of a cost. The cost to you and Julian is your whole life in some real sense, but they bear virtually none of the weight of this and have managed or have they? Have they managed in some sense to successfully impede the operation of Wikipedia or have they in fact as a consequence of this prosecution brought even more attention to Wikipedia’s operations and made it more, sorry, sorry, WikiLeaks operation and made it even more successful and widely known than it would have otherwise been. So I’m curious, do you think that their actions are counterproductive even in relationship to their own goals? I think their actions are counterproductive, but in the sense that it isn’t cost-free to them to do what they’re doing. They have to corrupt their own norm system in a very public way. Yeah, but that’s a long-term problem, man. That’s a long-term problem, you know, and lots of organizations are facing that problem now. I mean, I see that again in the actions of the Canadian government. I mean, what they’ve done is absolutely reprehensible speaking in the medium and long term, but from a short-term instrumental perspective, then, you know, hypothetically, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. So, and, you know, shallow actors act shallowly and so I agree that, well, let’s make the case, for example, that the New York Times is correct and that these investigations constitute a real threat to the integrity of the press. I mean, obviously, that’s a catastrophe because the press is one thing that keeps the potential overreach and tyranny of the government and big business and their collusion at bay. And if you interfere with that, then you risk destabilizing the entire society. So, obviously, that’s a risk. My point was more that the persons involved in this do not bear anywhere near the same risk or cost that you and Julian bear. They’re not in the same league. I mean, they can do this professionally in some sense while you’re roasted over a slow fire professionally, personally, financially, with regard to reputation, socially, and then there’s also a fair bit of a genuine mortal risk in play. You know, I’ve met probably now 150 people who’ve been tarred and feathered by various bad actors who bore very little consequence for their tarring and feathering and every single one of them, including people who I would have regarded as some of the most brave and emotionally stable people I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of people, have reacted to that pillory and social exclusion and appalling mobbing with about the same degree of severity from the psychological perspective that they might have experienced had they been diagnosed or a close one to them diagnosed with a fatal illness. And one of the things that I did uncover more as I was investigating your situation and your husband’s situation is that your team has made the claim that Mr. Assange’s mental health has been severely compromised, and I find that highly probable. Virtually everyone that I’ve talked to who’s been through a tiny fraction of what you guys have been through has some variant of post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence. You know, and that might only be a university professor who’s faced three or four allegations of some kind of ideological impropriety in the student press and the local newspaper and maybe a peripheral article on a state or national level, and then what would you say, the developing mistrust of his peers that goes on for a couple of months compared to what you guys have been through that’s a tempest in a teapot, but that’s enough to really, really bring harm to people. And it’s part of an indication of just how serious this culture of unwarranted accusation and weaponization of the investigative process really is. And people who are listening might think, well, who cares, you know, this is Julian Assange, what’s the probability that something like that will happen to me or anyone I care about? And I would say the way things are going, the probability that that may happen to you is increasing dramatically, but even more particularly the fact that it’s happening to many people and extremely publicly is already making you muzzle your willingness to speak freely and act truly in a manner that’s so pernicious and pervasive that you can hardly even imagine it. And so for every one person that’s persecuted successfully on the reputational front, like your husband, there’s probably 10,000 people who decide that it’s probably just better to shut up and take it. And that really does pose a signal threat to the integrity of the state that’s predicated on free association and free expression. So it’s rather appalling to say the least. And so let’s go through the other, if you can, to some degree. The other charges, obviously they’re of less significance than the original charge, I would think, because otherwise the original charge wouldn’t have been the charge that was originally laid. But what other accusations have emerged and why do legacy news media sources like the New York Times regard those charges as also a threat to their operations? Well, actually the first charge, the computer conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, it’s called, that is the weakest, it is basically a made-up charge. Because technically what they were, from a technical perspective, what they said was supposed to be the goal is a technical impossibility. But that came out during the extradition hearings. And what they did in relation to this first, I’m still talking about the computer charge, was they introduced a second superseding indictment halfway through the extradition hearing. So the US has been moving the goal posts constantly. And with this second superseding indictment, they said that they basically relied on a new witness, their key witness, who was an Icelandic man, who they made, he had been flown to Virginia, given his testimony to the grand jury, and so they had produced this second superseding indictment. And in there, they didn’t introduce more charges, they just said, look, we have more circumstantial evidence that suggests that, that says that Julian allegedly was instructing hackers. Okay, so all this new stuff that they introduced in the second superseding indictment, relying on this testimony from this Icelandic man Sigurdur Þordarsson, about a year later, in 2020, sorry, 2021, this very same witness then spoke to Icelandic, the Icelandic press and said, no, what’s in that second superseding indictment is not what I told the FBI, and in fact, it misrepresents what I said. So basically, the Department of Justice has completely misled the British courts, and the witness on whom they relied has retracted what they say is his testimony. So that’s been out there for, you know, anyway, so that’s, because it’s such a weak charge, they needed to try to beef it up. And then they went to this man who’s also a convicted fraudster and a convicted pedophile and so on, and also diagnosed with psychopathy, or what is the last? Yeah, anyway. Oh, well, that’s not such a bad combination, fraudster, pedophile, psychopath, why wouldn’t you regard him as a credible witness? Especially because he was convicted of some of that. Yes, well, he had defrauded WikiLeaks, and WikiLeaks had taken him to court and he had been in prison. So it’s not like he didn’t have a motivation there either. And they gave him immunity from prosecution. And anyway, so that’s the one charge. Now, the 17 charges under the Espionage Act. Now there’s quite a lot of interest in the Espionage Act. But Julian is, there’s no allegation he’s a spy per se. The US says that he received information that concerns national security, and he possessed that information, and he communicated that information to the public. Those are the 17 charges. If you break it down, it’s four charges equivalent to about 40 years potential sentence for the publication of the collateral murder video, five charges in relation to the State Department cables, which amount to 50 years, and the Iraq war logs and so on, and the Afghan war logs constitute the rest. But this is what he’s not being prosecuted. They’re really throwing the book at him in some sense. I mean, they have so much, they have access to so many things that he published that I just can’t imagine a court case that is addressing this because there’s so much for the prosecution to draw on given the volume of the leaks that they could bring allegations of… It’s not the volume. It’s not the volume they have an issue with. It is not the volume. It is the fact that the information is national defense information, they say. So it could be just one document. Right, I guess I was just wondering if… Right, right. But if you have 750,000 documents to choose from, so to speak, you could imagine that it could take you a very long time in court to wander through all of that and find the one document that might constitute a smoking pistol. But they don’t even… I’m just thinking about you guys being tangled up in this. No, but they don’t even need to do that. They don’t even need to show it. They just need to say this was classified, he published it. It is like a strict liability offense. And because it’s an espionage act, so it was enacted originally to prosecute spies, or at least it purported to do so, but it was worded very broadly and very vaguely because this was enacted in 1917 and it was immediately used to put dissidents, critics of the US participation in the First World War in prison, including Eugene Debs. And so it was immediately repurposed. Okay, but then for many years it was used to prosecute spies. And if you’re prosecuting spies, you don’t give them a defense. You don’t give them a public interest defense because it’s for spies, right? There’s no public interest defense for a spy who’s giving a document to South Africa, for example. But if you then use the same statute and use it against someone who’s involved in journalistic activity who is publishing the information, and you say no, you have no public interest defense because this is an espionage statute. So this is one of the big arguments that we are using in the extradition. So is this why the New York Times is concerned? Because the line between journalism and espionage is being, well, let’s say blurred in a major way? Oh, the New York Times, they’ve been concerned about this for 50 years because the US government under Nixon tried to use the Espionage Act in relation to the Pentagon Papers. And at that point they decided against it. But constitutional lawyers have been warning since then that one day there will come a US administration that will be willing to read the statute in a way that you can prosecute a publisher. And the New York Times is concerned because the activity that they describe as criminal, which is receiving information from a source and possessing, imagine just possessing information, even if you don’t publish it, these are all independently charges that stand on their own, just possessing national security, national defense information. It is worded so broadly that even in the extradition hearing, one of the expert witnesses, who’s a constitutional lawyer, said, well, even reading national defense information is a violation of the Espionage Act because that’s how broadly it’s worded. And now it’s finally been used against a publisher for the very first time. And of course, that sets a precedent. Okay, okay. So you can see why the New York Times is concerned. Okay. So there’s 17 charges of this sort, which is also going to be of broad concern to like publishers, even those operating at a lower scale. So just out of curiosity, well, not just because it’s not minimal. Why did you guys decide it would be easier in some sense, not just to go to the US and slog this through in court? Because it’s not like the pathway that has opened up before you seems to be much easier or preferable. I mean, your husband’s in prison and not a very good prison, not that there are very good prisons, and he’s suffering immensely as a consequence. And he’s in limbo and appears to me to be likely to remain there for as long a time as it’s convenient and possible for people to hold him there. I’m wondering, why would it be worse necessarily to accept the extradition, to go to the US voluntarily and to raise money for the defense and to fight this out in court? I’m sure you thought this through in great detail, but it isn’t self-evident to me, given that you’re, I mean, you’re really between a rock and a hard place, but it isn’t clear to me that you’ve picked the softer rock. Well, it is the less bad solution. All Julian is doing is fighting, using the law to fight against what is a political persecution. And the only opportunity he’s going to have to make that argument is in the British courts, because once he comes to the United States, he won’t be able to argue why he published what he published, the fact that there no harm has come of it. He will go into a Virginia court, which is in close proximity to CIA headquarters, the same CIA that plotted to assassinate him under the Trump administration. You know, this is the United States that has been breaking the law in order to get their hands on Julian. And they have total control over him. You’re right, the prison situation in Belmarsh is bad. It’s very bad. I mean, you know, during the COVID period, it was extremely difficult for him and his mental health has at times been in a very fragile state, as it would for anyone who was in isolation like that, but not just isolation, the sheer injustice of this case also. Well, and the uncertainty. That’s a terrible thing. I mean, once you’re sentenced in some real sense, at least you have, it’s like the hammer has fallen, you know, and it’s better in many ways to have the hammer fall than to be waiting for an indeterminate hammer to fall forever. That’s an almost unbearable psychological condition to be in. There were indications, for example, among the gay population in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic, that some people’s mental health actually improved after they were diagnosed with AIDS because the uncertainty about whether their behavior was going to result in AIDS had been resolved. And so the fatal catastrophe had arrived and its actuality was better than its uncertain prediction. And that’s an extreme case, but the psychological literature is replete with that sort of example. And your husband’s in the terrible situation where he faces indeterminate punishment for indeterminate reasons for an indeterminate period of time. And so, but again, I want to ask a bit more because I’m still confused. You haven’t had a tremendous amount of success in the English courts and your husband is in prison, even though by all appearances, he shouldn’t be given that his sentence has already been served and that the initial transgression was of a relatively minor sort, given the circumstances, I would say. I still don’t exactly understand why you have more distrust of the American court system than you do of the English court system. Are you concerned that his life will be in danger in some more real sense than it already is, given what’s happening to him in the UK? It’s a combination of fears. I don’t have tremendous faith in the justice system full stop, not in the UK and not in the United States. This case is as political as it gets. And quite aside from that, if Julian’s extradited, he may be, well, he will be. This is a national security case. What do they do with national security defendants while they isolate them? And there are many ways of putting a person in solitary confinement. In the US, they’ve perfected that on any given day, there are about 80,000 people in some form of solitary confinement. And then they have a reserve, a special form of solitary confinement, which is the most extreme one. It’s called special administrative measures. And there are about 50 people in the whole of the United States that are placed under special administrative measures. There’s also the federal Supermax prison, ADX Florence, where Julian is likely to be taken. Now, these potential SAMs or ADX Florence, that’s something that initially stopped the UK courts from ordering the extradition. In fact, in January last year, the lowest court ruled that Julian should not be extradited because if he is extradited, he will be most likely placed in conditions that will drive him to take his own life. And the extradition hearing heard multiple experts who had assessed Julian and all reach the conclusion that he was at high risk of taking his own life if he was placed in isolation like that. Why is he surviving in Belmarsh? Well, because he can see me and the kids and we’re able to speak over the phone. SAMs, special administrative measures, doesn’t even allow contact with other prisoners or prison guards and you have maybe 15 or 30 minutes a month in which you can choose to speak to your family or your lawyer. These are the most extreme. Okay, well that’s… And who decides… You’ve made a very credible case for why you’re concerned. I understand. But who decides whether you’re placed under SAMs? The agencies, the CIA and so on. Right, right, right. And that happens before the trial? Yes, that happens at any stage. So for example, the alleged source of Vault 7, Joshua Schulze, he’s been under SAMs for years now and there are articles about the conditions he’s in. They’re completely horrific and he’s had to prepare his case from there. But quite aside from that, there are two other enormously significant reasons, which is Julian can’t mount a defense. He’s a foreigner, he’s an Australian who was published in the UK, has no connection to the United States and they want to pluck him and put him on trial in the United States to face 175 years. They say you have no public interest defense. And then another thing that they’ve said is that, well, we may argue that because he’s a foreign national, he does not enjoy First Amendment rights. I mean, what is that? If you’re going to apply your criminal laws extraterritorially and then you bring this foreigner to your shores and then say, well, you don’t have First Amendment, you don’t enjoy constitutional rights because you were a foreigner abroad. It’s complete. Right, that’s convenient. It’s basically when Tanimo Bay. You see, with the war on terror, they changed the rule they said there are these exceptions. You have to carve these exceptions where we’re not, well, we’re kind of breaking international law, but we have this little way of doing it. And so one of the main arguments for not putting the one Tanimo Bay detainees on trial in the United States is because then you kind of import that system of exception onto the US jurisdiction. I mean, that’s kind of in the background. I see. And so you think that’s what’s happening in the case of your husband, an extension of the Guantanamo Bay bureaucratic morass into American territory itself and thus establishing also a very bad precedent. You said that he has been denied a public interest defense and is that a consequence of the nature of the charges? Is it such that if you’re charged under the Espionage Act specifically, you may have explained this to me already and I may have missed it. If you’re charged under the Espionage Act specifically, are you then denied prima facie, a public interest defense, which you would have if you were a journalist? No, it’s not. There’s no definition of who’s a journalist. The only factor that is taken into account is whether you received, possessed and communicated that information. And because you’re being tried under that statute. There’s no exception for journalists. There’s no exception for journalists. Okay, got it. This debate over the Espionage Act and its constitutionality has been there from the beginning for over a hundred years. And some people say that the whole statute is a violation of the constitution, but it’s never been used. Right. Well, so that’s also why people, I would say on a personal level in the United States in particular, but maybe around the world should also be concerned about what’s happening to your husband. Because of course, the situation with any reasonable legal tradition is that once a precedent has been established, which it would be in the case of your husband, it can be indefinitely broadly applied to any number of actors. And so obviously the New York Times and the Washington Post are perspicacious enough to see that threat being levied against them. But that isn’t necessarily where it would stop. Right. And that’s particularly worrisome in a case like we have in the modern world where, I mean, so for example, as a Canadian, if your husband is convicted, let’s say eventually, or even given that he’s been charged, if I go to WikiLeaks and I download one of the documents that he’s charged with promulgating illegally, am I now as egregious a violator of that statute as he is? Because I can’t see how I wouldn’t be. Well, according to the statute, yeah, but that’s, you don’t have to limit it to WikiLeaks. The New York Times publishes national security defense, national defense information every day. They’re unauthorized disclosures all the time because that is what journalists do. Good journalists, at least, they publish if it’s in the public interest. And if you don’t have that ability, then you basically do away with any serious journalism full stop. Well, it’s worse than that now, I would say, because the division line between public citizen and journalist has also become extremely blurry. So for example, if I go to the New York Times and I read an article that has been published without authorization, and I share it on Facebook to my relatively numerous followers, although that’s not necessarily relevant, it could be with even a family member, am I now a journalist who’s disclosing state secrets? And the answer to that is by no means clear, because I’m certainly publishing it. And obviously, everybody in some real sense has become their own publishing house in a world of radically accessible social media. And so that should make people very concerned, because each of us is now a relatively powerful journalist in our own right. So whatever happens to journalists is very much likely to be able to happen to the rest of us. Yeah, I mean, a tweet is a publication. There’s court rulings now that are already creating precedent. And of course, you know, it goes to the very fact of our ability to be able to express ourselves as well, because these platforms are the new public square, right? But we don’t understand that public square. We don’t see what rules are and what political considerations are governing that square. And so we’re at the mercy. And we don’t know how to police it either. We don’t know how to police the square. Well, we can’t even see. We can’t even see the whole square, right? Because we don’t even enter into contact with, you know, some people in the other part of the square, that there’s some invisible wall between us where we can’t see each other’s arguments. And we’re also interacting with agents whose motivations and identity not only do we not understand, but we can’t understand. And that would be the case with anonymous actors, but even more the case with bots. And so the policing issue becomes extraordinarily difficult. And I suppose that’s part of the conundrum that you and your husband face too, because the legal system, paranoid though it may be and reactionary though it may be, is also trying to wrestle with the fact of the radically increased journalistic ability of the typical citizen and exemplified, obviously, in the case of your husband, because he’s such a powerful user of such a powerful user of this technology. And so, what do you think people who are listening to this podcast should conclude with regards to what they think and how they configure their actions? And is there anything they could do that you would regard as ethical and useful in relationship to what you’re going through? Well, I think the first thing is to understand that Julian is the locus of a battleground over narrative, over who he is, what he’s done, what his motivations are, what WikiLeaks is. And essentially WikiLeaks is what he calls a rebel library of Alexandria. The publications of WikiLeaks have been used in court cases. They’ve led to someone who was a victim of CIA rendition being able to win his case against Albania. And it’s also revealed how states behave in a criminal manner when the stakes are high enough. And when you’re at a kind of power, top tier power level, what I mean by that is, for example, the State Department cables revealed that the US State Department was interfering with the investigations into criminal activities by CIA agents in Germany in relation to the abduction and torture of a German citizen called Cali Dalmasri in relation to an investigation that was initiated in Spain where Spanish journalists had been deliberately killed by US forces in Baghdad. So there was an investigation there and similarly in Italy. And so the US State Department used its influence, its political power, to strong arm those countries into dropping those investigations or to simply investigate but never actually issue an extradition request or so on. So when we come to this level of power, there are no rules. The only rule is how much might overwrite. And that’s that might that has descended on Julian and tried to create a climate of a persecutory climate around his person. In the lead up to his arrest, there was a relentless amount of fabricated stories. The Guardian published on the front page of its, well, on the top of its website but also the front page of its newspaper a completely fabricated story claiming that Donald Trump’s- Not the Guardian. That’s so hard to believe. Yeah, they hardly ever publish anything that’s inflammatory and false. Well, you know what? The woman, a Decca Aitken hit who interviewed that hit piece. She’s fun. Well, interestingly, she had also done a hit piece on Julian so you have that in common. In 2012, she did a- There’s a lovely point of contact. She did an interview with Julian about a book he had written called Cypher Punks, Freedom and the Future of the Internet. And it’s a very interesting book because it was written a year before Snowden published his publications and it anticipates a lot of what Snowden’s publications then revealed. And she did with the, the pretext was that it was going to be a book review but really it was a hit piece. She’s very good at pretexts, by the way. A real pro at pretexts. She was a butter won’t melt in your mouth, lovely, polite English woman who had nothing but the best intentions and who we helped set up her technical production because she couldn’t quite handle it herself and who was all smiles and cheer until she actually let her poison tongue loose. And so she was quite the creature as far as I was concerned. So it’s lovely to know that your husband and I have that in common. Do you know that the British diplomats historically they’re called, they were known because of that character and a term to be used to use for the British is perfidious albion. I don’t know if you’re- Right, right, right, right. Yes, oh yes, I’m familiar with that. I hadn’t, I hadn’t applied. That’s great, that’s great. I see the relevance of that epithet more clearly now that you’ve explained it. But and a lot of these characters that were used as character assassins against Julian, they’re recurring. You know, for example, the one who wrote a piece, he was, he was, he was the supposed to be the ghostwriter for Julian’s autobiography. And the publisher went rogue because they anticipated that Julian would be extradited within weeks and they decided to publish a draft of the autobiography without his permission under the title, the unauthorized autobiography. And that autobiography has many, many, many mistakes. For example, it says that Julian’s father is an actor and they made up quotes and then those quotes then got published as if Julian had said them. Anyway, that just the, so that ghostwriter then went on to, once Julian’s utility to him had expired, also because there was another potential book deal that fell apart in relation to Snowden. And so this, this author then went and wrote this absolutely poisonous piece against Julian. And that same author, do you remember the Grenfell fire in London where this tower block of apartments, a terrible tragedy that happened in 2017, where the tower block burned down and it was down to the cladding of the building that the council had put on the building. Anyway, this same guy, O’Hagan is his surname, he was then, he then wrote a profile about the people who had been living in that apartment block. And I think 78 people died. And he basically exonerated the council, the authorities, and put the blame on the victims. And when I read that, I thought, well, of course, these are people who are in that business of sucking up to power basically. And if you have a state or a section of the state that sets its sight on an individual or a group of people, then you get all these opportunists who, or people who are sucking up to the state for their own reason or seeing a career advantage in riding that train. And so for Julian, London, which is quite a specific, London is a strange city. It is a cutthroat, and especially the journalistic world. It is very old boys. I haven’t noticed that at all. Yeah, it is elite. I forget the percentages, but the vast, the percentage of Oxbridge, of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in working in the British media, the top tier media, is hugely disproportionate when you compare it to other professional jobs. And it is vicious. And so Julian entered that sphere, and then they have all this kind of a slipstream of actors in the media and in the whatever book deals and so on. And Julian kind of entered into that whole environment as an outsider who created, a radical outsider. There was a lot of jealousy. There was a failure to understand him because Julian is, as you mentioned, he’s a very you mentioned, he’s on this autism spectrum. He is brilliant, brilliant and incredibly engaging. And all these things, he is such an incredible character and he has a lot of charisma. You make the case for a radical transparency of the press, and that’s certainly a case that I’m inclined in many ways to agree with a priori. And perhaps also in the case of your husband, more specifically, you also make the case that he’s done a lot of good. But I would like to ask you two questions. What harm, if any, in relationship to that good, do you think WikiLeaks and your husband has done, given the magnitude of his operation and the technological novelty of this form of journalism? What are the moral hazards, let’s say, real and possible? And why have you decided to be so radically on his side despite the fact that, while he has a wealth of powerful enemies, he has a very diverse range of powerful enemies, many, many accusations have been levied against him. You might think, well, a sensible woman would think I could find an easier life. I could find an easier life somewhere else. But you’ve made the decision to dive into this in the deepest possible way. And so the first issue is what’s the harm that WikiLeaks is promoting, if any, that needs to be considered in relation to the good? And the second is, why do you trust this man, given that he’s at the center of this absolutely, in some sense, unprecedented level of controversy? Well, I can’t answer the first question because it is completely abstract. Now, the US government had talking points when WikiLeaks first started publishing the Manning Leaks, and they completely reversed the true situation. So, for example, WikiLeaks had just published the existence of 15,000 victims, civilians who had been killed, it had been completely unacknowledged. And what did they do? They reversed it to say WikiLeaks has blood on its hands, and when the US has been under oath in the court martial of Chelsea Manning and afterwards in the extradition hearing, they have had to admit that they have no evidence to back the claim. So, you know, the fact is that WikiLeaks operates at scale, and that has risks, of course, but it has also uncovered war crimes, torture. Yeah, well, I guess, well, part of what runs through my mind, I guess, is the proposition that we have a right to free speech because such things in some sense can’t be decided at the level of particular detail. It has to be something like it’s the journalist’s right and responsibility to make what might want to be kept secret available. And then I suppose it’s the responsibility and obligation of people who are working in the more narrow domain of state security to try to maintain their barriers. But there’s going to be a beneficial antagonism between the two, let’s say, because it’s hard to get that exactly right. And it’s not appropriate for the state security agents, appropriate for the state security agents, even though they have their domain, to interfere with the overarching freedom of expression and the free press. And your case, as far as I can tell, and Julian’s case basically hinges on the proposition that what he is most fundamentally is a journalist and that what he’s doing, although it’s at scale in a new technological platform, is indistinguishable from what journalists should do that’s moral and appropriate. And that the fact that he’s being persecuted on multiple fronts simultaneously, some clearly more egregious than others, does in fact pose a threat to the integrity of that freedom of expression in such a manner that everyone should be concerned about it. Does that seem an appropriate summation? Yes, I think that’s fair. I think it’s also fair to say that he goes beyond journalism in the sense that, not he, but WikiLeaks, as it basically is a repository for our contemporaneous history. And that is also, there’s a people’s right. And that’s the Library of Alexandria. Yeah, there’s a people’s right to know their own history, the truth of the history. And there are victims who are never even recognized because that’s so far from the truth. Because that truth is suppressed because of who controls the information. He’s not a transparency maximalist. He’s a transparency maximalist. He’s not against reductions. He has engaged in reductions with the material. But he has an attachment to the historical record and the importance that it transcends each smaller interest and the interests of smaller actors. And journalists should hold that principle at its highest. Well, you made a strong case for his judiciousness in the release. And that was quite surprising to me, given the scale of his releases. And so maybe if you don’t mind, we could end with the more personal question, which is, why do you trust this man? Well, because I know him. Well, okay. So tell me. This is a genuine question. It’s not an artificial closer. I mean, you’re in a tricky situation. I mean, you’re dealing with a man who’s, by your own account, very charismatic and very powerful technically and in terms of reputation. And he has a lot of enemies and a lot of allegations against him, any one of which could easily taint his reputation permanently. And yet you’ve decided not only to support him, let’s say, professionally, but also to lock your life into his life when you, at least in principle, had other options. And you say you know him. What is it about him that has compelled you? And you should have some wisdom. You’ve been a lawyer. You’re well-educated. You should have some sense of how the world works. You shouldn’t be someone over whose eyes the wool is particularly easily pulled. And you’ve come to this decision and you made a public case for it. You’ve paid a price for it. Why? What’s compelled you to believe that he’s who he claims to be? Well, because I’ve known him since 2011. And this is also my life. This isn’t just why do you attach yourself to him. It’s the same thing. And I entered into contact with Julian initially professionally. I observed what was happening to him and how the world around him populated by well-meaning people who sometimes had no interest, but sometimes well-meaning people who had an interest. And that in fact he was quite in a very vulnerable position, being high profile as he was. And actually an extremely vulnerable political position because his liberty depended on his political capital. And that’s what was targeted. And I saw all these lies being constructed around him and observed how in a sense the surroundings, like the people around us or the press which I previously had trusted as a normal person was malicious and maliciously representing him, maliciously representing reality. And so it’s not like I could just choose to take their side because they’re wrong. Because it was deliberate and I could witness the persecution as a bystander and then also as an implicated party. And the incredible political… We wanted to live our relationship and have a family. And even that was a kind of a political act. Not because we were trying to make a political act, but because we wanted to live our lives. And so together… Okay, so your case in large part is, if I’ve got it right, is that you’re not in some sense merely seeing this through Julian’s eyes. And you’re not merely an advocate for his point of view. You’ve been around and in the trenches long enough, and so it’s 11 years now, that you’ve seen the malfeasance and spiteful accusations firsthand. And you’ve seen the facts behind that firsthand within the confines of your own experience. And so your experience happens to dovetail with that of your husband, but you’ve been able to draw your own conclusions independent of whatever sway your emotional attachment to him might also exert. Does that seem reasonable? I’ve lived this, yes. I’ve lived this and the CIA has plotted to kill him and they also instructed people to take the DNA of our six-month-old baby’s nappy. It’s just, they followed my mother. There’s just no, there’s not even a choice in the matter because every single aspect of our lives has been intruded on. And it’s not just Julian, it’s me, it’s our son, it’s his lawyers. But more broadly, what they’re doing to Julian is corrupting our Western liberal democracy as we, as the ideal is. I’m not saying that it’s ever been that, but it’s a fundamental corruption and a step into a categorically different reality. Well, that’s an excellent summation to end on as far as I’m concerned. And my condolences in some sense on your situation. I have some idea about what you’re going through, not least because of observing the consequences of, I suppose, the similarities between what I’ve experienced and what your husband has experienced, which he certainly has had the worst of it, I would say. But I’ve also watched the effect of that on her. And that’s not a pleasant thing to you know, that’s not a pleasant thing to witness by any stretch of the imagination. And I hope that you are capable, the two of you, of holding it together and maintaining your wise counsel and level heads and finding your way through this awful maze without being tangled up in the spider’s web so terribly that the spider comes and devours. So good luck to you and thank you very much for talking to me today.