Title: 200. CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou on Assange, Weaponized Govt. and Panquake
Show: The Sharyl Attkisson Podcast
Date: 2023-10-13
URL: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO7631875012.mp3
Duration: 40:00

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[00:00] Hi everybody, Cheryl Ackerson here. Welcome to another edition of the Cheryl Ackerson Podcast. Today a fascinating discussion with a former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, the only person prosecuted and imprisoned over the CIA torture program not for taking part in it, but for blowing the whistle on it. He will also talk about a new internet product you can use to search the internet

[00:32] without big brother keeping track. It's called Panquake, P-A-N-Q-U-A-K-E, and he'll talk about what happened to him and what could very well happen to you with a weaponized government growing out of control. My name is John Kiriakou, K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U, and I am, what is my title? I guess it's Brand Spokesman for Panquake.

[01:07] Where'd you get the name, by the way, Panquake? You know, they talked about that a lot in the beginning. These people that are involved in the development of Panquake are far more creative than I am. I'm just not creative in that way, and they wanted it to sort of give the feeling of an earthquake in that it's shaking up the industry, and Pan meaning it covers the whole spectrum and the whole world, which is what they're hoping to finally do, and yeah,

[01:42] that's what they came up with. Let me read a little bit about, just to get you started on describing what's going on from, I guess, a news release. It says that Julian Assange supporters take on Big Tech, release new anti-spying archiving tool. It says supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have just changed the balance of power between internet users and Big Tech launching Panquake.me, a free app that protects users

[02:13] from being spied on by web trackers and preserves the original web content. Okay, let's break it down. Let's assume we're talking to people like me, they may use the internet, know something of it, but let's try to be fairly simple in terms of how we describe things. What is the idea behind the need for this tool or this site that you all have created? Right. Well, the need is for users, and that could be just the everyday, you know, Joe or

[02:46] Jane sitting at their computer. It could be journalists, it could be activists who just don't want to be tracked. And for me, as a user, that's the most important thing here. There were several things that were so important to the developers. One was transparency, and the code is open so anybody can see how this thing is set up. The second thing was privacy, and privacy and transparency are not mutually exclusive. You know, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and really all

[03:20] of them, they collect your personal data. They collect your metadata, they know what you share, they know what you forward, and then they package that information and they sell it. They sell it to other companies, but more sinisterly, they sell it to the FBI and SA and CIA. How do we know that? I believe you. How do we know that they have contracts with them that we're able to see or what? Yeah, through the Freedom of Information Act, there was actually a statement by the FBI

[03:52] just a few weeks ago in which they said that now instead of going to a court and asking for a warrant or a court order to purchase metadata, I mean to get metadata, they just purchased it directly from the social media company, which is perfectly legal because when you open an account, like let's say when you first set up your Facebook account, the terms and conditions include a provision that you do not own the data. So any website you go to, you know, any news article you read, they collect information

[04:26] on that and then they package it for sale. So literally everything you do on the internet can be purchased by the FBI, NSA, CIA or frankly anybody else. But if you've agreed to that, let's say you have a Facebook account and you visit things outside of your new development, outside of the thing that you all have developed, is Facebook tracking what you do when you're not logged into Facebook somehow or is it only the stuff you're doing while you're logged in?

[04:58] No, that's a great question. And you know, for a long time, people suspected that Facebook was tracking them continually and finally Facebook came out just in the last year and said, yes, that they do actually track us. For example, I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone. I was not on Facebook. I was just on the phone and I was telling him, oh, you know, I'm accosted by lunatics all the time and, you know, there was this woman that came after me and she had fantasized

[05:29] that we were engaged and she actually flew to Washington with a gun to shoot my wife so that she and I could be together. And he said, oh, buddy, you know what you need? You need a concealed carry class. And I said, yeah, but I'm not allowed to carry a gun. As soon as I hung up the phone, I went on Facebook and literally every single advertisement was for a concealed carry course in my area. So yeah, isn't that awful?

[06:00] So you know, it's like, it's like another example. I told my sister, oh, I need to buy a new desk. I don't like my desk. It's really old. I want one that has, you know, a USB port. No sooner did I hang up the phone. I go into the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and every pop-up ad on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette is for a computer desk. You know, that's just not acceptable. Many of us I think don't want to live our lives like that or we're tired of living our lives like that.

[06:32] And we want to be able to surf the web or read an article or communicate with friends or colleagues or journalists or whomever and just not be tracked. That's what this is. Before we go into some more details about Panquake or panquake.ne, it wouldn't stop that, would it? Like if you're, you have a Facebook account and they're tracking you and you're on the phone, but you're not going through Panquake, Panquake can't impact that, can it?

[07:02] No, that it won't impact. But what it can impact is if you want to send somebody an article, for example, Now if you see an article on Facebook and you open it, Facebook knows you've opened it. They know how long you were in it to read it and then they know if you sent it to somebody. Once you send it to that person, they know if that person opened it, how long they read it and what they did with it. What you can do at Panquake is you can go into the site.

[07:37] It's something called a link shortener, right? So you go to pnqk.me, you put in the URL there, you're able to read the article, it cleans your links of any marketing or ad tracking cookies, you're able to send it to somebody else through the Panquake site and then it actually archives the link. One of the things that I hate and I'm sure that you do too because you're a prominent journalist and you've done it for a long time, is you'll use something as a source

[08:12] and then the link goes dead. And so you go back to it a year, two years, five years later because you want to refer to it and the link no longer works. But Panquake will archive the link so that it will always be available to you. As long as you save it in the new, shortened, translated version that you got. Right, which the site does for you. Cool. Yeah. Well, I think one we should discuss. One of the things people ought to consider today is it's one thing.

[08:48] I guess it's less nefarious in a way. People are trying to advertise, send their products to you, listen in on you and track you to send you advertising. Not that that's good, but you agree to that and that's the presumed correct goal. But we now have learned so much about what the government is doing. So the government can access this data in many different ways and use it against you in ways you never imagined, even if you've done nothing wrong. Oh, my God, that's so true. Find out if you happen to be in a city like Washington, D.C.

[09:22] on January 6th, even if you broke no laws or did nothing wrong. Amen. You may end up by your behavior, being able to be tracked there and targeted unfairly by this, you know, weaponized institutions, the institutions we now have that are so politically weaponized. You're absolutely right. Absolutely right. You know, companies or the government can entail a lot just by your metadata.

[09:53] Right. They don't have to interview you. They don't have to put a team of spies to surveil you and track you just from your metadata, they can get a pretty darn good view of what you're doing on a day to day basis and how you're living your life. Like you say, even with your phone off or in airplane mode, they can still track you to within three feet of your location. And besides that, what if you what if you are, you know,

[10:25] chatting with, let's say, an abortion clinic or a boyfriend or girlfriend or, you know, a psychiatrist or psychologist. Don't you think you deserve a little bit of privacy? I think so. And not that they deserve to butt into your life anyway, but the conclusions they may mistakenly draw from your histories as a journalist, I sometimes look for incorrect information.

[10:55] You know, one of my big gripes about all the censorship is sometimes I want to see what people are saying that may not be right or may be right, but other people are trying to disparage it. I don't want a third party divining truth for me. And by the same token, and I may be researching predators, but you could look at the search history for me and wrongly assume that I am a predator. There's all kinds of. Oh, yeah. But the government peeking into your private life, of course. Oh, you're absolutely right. Can you imagine how potentially dangerous that is?

[11:29] It's just awful. For me, because of my background, I'm really worried about the national security state gathering and then misusing this kind of information. But you make a very important point right there. It's not just, you know, John has a beef with the national security state. It's that every single American is potentially at risk. Tell me a little bit about your background. Sure, I spent 15 years with the CIA. The first half was as an analyst on the Middle East.

[12:00] The second half was in counterterrorism operations. I rose quickly at the CIA and I became the chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9-11. I led a team of counterterrorism officers in a series of raids in March of 2002 that resulted in the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who we believed at the time was the number three in al-Qaeda. He was not the number three. The CIA just a few months later began torturing Abu Zubaydah.

[12:33] I went back to CIA headquarters and became the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. And I objected to the torture program. Not only did I object to it, I refused to be trained in it. I was the only person of the 14 approached to be interrogators to refuse the torture training, which, as you might imagine, damaged my career. But but I didn't care and I waited for somebody to come out and say something

[13:04] because this torture program was so patently illegal to me. I just expected that somebody would come out and say something that never happened. And so five and a half years later in 2007, I said something in an interview with Brian Ross at ABC News. I said that CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official US government policy and that the policy had been personally approved by the president. As you might imagine, the CIA filed a crimes report against me with the FBI.

[13:35] And the FBI investigated me for a year from December 2007 to December 2008, and they determined at the end of that year that I had not committed a crime and they closed the case. So three weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president. John Brennan becomes the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. John was an old nemesis of mine. And John was one of the fathers of the torture program. And so he asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. I had no idea that for the next three years,

[14:07] and this is why Panquake is so important to me, the next three years, my phones were tapped, my emails were being intercepted, FBI agents were following me everywhere I went. And then in January of 2012, I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage for speaking to ABC and to The New York Times. Of course, I hadn't committed espionage and the espionage charges were dropped. But but I finally took a plea to to violating the Intelligence Identity's

[14:38] Protection Act of 1982. I'm only the second American that was ever charged with that crime. And I did it to make the whole thing go away. I'm proud to say that in the end, I was educated because everything I said was true. I had great support from the likes of of John McCain, for example. But but I served 23 months in a federal prison and came out with a new appreciation for for privacy on the one hand and for government transparency on the other.

[15:11] And then when when Susie Dawson and this incredible group of tech geniuses, I don't even know what else to call them because, you know, we have these calls and they're talking about the system. And I'm like, God bless them because I don't know what the heck they're talking about, it's so sophisticated. But then at the same time, it's so simple. You know that the the technology behind it is sophisticated. But the the ease of use is such that anybody can use it. I'm older than you are.

[15:41] I'm not a Luddite, but but, you know, I don't want to get too down into the weeds and you don't have to with this. So anyway, I have this appreciation for transparency and and privacy. And this sort of puts it all in one package for me. That's why I agreed to to join up with them. I think they have an amazing idea and I'd like to be a part of it. Just to digress for a moment, when the FBI was following you around

[16:11] and your phones were being tapped and all that stuff, were you aware of it? Were there signs or signals or was something you found out about in retrospect? No, I had no idea. And I'll tell you what, I was a surveillance detection instructor. At the CIA and I never bothered to look because I hadn't done anything wrong. And so I had no idea that I was being followed. I had no idea that my phone calls and emails were being intercepted.

[16:45] And then just like you said a moment ago, they'll take these these emails completely out of context and then try to use it against you. And that happened to me repeatedly. That happened to a gentleman, a professor who had been accused of being a Chinese spy by the FBI. Yeah, when? Well, him too, but actually there's a whole series of them. And there's one more recent with an ongoing case he has against the FBI.

[17:16] They had looked at his emails and they claimed that he stole kind of stole technology for an invention and provided it. Oh, geez, Chinese unfairly. And yet a true read of what was behind the emails had nothing to do with the supposed invention that the FBI misread it about, which was proven they dropped the charges against them. But like you say, you know, they can see things that aren't there in your email. So whenever I hear people say and they do say this, I don't care if they look at my stuff.

[17:49] I don't do anything wrong. Right. You need to be thinking a lot harder about that because that's that's really not the danger is that they're going to get you for doing something wrong. So true. One of the things I learned in this whole experience is if they want to get you, they're going to get you. You know, they can pour through everything that you've done over the course of years through your emails. And like I said, through your phone calls and they can patch something together, especially in the Eastern District of Virginia, where

[18:23] interestingly enough, Julian Assange's case would be heard. Were he to be extradited to the United States? It's where Ed Snowden has been charged. I was charged there. Jeffrey Sterling is charged there or was charged there. Zacharias Musawi, it's called the espionage court because no national security defendant has ever won a case there. And you know, when your jury is made up from people or of people from the CIA and the Pentagon and the FBI and intelligence community contractors,

[18:56] you don't have a prayer. So who are they going to believe? The guy who's charged with multiple counts of espionage or the FBI agent who's on the stand testifying against him? It's it's like you can't win. You know, there's the old joke that that a jury would convict a ham sandwich. Well, it's absolutely true in the in the Eastern District of Virginia and not to digress myself, but I'll tell you another thing. I refuse to take a plea for a very, very long time, right up until the bitter end.

[19:28] And my best friend's wife has an uncle who was OJ Simpson's jury consultant. So he agreed to help me for free and he flew up to Washington. He lives in Dallas and we got him a security clearance so he could go through the 15,000 classified documents that the government had turned over to us in in discovery. And finally, after going through everything he said to me, listen, he said, if we were in any other district in America,

[20:03] I'd say, let's go for it. We're going to win this thing. But the Eastern District of Virginia, where your jury is going to have people from the CIA and the FBI and the DOD, he said, you don't stand a chance. You should take a deal. And I still refuse to take a deal. And this is something I've told Julian Assange's attorneys. I still refuse to take a deal. And that morning that I refused, my lawyers came to my house at seven o'clock in the morning, one of them said, the gruffest of the three said,

[20:35] you stupid son of a bitch, take the deal. The second one said, if you were my brother, I would beg you to take the deal. And the third one got right in my face. And he said, you know what your problem is? Your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage. Take the deal. And so I took it. Because when they've got all of this circumstantial evidence against you

[21:07] in the Eastern District of Virginia, you're likely not going to testify on your own behalf, which, of course, is prejudicial against you even when it's not supposed to be. And you've got a jury that's stacked against you. You have no choice. Well, I think that's another frightening thing about our system that today, the ordinary American, if they try to go up against the government, not only with the financing, the deference they get with the courts, financing, meaning endless amount

[21:38] of taxpayer money, the staff they have. That's right. Nobody can beat, you know, nobody. It's very, very difficult to beat the government. And in my case, I'm suing the government. So I'm the one that's trying to get, you know, accountability for the spying on me or the spying against me since the Department of Justice won't hold its own accountable and it's much the same. They have unlimited taxpayer money to delay and obstruct. The courts let them have every extension they want. It seems let them not meet their deadlines with no impunity.

[22:10] But if I were to miss, you know, a single day, I think. Forget it. That's right. Don't have to answer their complaints. I mean, nothing seems to make sense. But the deck is just what you know is the deck is stacked against you. Oh, it absolutely is. You know, the government spent six million dollars to to prosecute me. I still owe my attorneys one million one hundred and fifty thousand dollars that they'll never see. I only paid them fifty thousand. It was everything that I had.

[22:41] But that's what the government counts on. They do they do a couple of things on purpose. One is called charge stacking, where they'll charge you with a whole bunch of felonies. You know, felonies, you haven't committed. And then they'll wait until you go bankrupt. And then they'll come back and say, hey, we'll drop all the charges, but one, if you take a plea. And by then you have no hope. You're ruined financially, professionally, personally in many cases. And so you take the plea.

[23:12] This is why ProPublica found in a study that the government wins 98.2 percent of its cases, almost all of those wins are because of plea bargains. And the other thing they do is venue shopping. Yeah, they want they want to bring a case against you in the federal district where they know they have the best chance of winning. And so, you know, they'll come up with an excuse that is going to sound absolutely ridiculous to you for why you're charged in X, Y or Z federal district.

[23:46] In fact, they put a lot of thought into that and they did it so you couldn't win there. Well, good warnings out there for everybody. If you think you're never going to be in this situation, you might be surprised. And can you explain how Duck Duck Go is different? I think you kind of already have it. Just go into that because I think some people go to Duck Duck Go. Yeah, Duck Duck Go is a good place to accomplish similar goals to what pancake, right? It's a little bit like apples and oranges.

[24:18] I like Duck Duck Go because it also doesn't track you. But Duck Duck Go is very purely a search engine. And pancake is much more than that. Pancake, pancake.me, for example, can be used as a search engine. And like I said, it's not going to track you. It's not going to keep your data. It's not going to tell the government what you're doing or with whom you're doing it. And then Panquake. Rit Large is which is not yet completed, but is is deep in development.

[24:54] It's a social network akin to Twitter or to Facebook, where once it's done, you're going to be able to do everything on Panquake that you can do on those other social media platforms. And one of the one of the interesting things about Panquake, too. And like I say, it's not completed yet, but they're they're getting there. But so I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. But one of the cool things is that through this entire process of development, the developers have relied on recommendations from beta users.

[25:28] And so to watch this thing develop and change as it's matured has been an amazing thing to see. And you know, somebody asked me just yesterday, well, once this is done, if they're not going to target advertisements at you and they're not going to collect your data and sell it, how do they make any money? And it's actually very simple. It's going to be a subscription model and it's going to be reasonably priced. So right now, even even pre completion for three dollars a month,

[26:01] you can be a beta user. They've they've reserved several thousand spots. They have some left three dollars a month. Once it's up and running and out there, it's five dollars a month. And so you're not going to be tricked into providing your data so they can make a profit. You know, it's it's a very honest plan, a very honest business model. And this is a crowdsourced project.

[26:31] Is that right? The funding for for this? Yeah, it's crowdsourced and it's something that they're very proud of. So people want to learn more because I sense, based on what you said, there's going to be a lot more functionality to this in the future. So it's something that people, I think, are going to have to be interested in for philosophical reasons and want to support, you know, get involved in where should they go? First of all, to use it, you can give that link again, but also just to learn more about it.

[27:03] Sure. So check out panquake.me, P-A-N-Q-U-A-K-E dot M-E, panquake.me. And check out panquake.com. It's it's turning into something great. I want to encourage people to check this out, even if it's a little bit of work on the front end. And here's why. We've long been talking about the social media agencies and these big companies capturing us. I say that they sort of did a bait and switch.

[27:34] They got us to use them almost exclusively with the promise of freedom. Let's say, twin. Sure. The idea that we could have open exchanges of ideas and open access to information on the Internet. And then they switched everything around. They colluded with the government and corporations to do quite the opposite. Once we became totally reliant on them, we're now sort of trapped with these big companies and so convenient to use this.

[28:06] They developed. So people have been asking the last few years, how do we get out of it? Well, no one knows exactly how the paradigm will sort out. But it's things like this that people are trying that could be the game changer and there's lots of them. But I think we ought to all be willing to spend that little bit of extra time to give these things a shot and try to change the things we don't like. About our information being manipulated and our privacy being interrupted. I could agree more, Cheryl, until I went through this experience of my own. I never even thought about protecting my privacy and my data.

[28:40] You know, it just never even occurred to me as as being an issue. And then when I did go through this awful experiment or experience both and started seeing what was happening to other people, especially to journalists, you know, I remember back in, I guess it was like 2016 where where a journalist with the Washington Times, who happened to be married to a guy who worked at. I think it was the Department of Education. The police raided raided his house looking for some file that he had taken

[29:17] allegedly from the Department of Education. The den in their house was used by her for her journalism. And they went into the den and they took her reporter's notes. They just confiscated them. And it's like nobody, nobody really seemed to care or to object. And it was just such an egregious violation of her privacy. I started thinking, man, what do we where are we headed? We've got to do something to protect ourselves. I feel the same way. I remember that case.

[29:48] I feel like it was ATF or something that he whatever he was involved in. Yeah, something like that. It's been very disappointing, including in my case, that case to have the journalistic establishment not step up and do more of an outcry. And they too have been captured by. Yes, forces and influences. And it's been it's very disappointing because, you know, in the one hand, there there are watchdogs for government that exist. But the media was one of the most powerful ones. Yes. By and large, the media has

[30:20] advocated its responsibility that watchdog has gone away. They're all kind of on the same teams. It's very difficult to get accountability. Hey, after a short break, we're going to talk for just a moment about Julian Assange. Introducing Whipped Seafoam Body Butter by Syranane Cosmetics. Hi, I'm Star, owner of the Lemonade Mermaid. Enriched with the nourishing powers of cocoa butter, mango butter and shea butter,

[30:50] our body butter whisk you away to a world of deep hydration. Experience the essence of the sea with every application as this whipped delight leaves your skin refreshed, replenished and ready to conquer the day. Visit the lemonade mermaid dot com and make your skin sing with the magic of the sea. So I know you know, Assange, you're in touch with people who are in touch with Assange, is there a simple way to give a very short background of what happened

[31:23] to him and who he is, who he was when he got in trouble? Because back in the day when he first started WikiLeaks, I thought he was sort of the darling of the political left for some of the things that he was exposing and doing. But if I'm correct on this, he ran a fowl of the left when some of the documents he exposed or his site exposed involved unflattering things about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee when she was trying to be president. So can you give us a little background?

[31:54] Right. Julian Assange is the co-founder of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is the world's foremost organization dedicated to transparency, especially to government transparency. To tell you the truth, the American government didn't pay much attention to Julian Assange until 2009 when he released a tranche of documents provided to him by Bradley Manning, later Chelsea Manning. A lot of a lot of those documents, 99% of those documents were just sort

[32:26] of a day in the life State Department reporting cables on issues that most people don't care about. Some of them were embarrassing to the to the government, but what he also included in that tranche was something that came to be known as the collateral murder videos. This was a military video of helicopter gunships in Iraq killing. Killing journalists, camera men for for Reuters and then firing on

[32:58] the rescuers and the ambulance that was that was dispatched to help them. They killed several people and then it was covered up by the government. Well, Americans had no idea that the military had done this until Julian Assange said so. So the CIA and the FBI set out to to silence him. And they did that by trumping up some two sexual assault cases in Sweden. Both of the women who made accusations against Assange later said that the police

[33:31] pushed them to do it. And so there are no sexual assault charges pending against Julian Assange. But Julian was so afraid that he would be extradited to Sweden. He was in the UK at the time. He would be extradited to Sweden and then in turn extradited to the United States because of the Bradley Manning release that he took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy at the invitation really of the Ecuadorian government. But then what happened? He was in there for years. Then what happened was the United States

[34:04] dramatically improved its relationship with the government of Ecuador with what was supposed to have been a leftist government. It turned out not to be a leftist government. They talked to the Ecuadorians into allowing them to bug the embassy for audio and video. They were able to to collect literally everything that Julian was saying and doing, even his bathroom was bugged. And then in the meantime, there were other revelations, something called Vault Seven, which included

[34:36] what the CIA admitted was the crown jewels of the CIA's technical abilities. And so it was then that was during the Trump administration that the CIA came up with a plan to either kidnap Julian and render him to the United States or to kill him. Were he to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy? In the end, even the Democrats turned on him because in 2016, just before the election, WikiLeaks published the DNC emails that showed, among other things, that

[35:10] the Democratic National Committee had conspired to block Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination and had essentially cheated him out of the nomination and had given it, wired it for Hillary Clinton. The Democrats have never forgiven Julian for that, never. And so where he was for a while, the darling of the left, that went away. He never was really the darling of the right. It was it was the Trump administration that initially filed charges against him, multiple espionage charges, but it was the Biden administration that elected

[35:44] to go forward with the the request for the British government to turn Julian over to face trial and has continued on with this with this espionage case where Julian faces something like one hundred and forty five years in prison. So he has appealed and appealed and appealed. He's being held in Belmarsh Penitentiary in South London. It's it's the highest security penitentiary in all of England. It's where the most dangerous criminals and terrorists in the country are held.

[36:18] And what is he being held on? It's a charge of bail jumping for running into the Ecuadorian Embassy in the first place all those years ago for charges that were those on the charges that now no longer exist. Correct. Those charges no longer exist. The sexual assault charges. I did a story for full measure. People can find if they go to fullmeasure.news. And I believe it was titled Shades of Gray that discussed do be a sexual assault charge is basically the weaponization of the Me Too

[36:51] movement, because certainly there's something to be said about women should be should get justice and men should not behave certain ways. We all know that, but there also was this sort of weaponization of the Me Too movement that happened to accuse men who had done nothing wrong or maybe to accuse men who had done something perhaps unethical but not illegal, but to make them out to be criminal. So I did a story on this and included Assange as an example, because there were quite a few people targeted

[37:22] by our intelligence agency and government for doing things our government didn't want them to do like Assange, right, political things that they felt who all ended up with weird kind of sexual abuse or sexual criminal charges against them that were never brought to fruition. But it was enough to destroy and ruin and harm them and make them have to hire lawyers and all of that. It's a distinct pattern. And again, something everybody should be very concerned about, but there wasn't a whole lot of people speaking out against it or about.

[37:54] Oh, you're absolutely right. Absolutely right. This has been a pattern. We've seen it time and time again where where the Justice Department will accuse a person of whatever crime, espionage or mishandling classified information or whatever, but then they'll tack on a charge. Sexual assault, child pornography, right? And then you get to court and then they drop the child pornography charge. It turns out there was no child pornography. They were mistaken and they've done that just over and over and over again

[38:28] because a sexual charge will instantaneously separate you from the people who would be your natural supporters. They isolate you in that way. You can't raise money for your defense in that way. And remember, they have an unlimited budget. So that's how that's how they win their cases. They lie. Well, it's scary, but true. And you and I can both speak to this. So I thank you for telling us about the new product and for updating us on

[38:58] Julian Assange and giving your thoughts on this sort of weaponized system of establishments, agencies and so on that we're living under today. Thank you. Thanks, John. It's a pleasure. In this age of a highly controlled media landscape, it's never been more important to fight the heavy hand of censorship and support truly independent journalism. Go to CherylAxen.com and click on the store tab for a great way to do that.

[39:30] There are all kinds of fun and functional products designed specifically for independent and free thinkers like you, featuring slogans like I tested positive for critical thinking. And I need to find some new conspiracy theories. All my old ones came true. Proceed, support independent journalism causes like the ION awards for off narrative accurate reporting. Go to CherylAxen.com and click the store tab today.

[40:07] Thanks for listening, everybody. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast and that if you did, you'll leave us a great review, subscribe and share it with your friends. Check out my other podcast, Full Measure After Hours. And now you can support independent journalism causes by visiting CherylAxen.com and clicking on the store tab. There are some thought provoking and fun products designed exclusively for independent and free thinkers like you, such as products with a slogan, I need to find some new conspiracy theories.

[40:38] All my old ones came true. Proceeds benefit independent reporting causes. Do your own research, make up your own mind. Think for yourself.
