Title: CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou: Trump, Espionage Act &
Show: Kevin Gosztola (The Dissenter)
Date: 2022-08-13
URL: https://youtu.be/UvD5cUtGSZM
Duration: 49:00

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[00:00] right hey everyone it's kevin gustola here i'm the curator of the de center newsletter welcome to the shadowproof youtube channel hit the subscribe button if you aren't a subscriber already you'll get alerts for future interviews like the one we're doing now with friend and colleague uh in in in media and also a cia whistleblower welcome to the show john kiriakou thanks kevin thanks for having me let me take this down get that out of here and uh i'm having you on a friday

[00:33] uh for the friday news dump um we've got the search warrant unsealed but what's dominated this entire week is the fact that the fbi took this step or i guess we should say the justice department took this step of seeking a warrant and then going in and uh raiding i'm gonna i'm gonna use that word i think it's a joke that we've had uh justice department officials being like ah no it wasn't a raid it was a search we just went in there and searched uh but the they raided uh this

[01:04] what it's like got 55 plus rooms on this estate they they raided his uh it's kind of a resort he raided this estate and uh they seized uh from what we're hearing in reports like 20 boxes of documents from him after there had already been coordination with the national archives to recover 15 other boxes of documents some of them probably classified

[01:36] and we know the justice department then got involved because the archives found classified information in those boxes so there's a lot to get into here but let me first start with the question that is on all of our minds which is looking at this search warrant and wondering does this mean donald trump is going to be indicted and face espionage act charges now i'm already on record saying i don't think that that's likely for reasons we are going to get into in this discussion

[02:07] but you were targeted under the espionage act people may not know your full backstory you weren't raided though were you oh yeah oh you were raided okay so you you had the fbi run roughshod through your home so maybe what do you want as a matter of fact all right so maybe you want to talk a little bit about your own personal experience in comparison to what happened to trump this past week sure the first time the fbi raided my house was in 2012 i had blown the whistle on the cia's torture program

[02:38] and um the fbi had been investigating me for for four years and decided to come into the house and seize all of my electronics so i actually wasn't home at the time but my ex-wife was and um 12 fbi agents came in they were very quick about it they they pound on the door and if you don't open it they'll break it down they came in they handed her the search warrant they took

[03:08] my desktop my laptop my mom's laptop that i had had since she died they took all the business cards that i had i had hundreds of business cards uh from you know meeting different people uh they took some thumb drives anything that was that was electronic where where digital media could be stored they took it uh the second time that i was raided was in 2019 i was involved in a child custody uh

[03:39] battle with my ex-wife and in order to gain the upper hand she called the cops and said that um i was hoarding weapons and i was planning something big those were her words 22 fbi agents raided my house that time and it was different they they took a a sledgehammer and smashed a hole in the wall of my of my kitchen they they dumped all my potted plants out on the floor claiming that they were

[04:10] looking for weapons in the potting soil they just completely trashed the house it took me days to get the house back in in order they just ransacked the place and then never charged me with a crime i might add so yeah they they can be real um real sobs about this kind of thing now one of the things that i thought was funny in this trump raid was they clearly have an informant right this is clearly somebody on the inside

[04:42] who told them where the documents were who told them that there were documents there in the first place but then they made a point of going through melania's clothes through her closet um why well they they did that for the same reason that they you know raided roger stone at 6 a.m with cnn in tow just to humiliate right it's a power move and they do it just to humiliate i i've got to add another thing too kev

[05:15] you know the last couple of days i i've i've followed every detail of this situation so far and i i have very much wanted to criticize the fbi for a whole bunch of things overreach and being and just you know doing what they do but as more and more information has been has been released especially today um i'm kind of hard-pressed to see where the fbi made mistakes

[05:46] and so far it's been very easy to to be able to list the mistakes donald trump seems to have made i think you're right uh and so let's uh there's a there's a lot to dig into but first let's for uh the fact that now we're all treated to the mainstream press or the mass media's

[06:17] explanations of of what the espionage act is and whether whether you uh like like what it takes to be uh charged under the espionage act uh let's just get this out here in the open so this is this is eli hoenig and i'm gonna just pull up his bio i believe he was at the justice department at one point because most of these people who land at uh cnn have come you know there's like a revolving door oh yes very much

[06:49] i'm just double checking so he's senior legal analyst at cnn and he was at the assistant u.s attorney's office in the southern district of new york from 2004 to 2012. and then he was in the new jersey division as the assistant attorney general from 2012 to 2018. so he's a prosecutor he's a doj type so here it goes we've got section 793 1519 2071 um give us some more okay it's

[07:19] a law school exam yes in three words espionage obstruction and destruction so starting with the first one 793 that is part of the espionage act here and that reply that applies to anybody who gathers or loses or destroys defense information but this is the really important part with the intent or reason to believe or reckless of the likelihood that that information could be used to injure the national interests of the united states that's the first one the second one is obstruction essentially it's obstruction of justice destroying

[07:50] moving concealing a document in order to interfere with some sort of ongoing investigation and the third one is destruction of a federal document a couple of really important things to keep in mind though these are the charges that prosecutors wrote out and said we have probable cause here's our probable cause we don't have this document brought it to a judge who agreed it is a lower standard of proof it's probably it's probable cause it's not proof beyond a reasonable doubt also nobody is bound by this if the proof ultimately is not there on any of these

[08:20] charges prosecutors don't have to and won't charge it if prosecutors find evidence sufficient to charge other crimes they can do that too so this is a starting point this is for the search warrant only but it still tells us quite a bit about what the proof is and where doj is interested in looking yeah all right your reaction wow um you know espionage means a lot of different things to a lot of different prosecutors

[08:51] um i don't mean to give a history lesson but for people who don't know the history of the espionage act the espionage act was written in uh it was passed into law in 1917 to combat german saboteurs during the first world war it is so old that it doesn't even mention the words classified information because the classification system wasn't even invented until the 1950s

[09:22] it mentions only national defense information but it doesn't explain what national defense information is it's up to individual judges individual prosecutors individual juries even to decide what national defense information is and it doesn't explain what harm to the national security means right i mean we've got we've got senior senior level

[09:52] um nsa people um fbi people who now have come out after the fact saying well chelsea manning didn't really harm the national security there's no evidence that there was any harm to the national security there was some embarrassment but that's not harm to the national security uh same thing with ed snowden ed snowden didn't reveal anything that harmed national security in fact he he provided a public service by telling us that the that the government was breaking the law by uh spying on american citizens

[10:25] uh you know it was under the espionage act that julius nefel rosenberg was executed in i think it was 1950 uh and again except for a couple of very minor technical uh changes the espionage act has never been updated the espionage act also does not allow for an affirmative defense right you are not permitted under the law to stand up in court and explain why you did what you did

[10:55] that by blowing the whistle for example on the fact that nsa was spying on americans was in the national interest you are not allowed to use that as a defense and so there are some very serious problems with the espionage act another problem is that the the justice department uses it as a cudgel to just bash the brains out of whistleblowers or would-be whistleblowers and to me it it cheapens the law i don't think we should have an espionage act anyway or

[11:26] if we did have an espionage it should be rewritten from scratch because the one that we have is so full of problems but now i mean you know if if what we're learning on cnn and msnbc is true um yeah donald trump can be charged under the espionage act and not under like the entry level espionage act either the next one up instead of five years per charge they're talking about 793 which is 10 years per charge

[11:58] um we know that he famously you know tore every document that came into his possession tore it in half and then tore it in half again and people had to um tape it all back together again before sending it to the national archives that's a crime that's a felony you can't destroy documents we have laws that govern the preservation of these documents and i get it that he's not a professional politician and it's his personality but

[12:29] listen how many times you have to be told yeah well and i mean how many times are people at lower levels told in their training and then maybe they could claim oh you know but i don't really take this stuff seriously so i'm sorry i didn't mean to and does that help them no they end up in prison for a few years right exactly exactly so with my newsletter i went through and i'll say i put myself out there and and said based on what we know about the way the espionage act is used

[12:59] and even after all this i have to confess i don't yet believe that the justice department is going to charge him with violating the espionage act i agree and i don't because i i well it's actually probably a different reason than what i'm going to discuss but my first initial argument stems from the disparate treatment that two-tiered justice system that fact that like what you endured but also like i didn't even reference the

[13:31] cases that are like daniel hale or thomas drake who were prosecuted for retaining classified information but i referenced people who actually have taken documents home and kept them on their property or had documents found in their cars or whatever and they were nsa contractors or and they were actually prosecuted because hey you're not allowed to just have this in your house but um and then and let's be clear we don't actually know what their plans were for this classified information they never

[14:03] turned around and gave it to the media and said okay i'm going to be a source they just were found with classified information a good example too that is still very bizarre um or i guess just quirky maybe not bizarre but quirky is you know about james hitzelberger yeah i've spoken to him a number of times yeah and um i i mean it's sort of kind of like um is it kind of like a mr magoo kind of thing where like i just like bumbling along and i violated the espionage act because i'm a bookish person and cares

[14:35] about documents i think he may have had a hoarding disorder and it's like he couldn't help himself but to just take all this stuff home and store it in a shed or something well he gave it to the hoover institution yeah that's right and they have documents there along with his pre-revolutionary iran collection of documents that he had collected it's fascinating and it's fascinating too because the justice department recognizes so does the judge that he's not really committing espionage so

[15:05] they're gonna handle him delicately he just got time served i mean he ended up maybe doing what like a year of time in prison that's what it was yeah and that was it and uh it's very different from a lot of the other cases but still again he now has espionage act on his record as you you know he was convicted of it and so david petraeus though he got to bring in his legal team and make sure he didn't get charged with violating the

[15:35] espionage act yeah they uh they were they did not charge him with espionage or they didn't convict him of espionage instead he took a plea to a misdemeanor uh misuse of classified information or or failure to secure classified information something like that it was a it was a misdemeanor uh he paid a fine and um and got 18 months of unsupervised probation which you know is literally nothing

[16:06] and his lawyers got a reference to your case removed from the statement of facts because he lectured you about secrecy oaths he sure did yeah and then it turned out on the day of my uh sentencing he sent an all hands email to every uh cia employee in the world saying that today was a great day for the intelligence community that john kiriakou was sentenced to prison

[16:38] and that we have to remember our oaths mean something and then two hours later he lied to the fbi in his office and said that he had never provided classified information to his adulterous girlfriend who was not entitled to receive or possess it that's correct yeah paul broadwell was working on this biography and the thing that again i guess puts it on this level

[17:10] of donald trump is that he had these notebooks that were called black books yes because they had war strategy information there were diplomatic discussions that were referenced in there his own conversations about i think isis with president barack obama were noted in those books and there's you know sources and methods information inside of the books and oh

[17:40] i'm going to take these to my office and then when i meet with paula broadwell who i'm having an affair with i'm going to let her have a peek in the books for her book for her book that i'm having that i now am effectively making sure lionizes me and is not like some deep dive balanced biography but is going to be the thing that uh deifies me forever hopefully that's exactly what happened and leon

[18:11] panetta did the same thing when he became the cia director you know he authorized um he authorized briefings for the the director and writer of xerodark 30 classified briefings at the cia using a classified mock-up of the bin laden compound in exchange the analysts who provided those illegal classified briefings received gifts like watches and invitations to the movies premiere in

[18:42] hollywood and then after all that as he was patting himself on the back for the bin laden killing uh he he revealed the name of the navy seal that killed bin laden the name had been classified until he blabbed it out and then just said oh my bad sorry about that it was an accident so it's not espionage i didn't do it on purpose well the espionage act doesn't say anything about whether it's an accident the revelation is an accident or not

[19:14] yeah you know in my own case um in in the very first hearing that we had my attorneys asked that the charges be uh dismissed because i had no criminal intent what what i had done first of all they ended up dropping all the espionage charges because i hadn't committed espionage where they got me was on the intelligence identities protection act because i confirmed the name of a former colleague to a reporter who never made the name public and so um

[19:47] my attorneys asked that the the case be dropped because i had no criminal intent and i hadn't done it on purpose and in the tom drake case his judge said that that the person charged had to show criminal intent and my judge said that she had chosen to not respect the precedent that was set in the drake case and i still remember my attorney my lead attorney standing up and saying your honor are you saying that somebody can accidentally commit espionage

[20:18] and she said that's exactly what i'm saying and she looked at me and she said mr kiriakou you either did it or you didn't do it and i think you did it so there you have it and that's what's just maddening to listen to someone like eli honig talk about intent in the espionage act because it doesn't have anything to do with your actions no it's all about whether the information was classified or not classified and if

[20:50] you release it and it's classified then they say you had an intent to injure the united states and you were trying to advantage a foreign power and you're going to prison or you're going to have this on your criminal record at the very least and we'll give you probation for three to five years or something like that and so in any case let's let's spend just a few minutes we got a good amount of viewers so thank you all for tuning in yeah actually this is one of the better streams that i've been able to do so

[21:21] while i have you here i just like take 10 or 15 more minutes of your time if you don't mind it's a friday night i should be relaxing you know watching some popcorn flick and not bothering with the yeah i didn't even bother to shave yeah well it's friday there's nothing going on in the news it's not like i got a collared shirt i mean and we didn't oh by the way we didn't decide to match in like black t-shirts we're not sending some kind of like message to people here but um but yeah other than the fact

[21:52] that i do think the universe might be caving in on itself if assange and trump are going to be uh charged with violating the espionage act i i i don't know i feel like i'm entering like a circle of hell or something um i do honestly have to express my anxiety about that but so i'm looking at this and it it says essentially okay so i do want to make this point um which i think you'll be able to accent which is it says that they're going in to search

[22:24] his his estate and they mentioned the espionage act but that doesn't necessarily mean i agree with what eli was saying it doesn't necessarily mean the justice department's gonna bring an espionage act prosecution against donald trump that's just the justification they have that they can go into his estate and violate his property and and take it uh while he's not there and reclaim control of the u.s government documents right you're exactly right um it it

[22:55] allows them to better hone what it is they think they know or what it is that they think they want to know before they um they file charges and and they can do that in a couple different ways too they can they can file direct charges or they can turn everything over to a grand jury when they're finally ready to uh to uh charge them with something if they get to that point um it it doesn't have to be you know either or or

[23:25] not i mean it it doesn't have to be both they can do it either way but you know we're going to rapidly get to a point where these are all going to be political decisions that are going to be made i mean you charge a former president in the united states with espionage when you know what the real goal is is to charge him with something so it bars him from running for president again i think that's really what the goal is i could theorize and i wonder if what you think of this i could theorize that

[23:57] the conversation with trump's legal representatives goes something like this mr trump we're not going to charge you with violating the espionage act we could but we're just going to ask you don't run for president again exactly and we will not press criminal charges but if you do run for president we believe you're going to get in the white house and commit further offenses that involve mutilating destroying tampering jeopardizing these national

[24:28] security documents and we can't take that risk we're too anxious here in the national security state i mean obviously i recognize that there's a culture in some of these institutions they know they don't like trump he's got that so there is a hostility but still look they've now documented that this is going on and they don't want it to happen again i could totally see that being the way this plays itself out or you know if if trump

[24:59] won't back down i could see them charging him with something that would prevent him from running and then biden issuing a pardon but then even that even that would would put biden in a in a predicament because why is it okay for donald trump to violate the the espionage act but then you're coming down like a ton of bricks on julian assange and you've got ed snowden who did far far less than what you're accusing donald trump of doing um he didn't he

[25:31] didn't uh release code word special access you know sources and methods information uh and the poor guys in exile in in russia yeah well there are some serious political questions here i mean look i have tremendous sympathy for i i said this to you on your radio show and i have tremendous sympathy for all the families of people yeah you know including your family but also like everyone who has been through a prosecution under the

[26:02] espionage act i'm thinking of reality winner and her family i'm thinking of daniel hale and his friends and family i'm thinking of thomas drake i've been watching him and he told me personally he's going through flashbacks struggling as he sees what's been unfolding this past week um i'm thinking obviously if snowden you know he can't come back here um uh chelsea did get a commutation but she's still chelsea manning still has that on her record that she she can't go

[26:34] to canada you're because that's the way that they interpret that our law it's so insane um and then you know there's you know there's other people jeffrey sterling is a good example of you know what through what i think is a bogus trial where there wasn't ever really even evidence put forward literally no evidence yeah and he's got this against him so i feel for them at the same time i'm with you abolish the espionage act and the thing that's

[27:05] crazy that people are i'm glad people are getting introduced to in their last last week i hope people try and remember some of these statutes that are named you now know that there are multiple choices the justice department has when charging someone for mishandling classified documents it doesn't have to be the espionage act that's right you know when i was still at the cia it was early in my career i sat next to a woman who was having an affair

[27:36] with a man who used to be a senior cia officer and had gone on to be a commentator on cnn and you know in the course of pillow talk she said something to him about terrorism i don't remember what it was and he repeated it on the air so the cia filed a crimes report there was a doj investigation and they found oh he's having an affair with this woman so today she would be charged with espionage and she would be facing 10

[28:08] years in prison what they did then and this was 1997 was um they put a letter in her personnel file and they suspended her without pay for four weeks and she was not allowed to be promoted for two one-year cycles so how did we get from that to spending the rest of your life in in a maximum security penitentiary in one generation i don't understand

[28:39] but that's what we are yeah and i'll say to you that uh we don't have the narrative yet uh but that raises two questions so first uh you can respond to each of these they're connected we don't have the affidavit right and the justice department is saying that we may not get it but the affidavit is what the fbi's special agent usually writes out you know why they're gonna go conduct or execute this warrant and uh

[29:10] lays out some kind of uh facts for pursuing their actions and it's what's necessary i believe to get the judge to agree to it uh am i correct or wrong or it's sort of like part of the basis yeah what they did is they they went to the judge and said that they have no problem uh releasing the the uh warrant itself but the supporting affidavit apparently has so much uh

[29:41] either classified information in it or information that could reveal classified information that we likely won't see what the affidavit says you know it's it's funny too um kevin i think you would remember um during the jeffrey sterling trial the lengths that the justice department went to to protect information that really wasn't classified you know i remember even in the in the tom drake uh hearings

[30:13] uh they invoked sipa the classified information procedures act yeah yep and um and they couldn't say certain words like they would replace a word that they considered to be classified with a word like swimming pool right and i remember i remember a guy this became a joke actually among my my friends i remember a guy saying very seriously the word zarf when standing alone is unclassified

[30:43] it's like come on we're seriously fighting about this in court that whether the word zarf is classified or not but they go overboard and what they end up doing is convincing the jury that wow if the justice department is so concerned about this information getting out that even we the jury that have been given temporary security clearances just to hear this case we still can't hear some

[31:14] of the evidence because it's so sensitive then he must be guilty yeah you know so uh what i was going to say was uh we won't read that although the night first amendment center is going to try to and i think all the media organizations should try to get it unsealed oh the other issue may be that a judge would say it's prejudicial that like they should be able to keep that from being released just in case there's going to be charges brought against trump

[31:45] that'd be that resume um someone i don't normally like to give credit did note that back in 2019 there were whistleblowers that came forward who were complaining about the threat of uh donald trump's administration potentially sharing nuclear technology with the kingdom of saudi arabia i don't know if you're up on this yes and there's been some connecting of the dots theorizing which i'm i'm openly willing to engage in

[32:16] because it seems plausible um that maybe you know there is something very geopolitical here to why the justice department would want to recover these documents uh given the trump family's business deals with people in saudi arabia and this report from 2019 elijah cummings um who's no longer alive but uh was the chair and had some role in putting this together

[32:48] uh you know he's actually one of the few that did care about these whistleblower issues yeah some small degree that's right but uh it mentions that mohammed bin salman wants to get his hands on nuclear technology to have a way to counter iran and if iran would ever develop a nuclear weapon and of course we don't have a nuclear deal anymore so we don't really know what the iranian regime would choose to do in the future and there's

[33:20] some background to this you know the the saudis have been seeking nuclear technology since the 1980s and um they even went so far as to purchase uh information from the pakistanis the pakistanis the saudis have had a very close uh historically close uh relationship to the point where the the the saudis have provided so

[33:51] so much money to the pakistanis over the years that in in in gratitude the pakistanis named one of their largest cities after king faisal faisal abad so what the rumor was was that they had purchased this information that the pa that the pakistanis had gotten from the north koreans through a q khan the father of the pakistani nuclear program and that it was passed to saudi arabia in the last couple of years the

[34:22] saudis have come to a preliminary agreement with the government of turkey for the turks to build a nuclear power plant they claim that this is for peaceful purposes because of course you know there's not enough energy in saudi arabia they have to have nuclear power uh to power their country so what we're hearing uh in the media over the last couple of days is is plausible um i'm unaware of any

[34:53] truth no no no there's there's no basis to what i'm saying i'm just trying to figure out i'm trying to figure out why donald trump would have an interest in nuclear weapons documents that's all uh yeah yeah and i'm asking people about it others are wondering you know and and i have to i have to just put my foot down too and say i'm no person who wants another repeat of of what happened with the russiagate scandals and i know that the media made claims

[35:25] about stuff and the fbi and the justice department that were later proven to not be true but i just um having been doing this work for the last decade plus i really do believe what is coming out from sources about this investigation and i mostly believe it because we are seeing them use very delicate care in how they pursue the investigation and like giving giving

[35:55] donald trump so much time to return the documents like there's a subpoena there's a national archives there's a justice department team with a counterintelligence chief who goes there in june and then it's not until august that his estate is rated i just i i don't know look i understand the justice department is politicized and it's used as a tool by both parties in any administration that's the way it is now but i just have

[36:27] a tough time believing that they're not trying to assert some control and care because they don't trust donald trump to protect and handle these documents responsibly another thing that i would be interested in knowing is every former president is allowed to keep a lifetime secret security clearance not top secret but all former presidents are allowed access to secret documents

[36:58] and they are permitted secret level briefings anytime they want one by cia analysts many many times over the course of my career i was called upon to brief jimmy carter george h.w bush maybe they have a an interest in you know iraq let's say or afghanistan or something and you fly down there for the day and you give them their little briefing and you take a picture together and then you leave i'd be very interested to know if donald trump has a secret security clearance

[37:30] very interested in my whole career only one time did i ever hear of anybody um having their clearance revoked and it was uh admiral stansfield turner who had been the cia director uh he came back to headquarters for a briefing and i was instructed to brief him at the unclassified level uh he was going to give a speech on a cruise ship and just wanted some background about pro-democracy movements in the persian gulf and i asked why

[38:02] the unclassified level is it because he's going to pass the information on to these cruise ship uh passengers and they said no because we hate him that's why and i wonder if if they've given trump the same the same access that they give all other former presidents okay so it's mostly useless to go through the sets of documents that were taken and talk to people about the classified information because it's just you know there's there's apparently like one set of top secret documents uh we

[38:34] know that he had like clemency information on roger stone there's apparently something on the president of france i have no idea why donald trump's got something on emmanuel macron but that's a file that was taken those are the only two we really specifically know details and then they're all labeled vaguely as like miscellaneous secret they're just labeled by the classified so the top secret set obviously covers anything nuclear weapons related and that could be what that is um but i guess before you go and we really have a

[39:06] lot of uh viewers so thank you very much for tuning in i'm gonna say while you're here hit the subscribe button if you've got any quick questions for john before he runs off um this evening go ahead drop them here in the chat try to be kind to each other i saw you bickering and uh it was disruptive to the chat so yeah i put you on pause just so you could come back to this conversation and not be ridiculous but um so i want to read you this uh

[39:38] part of the new york times reporting on what went on because you were speaking earlier about the potential for an informant at mar-a-lago and i just you know this is some decent reporting on what was happening so this person's been mentioned his name's jay bratt he's the counterintelligence chief for the justice department he um they subpoena the trump organization for a copy of mar-a-lago's surveillance tapes a person with the knowledge of the matter said then the company complied

[40:11] they turned over the tapes to the government i don't know why the trump organization is complying but they did and mr trump's lawyers sift through his records at mar-a-lago to determine whether he still was holding on to anything classified or sensitive in the course of that trump uh in the course of the process trump's team made statements to the justice department about mr trump about what he had returned then later officials came to question whether the information was entirely accurate um and then it goes on to say that uh

[40:43] okay so anyways but i thought that was an interesting detail there there's more detail i don't think this is the exact uh report that i read earlier but there was quite a lot of detail in one of these new york times reports about how they were going through footage at mar-a-lago and they were watching individuals come and go at his estate and tracking movements and uh and so like at that when i hear that information i think there's other people who are suggesting

[41:13] that you know maybe they saw someone or they saw something happening and they're like okay well now's the time we really do have to move because it's kind of like why august yeah like you've been delicately moving all this time and you seem to be getting responses from trump's representatives but like at what point did you call bs and say uh we gotta move wow man that's uh that's a good question and and that very well could be uh the

[41:44] case that they just decided there was a danger in waiting any longer and uh and so they decided they had to move you know i thought it was interesting too that the new york times reported yesterday that both melania trump and ivanka trump had been begging donald trump not to run for president again because they want their wonderful lives back that was that was the word that the new york times uh used uh you know was that an accident that that it came out yesterday

[42:15] i i there's so much more to this story that we just don't know yet um and we're going to learn i think i do believe we'll know let me get some questions for you and then i'll let you go so um [Music] do you think uh do you think the espionage act will ever be reformed by congress oh that's a good question um and you know what on monday i would have said no never never in my lifetime anyway and now today i'm wondering if

[42:45] republicans are going to be so up in arms about this that uh that they'll want to finally reform it like i say it was it was just barely reformed not even reformed it was barely changed in the early 1950s and then again in 1996 during the clinton administration but these were just small technical changes to try to update it it needs to be scrapped and if we have to have one rewritten from scratch but i think that this might

[43:16] be the kick in the butt that people need on capitol hill where you know let's assume the republicans take the house uh in november and the democrats keep the senate which is the way things look right now uh what better way to work together on a major national security issue than than this yeah uh we know that there's gonna be extensive i mean extensive hearings about the politics in the fbi we've already been hearing from chuck grassley um ron johnson's all over the fbi he won't stop

[43:49] talking um there's you know it's hunter biden if it's not it's not going to be how they handled the raid on trump's mar-a-lago state uh so they're they're they're ready to dig into the i mean i've i've been hearing things from chuck grassley about the fbi that makes it sound like they're going to have church committee hearings again you know i heard that today church committee style hearings about the fbi you know what that i welcome no we need those we need more overseas we

[44:19] could we need more and and the idea that christopher wray can come out you know he's a for i think he's a former bush administration official right before he was a fbi director the idea that he can come out and they get to act like the fbi always does things by the book you know and i i keep wincing every time i hear people go oh the fbi only goes in when they have probable cause to execute a search warrant no that's not how that's good um all right so uh last question for you

[44:50] uh you want to say anything about where we're at with julian assange it's always good to keep doing our thoughts how this person now is thinking of this new news how is it legal to prosecute him and what can be done to protect him yeah i mean i guess do we think of these charges in any new light given that trump is now in jeopardy well my position really is identical to yours and it's that not only should bullying not have been charged uh but that uh

[45:20] that it's criminal to charge him uh under the espionage act for a whole bunch of reasons um he's a he's a publisher he's a journalist he's not an american citizen a whole bunch of different reasons but you know it just shows you how political and politicized the espionage act is where if you want to use it to attack people who publish inconvenient truths or you want it to you want to use it to attack um whistleblowers who reveal

[45:50] information that you don't want to be revealed then that's fine and then you leak your side of the story to cnn and fox and msnbc and the whistleblower goes to prison but then you know you get a situation like this where there are very serious political questions at hand and maybe the powers on capitol hill aren't going to like that very much getting back to julian real quickly um you know his family has accused me of being overly optimistic and i've been

[46:23] overly optimistic several times uh the case is before the european court of human rights but the boris johnson administration has already said that they won't delay extradition pending a decision by the european court of human rights it's a bureaucratic process and so he hasn't been extradited yet but if i had to bet money i'd say he is extradited and then it's up to us to show our support once he gets here to uh to washington yeah it's actually in the uh uk high court of justice

[46:53] and it's still in the high court yeah the european court of human rights is in strasbourg i think they're hearing it uh simultaneously okay um and then of course we've got the criminal case that his people filed in spain against that private security company you know and how in the world any of that information is even vaguely admissible in a court of law is a mystery to me yeah you know just just like the fact that the cia had drawn up plans to to murder him or to

[47:26] kidnap him in this brazen you know shootout that was going to take place in the center of london how does that not just wreck their whole case how does it not wreck their case that their star witness has finally confessed to having made everything up and is a convicted pedophile and convicted fraudster you want to put that guy on the stand that's your star witness a pedophile oh this is a good this is a good laugh to end on uh you want to respond quickly to mike pompeo

[47:56] meeting with pretty patel and and she asked pompeo if she could get a personal thank you for approving the extradition she was uh very briefly a candidate for leadership of the conservative party she dropped out a week or 10 days ago um but she really believed that a personal thanks from mike pompeo was going to make her prime minister of the uk i'm glad she failed in round one although none of them are any good i i i

[48:28] don't think that a pompeo endorsement does that for your career but that's this is my own opinion so uh all right thank you so much for joining me on friday evening we had this news dump um people can find you at rumble you do your political misfits yeah politicians yep political misfits on one bowl and i'm on facebook and twitter all the usual when you're writing you're doing your writing that appears that sheer post is great oh yeah sure post consortium news and covert action magazine and then i'll just say to

[49:00] everyone as i go uh stay tuned next week on monday we got some big assange related wikileaks news i can't really talk about right now but you know it's been building up to uh this moment and it it's gonna make you feel good if you've been waiting anxiously for some people around assange to fight back that's what we're talking about so i'll see you all soon um thank you and you guys all take care of yourselves
