Title: Revolutionary Change
Show: Revolutionary Change
Date: 2020-11-24
URL: https://youtu.be/IozNdHiBjJM
Duration: 12:00

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[00:01] [Music] so this obviously for me brings up thoughts of when we talk about whistleblowing about julian assange and what he's going through right now and to me i've viewed this for a long time that if we actually do extradite julian assange and try him for espionage we're basically ending our first amendment like that's without a doubt this is like yes without a doubt and shame on the washington post the new york times

[00:32] the wall street journal and others for not leaping to his defense because they're next yeah if julian assange is convicted he's going to be tried in the eastern district of virginia if he's extradited if he's convicted then every working journalist in america is going to be a target yeah it's extremely scary and it's and not only are they not covering it it's almost like they're covering it up i i have noticed that for years i've been very well versed in what's going on with julian i've been following this for probably eight or nine years now and it's just out of control what's

[01:03] going on with him and it's similar to what happened to you in that what they're really wanting to get him for is not how this all ended up getting wrapped up for him he ended up i mean they charged him with like sexual assaults that were bogus and like ridiculous thoughts yeah that's the strategy uh they they they do that now it's a strategy that they've developed after after i was arrested and tom drake was arrested and and uh chelsea manning and ed snowden they developed this this policy where they um will charge

[01:35] you with sexual impropriety of some sort look at people like matt de hart for example um or the vault 7 whistleblower what they'll do is charge you with let's say child porn or or sexual assault in the case of julian and then when they come up to trial they drop it and they say oh oh no our bad there was no child porn on the computer we made a mistake that's what they did with matt to heart

[02:05] they incarcerated him because they said they found child porn on his computer there was no child porn completely made up completely and totally made up now they're telling us that that we should believe that there's child porn on the vault seven whistleblowers hard drive or that julian raped two swedish women and then ah now that falls apart but you know he's a really bad guy otherwise you know he leaked all this information i still can't figure out how you can charge somebody that's not a us citizen um under the espionage act nor do

[02:38] i isn't that i mean is it julian's an australian national um and so how can he be i mean as far and i'm an attorney so i look at this and i'm like how does he have any responsibility yes to protect our country even if it even if he was doing what they said i mean why is he even why why do we have any say so about what julian assange does yeah that's right he's under no legal obligation to protect national defense information none none whatsoever in fact the

[03:11] journalist he's won journalistic awards and that's why i say if he's convicted then every national security reporter in america is going to be a target you know interesting enough too as you mentioned julian is an australian uh citizen i've given many interviews to australian journalists about julian and his case and no one ever asks me about the efficacy of a prosecution using the espionage act it's like nobody's

[03:42] thinking about it nobody's talking about it he should never have been charged in the first place now chelsea manning was charged with multiple counts of espionage that's different that's different yes that's different and and the fbi and the cia maintain that julian solicited the information and then assisted chelsea and hacking into the system there's no evidence that that ever happened no i mean i mean they they held her for how long trying to get her to basically say oh assange is who guided me to do this because

[04:13] what they want and she's tough she didn't she's that's another one that i just i feel like as a citizen in this country we can't pay her back enough like i i don't know how people can have anything but admiration for for her and yet mad respectfully manning i i know chelsea relatively well not not very very well not like you know tom drake or ed snowden or some of the others but um but chelsea is disarming

[04:44] because she's very soft-spoken she's very down-to-earth she's not an imposing figure in any way and then she is tougher than 99.9 of the men that i know yeah will not buckle to the justice department i have crazy respect for that most people would would just cave if they say look just testify against julian or you go to prison her response is

[05:17] lock me up yeah i'm not saying a word and she puffs it out until the bitter end it's crazy so what finally allowed why did they finally release her this time the the only reason they released her there was a lot of public pressure it wasn't the public pressure that got her released it was the fact that was two things one the judge finally came to an understanding that she really was not going to testify period she just wasn't going to testify and the other thing was that um they the prosecutors were

[05:48] not going to add any more charges against julian for which they would need chelsea's information to support and so finally the judge said just let her out it's just unbelievable but without that they really don't have anything which then i still don't understand how they're going to have a legitimate case against him no um there's got to be one juror out there who is going to have the the fortitude to stand up and say this i hope so you know what though i'll tell you a

[06:19] little another little anecdote about my own case my best friend um my best friend's wife has an uncle who happened to be o.j simpson's jury consultant that's random okay totally random washington's a very small town yeah so god bless him he flew up here from dallas we got him a security clearance he went through all the the paperwork i had 15 000 pages of classified documents that that we were

[06:50] using for my defense and then we all get to get got together for a meeting at the attorney's conference room and he said look if this were any other district in america besides the eastern district of virginia he said i'd say let's go for it we're going to win this thing you haven't done anything wrong but the eastern district of virginia they call it the espionage court for a reason because no nationals no national security defendant has ever won a case there so he said

[07:23] look at your jury your jury would be made up of people from the cia the pentagon the fbi the department of homeland security and a myriad of intelligence community contractors or their relatives he said you don't stand a chance yeah just take the deal and start the deal yeah no and we railroad people for everything all the time so it's not it's not even remotely surprising to me and i'm coming from a criminal defense background this is not

[07:54] this is not uncommon by by any stretch what can what can we do to for whistleblowers what because obviously there's beyond blackballing and ghosting from mainstream media and you know independent media does a decent job i mean i you know obviously i've seen you on shows and i've seen good coverage of julian and there are things out there but is there anything you know or think of that we can do so that more people can understand what's going on here

[08:25] that's a very tough question it's far tougher than it sounds um and people ask me all the time and i don't really have a perfect answer so i'll tell you what i what i generally tell people it's incumbent upon all of us to constantly be out there talking about these issues this show this topic is a public service people need to hear these issues because they're important to all of us they're really critical number two we have to ride our elected

[08:55] officials we have to call them and write them and email them and demand that they support national security whistleblowers we have to demand real congressional oversight of organizations like the cia and nsa and the fbi and the rest of them yeah otherwise just by their very nature they run rampant roughshod over our civil liberties and let's let me let me explain to people that because a lot of people listen to this are probably newbies to a lot of this stuff and that is what we refer to as the deep

[09:26] state for for people that um are listening when i say deep state we're talking about these executive branch federal agencies that have no accountability to the american people and basically they have been in charge for a very long time this goes back 60 years already at least with with those in terms of just complete running amok and no president that in my lifetime has even attempted to really reign that in yeah no president and you made a point when we first

[09:56] started the show first started talking uh that it doesn't matter if it's a red administration or a blue administration you know george w bush killed four people with the use of a drone in his last month as president barack obama killed 424 people with drones in his last month as president so this isn't exclusive to the republicans the republicans aren't the ones who decided they're going to be jerks to whistleblowers and they're going to use the espionage act this is most certainly

[10:27] bipartisan in nature you know i i gave an interview to a to a chilean newspaper the week that donald trump was elected president and they they interviewed me they interviewed tom drake from nsa and they interviewed ed snowden and um and they asked all of us if we thought things would be better under donald trump or worse under donald trump for national security whistleblowers i foolishly said that i was cautiously optimistic because they couldn't possibly get any worse than they were under barack obama never

[10:59] say that i it was a stupid mistake because of course things got worse almost instantaneously yeah we have reality winners serving five and a half years uh she's nsa whistleblower we have terry albury uh who actually is getting out of within a week from today um the fbi whistleblower uh and there are we know from from uh jeff sessions the former attorney general and his big mouth that there are 123 active national security investigations going

[11:30] on right now so it's far worse than barack obama yeah the sentences are longer than they were under barack obama so how do you how would you foresee what do you anticipate that we're going to see under a joe biden administration regarding some of this and our foreign policy um obviously i see him as obama's point 2.0 right out of my mouth i see kamala as hillary in a kamala suit yep um the career prosecutor yeah imagine the

[12:01] thousands of lives that she ruined by sending people uh to prison for long stretches for having you know personal use drugs so you don't have any high hopes for the for the biden administration for anything no i don't
