Julian Assange
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Some media outlets have attempted to label Julian Assange as an activist rather than a journalist or publisher, reflecting a broader debate about the role of whistleblowers and the media.  Assange is widely regarded as a political prisoner, with many observers criticizing his treatment and the conditions of his imprisonment.  John Kiriakou, a 15-year friend of Assange and a former WikiLeaks board member, describes himself as "on record as being a strong supporter of Julian Assange," crediting him with revealing war crimes committed in Iraq and crimes committed by Hillary Clinton's campaign, and arguing Assange functions as a publisher deserving journalist-like immunity.

WikiLeaks and the publishing record

The record

Assange and WikiLeaks played a significant role in bringing whistleblower cases to light when other news outlets avoided covering them; his work led to the unearthing of the Espionage Act and its application to whistleblowing activity.  Assange is also credited with originating the demand for technologies like SecureDrop, which has become a crucial tool for secure communication.  Kiriakou stresses that WikiLeaks has never had to issue a correction or apologize for publishing something incorrect, and that major outlets, the New York Times and Washington Post among them, have landed scoops based on material Assange published. He makes the same point about Chelsea Manning's leaks specifically: "Everything WikiLeaks has released has been true, everything. And WikiLeaks has never blown the source", a track record he calls the reason he would still trust WikiLeaks over any other outlet with a leak today, even as the organization has become "a shell of what it used to be" after fourteen years of pursuit of Assange, with most modern leaks now surfacing on Discord or Telegram or going directly to reluctant news outlets instead.

Manning, the cables, and Collateral Murder

Kiriakou dates official American interest in Assange precisely, and to a single event rather than to WikiLeaks itself: "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." He is dismissive of the bulk of that release, "99% of those documents were just sort of a day-in-the-life State Department reporting cables on issues that most people don't care about," some embarrassing but no more.

The exception is what he treats as the whole cause of the prosecution: the material that "came to be known as the Collateral Murder video", a military recording of helicopter gunships in Iraq killing Reuters cameramen and then firing on the rescuers and the ambulance sent to help them. Several people were killed and the incident was covered up. Kiriakou's summation of why this mattered is a single sentence: "Americans had no idea that the military had done this until Julian Assange said so." His account of the response is equally direct, "so the CIA and the FBI set out to silence him."

A transparency absolutist

Kiriakou rejects claims Assange works for the Russians: "He doesn't like the Russians any more than he likes the Americans." He calls Assange a "transparency absolutist" needed to balance government "secrecy absolutists," and recalls WikiLeaks meetings where members put phones in a microwave, only to find they were tracked anyway.

The DNC emails

Kiriakou stresses that the DNC emails Assange published were not disinformation but "authentic" primary-source documents, and that they revealed the DNC cheating Bernie Sanders, giving someone inside the committee a clear motive to leak.
The campaign against Assange

Pompeo and the "hostile non-state intelligence actor"

Kiriakou notes that Mike Pompeo, before becoming CIA Director and later Secretary of State, praised WikiLeaks while campaigning for Trump in 2016, saying "God bless WikiLeaks." Once at the CIA, per Kiriakou, Pompeo's public description of WikiLeaks as a "hostile non-state intelligence actor" was a carefully chosen phrase: by defining the organization that way, any senator who spoke up in Assange's defense could be framed as siding with an enemy, which meant covert action against Assange could be classified as counterintelligence and did not have to be briefed to Congress. The purpose of that classification, in Kiriakou's telling, was operational cover for a killing: because branding WikiLeaks a hostile non-state intelligence actor let the CIA treat action against Assange as counterintelligence rather than covert action, "you don't have to brief it and then you can go do your hit and murder Julian Assange and deny it in the media", the assumption being that any senator who defended WikiLeaks might himself be a foreign mole, so no one need be told.

Vault 7 and the crown jewels

On Gonzalo Lira's Roundtable in September 2022, Kiriakou explained the CIA's pursuit of Assange as "twofold." First, he said, Assange was "doing it with impunity", actively soliciting leaks, offering protection, and "taking people's personal security very seriously" by redacting to protect the identities of individuals named in the underlying documents, a level of tradecraft that "just enraged" the agency. Second, Kiriakou said, the 2017 Vault 7 release was the moment that "pushed the agency over the edge": those documents were "the most sensitive, most important crown jewels perhaps ever in the history of the CIA, that was just too much for them, bridge too far."

Surveillance, kidnap and kill plots

Kiriakou cites reporting by Mike Isikoff for Yahoo/Newsweek that the CIA drew up plans to kill Assange or snatch him. He says the U.S. enlisted the UK, Ecuador, and, as later reporting revealed, Spain to spy on Assange, keeping him in conditions Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has called torture outright.

The sexual-impropriety template

Kiriakou notes Assange was charged with sex crimes in Sweden that were eventually withdrawn, part of what he describes as a broader Justice Department tactic, used against whistleblowers including himself, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Matt DeHart, and the Vault 7 whistleblower, of pairing prosecutions with sexual-impropriety allegations (child pornography, sexual assault) that are quietly dropped before trial.

Financial de-platforming

Kiriakou traces the modern pattern of financial-platform de-platforming to Assange's case specifically: PayPal cut Assange off without a judicial order after the State Department falsely claimed he had broken the law, with PayPal saying it didn't need a judicial judgment and would simply take the executive branch's word for it to "un-person" him, a precedent, Kiriakou argues, that set the template for everyone who has been de-platformed since.

The prosecution

The Manning "hacking conspiracy" and its witnesses

Kiriakou has repeatedly framed Assange's prosecution as part of a broader Justice Department pattern he experienced directly. He says that in his own case, the government similarly tried to discredit him by falsely alleging he had stolen a diary he never stole; the underlying constitutional issue, he argues, is that under Supreme Court precedent a journalist may lawfully receive stolen information as long as the journalist plays no part in the theft itself, and on that principle, he says, Assange never tasked Chelsea Manning to steal anything. The indictment's claim that Assange conspired with Manning to hack rested, per Kiriakou, on a single source: a convicted Icelandic informant, Sigurdur Thordarson, who had himself been convicted of making false statements to the FBI after offering the bureau false information about Assange in exchange for money and later retracting it. Kiriakou calls what Assange did, publishing what Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were saying and doing, "very brave," and does not believe Assange conspired with Manning to hack anything, contrary to the indictment's allegations. Discussing the parallel Spanish criminal case, Kiriakou notes the prosecution's star witness there has since confessed to fabricating his testimony and is, like the FBI's source, a convicted pedophile and fraudster, a fact he says no judge in his right mind should credit.

The sentencing pattern

Kiriakou situates Assange's threatened 145-year sentence within a broader pattern of increasingly severe Espionage Act sentences he says the Justice Department refined against whistleblowers before ever reaching Assange. He cites NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who received five and a quarter years for leaking a single page of classified analysis on Russian involvement with the Trump campaign, and FBI agent Terry Albury, who received three and a half years for leaking a barely classified memo describing systemic racism in the FBI's hiring and promotion practices, each sentence, in Kiriakou's account, harsher than the last as the department learned from earlier cases that had fallen apart in court.

A non-citizen, and a secret grand jury

Kiriakou has pointed out that Assange, an Australian national with no U.S. citizenship, was nonetheless charged under the U.S. Espionage Act, and that in all his media appearances no interviewer has ever asked him about the legal basis for prosecuting a non-citizen under that statute. The grand jury proceedings against Assange were themselves secret; Kiriakou notes the fact that Assange had been charged with anything at all only became public because of an accidental Justice Department filing error in an unrelated Eastern District of Virginia case.

The collapsed 2017 negotiation

Kiriakou has relayed a secondhand account that Assange was at one point negotiating a Justice Department deal to drop the Vault 7-related charges, which collapsed after FBI Director James Comey found out and stopped it; reading further into the episode, Kiriakou describes the Justice Department negotiating in January,February 2017, through Assange's attorney Adam Waldman, for Assange's immunity and safe passage in exchange for his testifying that Russia was not the source of the 2016 WikiLeaks releases, until Senator Mark Warner alerted Comey, who ordered the negotiations stopped.

Extradition and the Eastern District of Virginia

The extradition fight

Speaking the day before an April 2022 Westminster court hearing, Kiriakou said the court was due to decide whether to advance Assange's extradition order to Home Secretary Priti Patel, who had already indicated she would sign it. He noted the European Court of Human Rights had, by that point, set three precedents refusing to extradite British prisoners to the United States because of its use of solitary confinement, but that no law forced a stay on Assange's case while that court's review was pending. Discussing the same precedents in 2023, Kiriakou specified that in each of the three cases the European Court blocked extradition solely because the prisoner had a documented mental illness combined with the prospect of U.S. solitary confinement, which the court had deemed cruel and unusual punishment, grounds observers hoped might also stop Assange's case, though there was no guarantee the court would even agree to hear it. He ultimately believed Assange would be extradited regardless, since the Boris Johnson government had already said it would not delay extradition pending a European Court of Human Rights decision; he separately relayed rumors of a possible face-saving plea deal in which Assange would plead to a national-security or Espionage Act charge, be sentenced to time served, and be expelled from the UK to Australia rather than face trial.

Why the Eastern District

Kiriakou draws a direct parallel to his own prosecution to explain why Assange would be tried in the Eastern District of Virginia. In his own case, his best friend's wife's uncle, O.J. Simpson's jury consultant, who had also worked with George Zimmerman and William Kennedy Smith, was given a security clearance to review the 15,000 pages of classified discovery, and told Kiriakou's eleven attorneys that in any other U.S. district he would have a real chance, but that an Eastern District of Virginia jury would likely include people who work for, or have relatives who work for, the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, DHS, or intelligence contractors, so he should take the plea deal. Assange, per Kiriakou, has never been to the Eastern District of Virginia or the United States at all, and is being tried there specifically because it is the district where he is most likely to be convicted and to receive the maximum sentence, up to 145 years. If convicted there, Kiriakou argues, every working journalist in America becomes a target, since the government has never before prosecuted a journalist, or even a publisher, for espionage for practicing journalism, and there is no evidence any Assange-published leak caused negative effects on any U.S. military operation.

The terrain of the courtroom, and jury nullification

On the #FreeAssangeVigil in May 2020, Kiriakou said the greatest strategic risk in Assange's prosecution was that neither the mainstream media nor Assange's defence had fully absorbed the peculiar terrain of the Eastern District of Virginia: the district's jury pool is drawn heavily from CIA, Pentagon, DHS, FBI and intelligence-contractor employees; Judge Leonie Brinkema had been passed over for the case in favour of a chief judge who was "a FISA court judge before he was named to the Eastern District"; and the courtroom would be run under SIPA classified-information procedures, plastic sheeting on the windows, code words substituted for classified terms, that Kiriakou argues bias juries towards conviction. Kiriakou said the only remaining defence-side lever was "jury nullification", the one right-thinking juror out of twelve, and that he would personally support leafleting the Alexandria courthouse in the spirit of the Fully Informed Jury Association.

On a 2021 panel he listed three matters he considers unavoidable for any appellate court, the character of the witness Thordarson, the CIA's hiring of a Spanish company to bug the Ecuadorian embassy, and the leaked account of a CIA and MI6 plot to kidnap or kill Assange in Knightsbridge, and asked whether judges "just keep all of that stuff out of their heads." On the prosecutor's motives, see prosecutorial careerism.

Detention and the man

The Swedish cases and the embassy

Kiriakou's account of how Assange came to be confined begins with the mechanism he says was used to silence him: "they did that by trumping up two sexual assault cases in Sweden." He notes the outcome, "both of the women who made accusations against Assange later said that the police pushed them to do it", and that consequently there are no sexual assault charges pending against him.

The refuge followed from a chain of feared extraditions rather than from the Swedish allegations themselves: Assange, then in the UK, was afraid of being sent to Sweden and "then in turn extradited to the United States because of the Bradley Manning release," and so took shelter in the Ecuadorian embassy at the invitation of the Ecuadorian government. What ended that shelter, in Kiriakou's telling, was a change of government in Quito, the United States "dramatically improved its relationship" with an administration that "turned out not to be a leftist government," and talked the Ecuadorians into permitting audio and video bugging of the embassy. The surveillance was total: "they were able to collect literally everything that Julian was saying and doing, even his bathroom was bugged."

He sets the Vault 7 disclosures, which he says the CIA admitted were the crown jewels of its technical abilities, as the trigger for what came next, a plan formed during the Trump administration "to either kidnap Julian and render him to the United States, or to kill him," were he to leave the embassy.

Belmarsh, and the charge he was actually held on

Kiriakou notes the asymmetry between the scale of the threatened sentence and the charge actually keeping Assange inside. He was held in Belmarsh Penitentiary in south London, "the highest security penitentiary in all of England... where the most dangerous criminals and terrorists in the country are held", while facing an American espionage case carrying "something like one hundred and forty-five years in prison." The charge under which he was detained in Britain, however, was bail-jumping for having entered the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place, over allegations that, as Kiriakou confirms, no longer existed.

He also assigns the two administrations distinct roles in the case: it was the Trump administration that initially filed the multiple espionage charges, but the Biden administration that "elected to go forward" with the request for the British government to hand him over.

Solitary confinement and the torture findings

Kiriakou notes Assange won his extradition case, the British courts having refused three times to extradite prisoners to face U.S. long-term solitary confinement, yet remains in solitary pending appeal, "not been exposed to sunlight for something like nine years." Kiriakou says Stella Morris, Assange's partner, told him his emotional state is "fragile" and his health "bad." Speaking on a 2021 panel alongside Daniel Ellsberg, he began from the UN finding, "nils melser... the un special rapporteur on torture has said repeatedly that what julian has been uh experiencing is a form of torture", and extended it to American practice, naming solitary confinement and communications management units as forms of torture in their own right.

"Tougher than everybody gives him credit for"

Kiriakou's argument on that panel was that the case against Assange rested on a misreading of the man, and that none of the pressure would work: "the government doesn't yet have an appreciation for the fact that that none of that matters julian is tougher than everybody gives him credit for being just like dan was tougher than everybody gave him credit for being." The comparison he draws is of scale, Ellsberg "stood up to a president arguably one of the the most powerful and corrupt presidents in modern american history julian has stood up to what three different presidents so far", and the warning is directed at the prosecutors: "there's this odd way that people have a tendency to underestimate our resolve and they do that i think randy at their own peril."

He expects vindication on a long timeline rather than a legal one, which is why he thinks Assange "has been so steadfast in in his belief that he did the right thing" despite a cost he calls high, "god knows the cost has been high we see what the poor man is is undergoing."

The press response

"An activist, not a journalist"

The distinction Kiriakou has run into repeatedly, from the national-security press itself, is that Assange is an activist rather than a journalist. He recounts a Zoom call, chaired by Rob Reiner, on which a colleague asked former Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel why the national-security press was not defending Assange; "in unison they said that Julian Assange is not a journalist, he's an activist," which Kiriakou found flabbergasting. Describing the same exchange on Live on the Fly in November 2021, a call with attorneys, intellectuals and a handful of journalists, he said he put the question directly to a Knight Ridder reporter and was answered "Julian Assange is an activist, not a journalist" and then, when reminded that Assange was at minimum a publisher, "you know what, I don't want to talk about Julian Assange." Kiriakou rejects the distinction, arguing that at the very least Assange is a publisher, and that no publisher has ever before been put on trial for espionage for practicing journalism.

Why national-security journalists stay silent

On Live on the Fly with Randy Credico in November 2021, Kiriakou laid out the two reasons he believes American national-security journalists have failed to cover Assange's prosecution as an existential threat. First, he said, most outlets no longer have a budget for investigative journalism, so they "crawl into bed with the CIA", republishing agency press releases as reporting and, in the case of NBC News's Ken Dilanian, literally sending drafts to Langley for clearance before sending them to their own editor. Second, he said, they are afraid.

Unindicted co-conspirators

Kiriakou notes the Assange case is only the endpoint of a longer trajectory. Under the Barack Obama administration, he said, mainstream reporters were formally described by the Attorney General as "unindicted co-conspirators" and their homes raided, a precedent, in his framing, that leaves "literally nothing to stop the government from targeting" the New York Times and the Washington Post next if Assange is convicted.

Kiriakou's involvement

From anger to advocacy

Kiriakou's own path to Assange advocacy was not straightforward. He says the initial cache of documents Chelsea Manning gave to WikiLeaks happened to include his own Social Security number, buried in an obscure cable about a Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip, which initially left him angry at Assange. After his release from prison, he connected with Dr. Suelette Dreyfus, founder of the Australian NGO Blueprint for Free Speech and a co-founder of WikiLeaks alongside Assange, who asked him in 2015 why he was not an Assange supporter. When Kiriakou raised secondhand accounts that Assange had "kind of a problem with women," Dreyfus told him she believed police had put those women up to the allegations. He came to see the two cases as inseparable: "in a way we're all Julian Assange", arguing that if the government successfully prosecutes a non-U.S.-citizen publisher under the Espionage Act, journalists at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post are next. He appeared on at least one whistleblower-conference panel alongside Assange, Edward Snowden's lead attorney, and an Australian journalist who had been among the original reporters on the WikiLeaks story. He also recalls, without particular sympathy, enjoying Chelsea Manning's Twitter feud with actor James Woods.

His own case, in parallel

Kiriakou traces his own whistleblowing to his fifteen years of CIA service, rising to become chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11, and urges other whistleblowers to hire an attorney experienced in whistleblower defense before going public, rather than waiting as he did. He pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by confirming the name of an officer involved in the CIA's rendition program, was sentenced to 30 months, and was released in 2015 after serving almost two years. In May 2023 he disclosed that a Twitter attorney had told him, before Elon Musk's takeover, that the DOJ had obtained his own Twitter communications under a sealed warrant during the Biden administration, he said he did not know the nature of the case. Around the same period he described Assange as being "slowly executed" in public, tempered by a glimmer of hope in a letter Assange wrote, published via his wife Stella, addressed to the new King of England.

The Department of Justice rally

Kiriakou has twice described the same episode: a rally outside the Department of Justice on the anniversary of Assange's arrest, organized by Misty Winston, at which he gave a five-minute speech followed by Jerry Condon of Veterans for Peace. During the event, a young man in his mid-20s stripped naked, doused his genitals and clothes in Sterno lighter fluid, and attempted to set himself on fire while Joe Lauria of Consortium News and Ford Fisher livestreamed it; the man was so nervous he was visibly shaking and could not get his lighter to catch. Attorney Skip Kalton House, a fellow Assange supporter, reached him first and slapped the lighter from his hand; Kiriakou then shoved the man eight to ten feet away and kicked the lighter out of reach, preventing him from self-immolating. The man had a fresh, inflamed tattoo reading "Free Assange" across his stomach and was ultimately taken by police for a mental-health evaluation rather than arrested, which, to Kiriakou's surprise, he considered the appropriate outcome.

Kiriakou connects the incident to a broader decline: the U.S. had, by his account, dropped to around 43rd or 46th in the World Press Freedom Index, behind Bosnia-Herzegovina and Costa Rica, a fall he attributes in part to Assange's continued imprisonment.

The near-pardon

Kiriakou says that on Trump's last day in office, Tucker Carlson told him Mitch McConnell had personally called and killed a planned joint pardon of Assange, Edward Snowden, and Kiriakou himself, McConnell's stated fear being that pardoning all three together would cost him control of the Republican caucus in the Senate on Trump's own impeachment vote.

Defenders before the embassy eviction

Kiriakou uses the Assange case as the measure of an activist's persistence. Describing Suzie Dawson, the New Zealand activist who later became chief executive of the company behind Panquake, he dates her commitment to the period before the eviction: "I don't think I have ever known someone as dogged as Suzie, whether it was defending Julian Assange even before he was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, or whether it was Panquake or anything else ... when she sets her mind to doing something, she's going to do it, and it gets done."

On the eve of the eviction (April 2019)

Four days before Assange was removed from the embassy, Kiriakou told a vigil livestream that he had grown more optimistic overnight: "24 hours ago I thought, well, this is what we've been fearing all along, it's finally going to come to pass ... but the more I thought about it today, I thought this is actually the perfect time for us to make that argument that Julian is a journalist, Julian is a publisher. Julian is not the kind of person that the Espionage Act was written for. He's not a spy, he's a working journalist doing his job."

He set the case against his own CIA formation, where "we were always taught that everything is a shade of gray, and in many cases that's just simply not true. Some things are black and white, they're right and wrong. This is just wrong." His stated faith was in the jury system, with one caveat he said could not be overstated: that the jury actually receive the information needed to decide justly.

The practical programme he set out that night ran on three tracks. Write outside the sympathetic outlets, not only "reader-supported news, Consortium News, Truthdig, Truthout" but the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Washington Times, and build a deliberate alliance with civil-libertarian conservatives, on the ground that "the ideological spectrum is not a straight line, it's a circle, and there's a point where the right and the left meet, and that is where civil liberties are involved." Put bodies outside the courthouse, since a case of that profile would be broadcast all day and no jury instruction could realistically seal it off. And raise money for counsel: not one or two attorneys but "a team of a dozen of the best legal minds in Washington", drawn from the half-dozen Washington firms he says are "legal titans", noting that a couple of them are "great if you're guilty and you want to negotiate the best deal" and a couple "great if you're innocent and you want to go to a jury and you want to win this thing."

What a conviction would establish

Kiriakou's argument for why the case matters beyond Assange is that a successful prosecution "would open the door for the Justice Department to prosecute literally any journalist who printed classified information in an article. It would expose any news outlet, including its publishers, to espionage charges for publishing any information that the government considered to be national defense or classified. It would be the end of a free press in the United States, and I really believe I'm not overstating that."

He extends the risk past American jurisdiction: "you think the British government isn't watching this? You think the French aren't watching to see how this plays out, or the Israelis, or even maybe the Chinese? ... I would bet a paycheck: if this prosecution is successful, they're going to turn around and do exactly the same thing." He places the case in a class with Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs, "one of those once-in-a-generation events", and noted that he had spoken with Assange by telephone a couple of times but never met him in person, which "doesn't matter to me one whit."

The press that did not defend him

Asked why so few establishment journalists would stand up for Assange, Kiriakou pointed at the economics rather than the politics: "almost no outlets have a budget for investigative journalism anymore. You have to turn to the likes of ProPublica, or, well, I hate to even say it, the Intercept, and WikiLeaks, for real investigative journalism." Mainstream journalists, he said, "either don't have the wherewithal or the fire in the belly ... they're told what to cover and they're largely content doing that." The symptom he named is that scarcity has become newsworthy in itself: "it's always such blockbuster news when they come up with something that's mildly interesting, because investigative journalism is so rare that journalism in and of itself is news. That's the sad state we're in." On ownership he was blunter still, "you've got pets like the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, contract with the CIA ... the media is not the media, it is just mouthpieces of power."

The smear campaign as an operation (2018)

Kiriakou's reading of the run of hostile press about Assange during his embassy confinement was that it was conducted rather than merely published. "Intelligence services all around the world are well schooled in psychological warfare, and I think this is a concerted, formal attempt to weaken Julian mentally, emotionally, maybe even physically, and to make him give up in the end. I think that's really the goal. They can plant stories in whatever media they want, they put these false narratives out there, and people are gullible."

He placed the leaking in the ordinary Washington pattern rather than treating it as anomalous: "the biggest leakers in Washington are the White House, the CIA and the FBI ... they do it to control the story, they do it to control the debate, they do it to influence public opinion. It's only a leak if it's something that they don't like; if it's something that they like, it's authorised." He singled out the Guardian, a recipient of WikiLeaks material, as a particular disappointment for having turned on Assange.

The distribution of the attacks told him something about who was driving the case. No complaints about WikiLeaks were coming out of the White House or the Justice Department; the leaks came from the FBI and the CIA, with public statements from Mike Pompeo. His inference: "this is a tier one target or operation for the CIA, but it's really not very important for the White House."

The Strasbourg route, and why it was hollow

In April 2022, with the extradition order having reached Home Secretary Priti Patel and Kiriakou expecting her to sign it, he set out the one remaining avenue and its defect. Assange's lawyers had fourteen days to appeal to the UK Supreme Court, which he thought they would do but which would only buy fourteen days. Beyond that lay the European Court of Human Rights, where, Kiriakou counted three, there were precedents of the court refusing to let the United Kingdom extradite to the United States people suffering from mental illness, on the reasoning that the American practice of solitary confinement was enough to push them to attempt suicide. Assange, mildly autistic and suffering from chronic depression and anxiety, fell within the same class.

The defect was procedural. The UK government's position was that Assange was perfectly free to apply to Strasbourg, but that this did not oblige Britain to halt the extradition while the application was heard, which, as Kiriakou put it, defeats the whole purpose of the appeal.

What he told supporters to do

His conclusion was a set of instructions rather than a prediction: be in the courtroom every day until they throw you out, be out in front of it when CIPA is invoked and the world's media are there, give interviews, write op-eds, and "blow whistles if that's all that you can do", so that Assange can see he is not alone.

Publisher, if not journalist

Kiriakou''s argument for why the prosecution endangers everyone else is built to survive disagreement about Assange himself. "This is why the prosecution of Julian Assange is so dangerous, this exactly is the reason why Julian''s case is such a slippery slope. Because you use the Espionage Act to prosecute a journalist, and even if you don''t believe that he''s a journalist, which I do, you can''t deny that he''s a publisher."

The consequence he draws is sequential: "if he''s convicted under the Espionage Act, then what''s to keep the Washington Post national security reporter from being convicted? Or the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, whoever in the White House happens to be in the White House, if he doesn''t like something that''s been written and there''s one little kernel of information that may or may not be legitimately classified. What''s to keep the White House from going after that next person?" He also notes the jurisdictional oddity in passing: Assange is not an American citizen.

The reading list as a test of democracy

The same conversation produced his definition of what had been lost. "We''re not in a democracy. If we were in a democracy we, as adults, would be able to choose the sources of news that we want to consume, and we just simply can''t do that. I can''t go any more to Press TV to get the Iranian side of a story, or to teleSUR, or to RT America. I can''t even go to Al Jazeera America, it doesn''t even exist any more." His characterisation of the period was one he flagged as deliberate rather than loose: "this is McCarthyism all over again. I hate speaking in hyperbole, but I really don''t believe this is hyperbole. It''s dangerous."

The day before the appeal

Speaking the day before the February 2024 hearing, Kiriakou reported a consensus among the people closest to the case. "I''ve spoken to a lot of people about this hearing next week, Julian''s relatives, his UK attorneys, one of his American attorneys, even people at WikiLeaks, and everybody is pretty certain that he''s going to be not just extradited a week from tomorrow, but whisked directly from the courtroom to a waiting FBI plane and flown immediately back to the United States."

His instruction for that event was collective and practical: "it''s up to all the rest of us to stand up. We''re going to have to maintain a presence at that courthouse. We have to go to every hearing, we have to stand outside, we have to talk to the media, we have to march, we have to write, we have to meet with citizens who need to be educated on this issue."

The reason he gives is the one he always gives, stated at its shortest: "there''s a very thin line between Julian and all the rest of us. Julian is obviously a publisher, he''s obviously a journalist, and any conviction, any prosecution, would put every national security journalist in America on the firing line. The Constitution really is what is at stake here ... we can''t go down without a fight."

He also flagged the charge he expected to matter most in an American trial, the computer-crime count that Reality Winner, Daniel Hale and Terry Albury did not face and Assange does, and predicted the government would use it to argue that Assange had aided terrorists, as the military had argued of Chelsea Manning.

Measured against the documents scandal

When classified material was found in Mike Pence's possession in 2023, Kiriakou used it to rank the sensitivity of what Assange had actually published. Pence's briefing books from vice-presidential foreign trips contained finished CIA intelligence, including psychological profiles of the leaders he was about to meet, "that's very highly classified. Julian Assange never released anything as highly classified as that."

He drew the comparison deliberately: "so this is worse than what Julian Assange is being accused of having done." He makes a parallel point about the State Department cables, that roughly half of what WikiLeaks published were background briefings of the same character, still withheld from declassification.

'They're not making this up'

When the UN Special Rapporteur on torture wrote to the British government in late 2019 about Assange's treatment, Kiriakou called it "an important statement coming from the United Nations," and immediately noted its reception: "I'm afraid that it's been largely ignored, at least by the US and British governments."

He vouched for the reporting on Assange's condition from his own contacts, "I'm in touch with Julian Assange's attorney", and against the suspicion that it was advocacy: "when we read in the media that Julian struggles to remember his own name, or that he is unable to participate in his own defence, they're serious about this. They're not making this up. They're not exaggerating."

His characterisation of the cause was deliberate rather than incidental: "the American and British governments are breaking him mentally and emotionally. They're doing it deliberately. They're doing it with malice aforethought."

On the extradition hearing then approaching, he noted the anomaly in its length: such hearings "normally take about four hours. This one is scheduled to be something like four weeks."

Institutional, not ideological

Asked in February 2020 who in the United States actually wanted Assange extradited, Kiriakou narrowed it to one body: "the only organization that is even talking about extradition is the US Justice Department. Certainly there's no movement among the American populace demanding the head of Julian Assange." He put the number of Americans who have never heard of Assange at "at least 95 per cent."

Asked whether that made the Justice Department an arm of the sitting administration, he declined the framing. "Most of these prosecutors are career prosecutors. They're the same people that were prosecuting cases under Barack Obama and under George W. Bush before him. So I don't think it's so much ideological as it is institutional." He located the drive in the Justice Department's National Security Division and in the prosecutors and judges of the Eastern District of Virginia, with Jeff Sessions as the attorney general who "got the wheels moving in the first place." Bill Barr he treated differently: "Barr is not Jeff Sessions. His job is to protect the president, as he sees it, and putting Julian Assange in prison I think is going to help with the Republican base."

On why the indictment covered only the 2010 Manning material and not the later releases, his guess was tactical: "they're holding that information in reserve in case they do get him here and he is somehow acquitted of the leaks in the Afghan and Iraq war logs. They have that in reserve to charge him with new crimes afterwards."

The constituency that did not show up

Kiriakou identifies a specific reason the case never found an American political base. "There are a lot of Democrats who blame Julian Assange personally for giving us Donald Trump. They believe that his release of the DNC emails in the weeks before the 2016 election guaranteed Donald Trump's victory, and they just will not forgive him for that."

He regards that as a category error about who Assange's allies should be: "Democrats ought to be Julian Assange's natural constituency here. It should be Democrats and progressives who are in the streets demanding that Julian be released, and it's not." The people actually marching, he said, were "those of us who are true progressives," not run-of-the-mill Democrats.

The legal defence he offers is short and does not depend on any of that: it is illegal in the United States to classify a crime, "if something is a crime, by definition it cannot be classified," the American people have a right to know what is done in their name, and Assange released evidence of American war crimes. "That's a public service. It's not a crime."

Why no plea was on offer

Asked in 2023 whether the Justice Department might offer Assange a deal, Kiriakou doubted it and named the only shape such a deal could take: "if he, or if WikiLeaks, had additional information that had not yet been released, and as part of the deal they would negotiate X amount of time in exchange for you not releasing the information, or returning it back to the government."

Absent that, the arithmetic was against it: "he's facing 175 years in prison on dozens of espionage charges. I can't imagine that they would want to make that any easier for him."

On the politics of the charges themselves he credits Obama with never bringing them, blames Trump for bringing them, and records his own mistaken expectation that Biden would drop them because he understood the New York Times problem from the inside. "No. He doubled down."

Whether a trial was possible at all

Asked in 2019 what kind of trial Assange would receive if the United States succeeded in extraditing him, Kiriakou answered a different question. He did not think Assange would ever go to trial: "I think that the deck is so stacked that it's just not within the realm of possibility for him to receive a fair trial."

His grounds were the venue and the judge rather than the evidence, the Eastern District of Virginia, and a bench on which, he said, no national security defendant had ever won.

He drew the consequence from his own case. Having described being told at his plea hearing that the confession he objected to was window dressing, he said the same thing was going to happen to Assange.

The delegation at the Justice Department

Kiriakou breaks his own convention against dating a recording in order to record one afternoon's events. "I know on podcasts and things like this we try not to be specific to a certain day, but I'm going to be specific to a certain day. Today, six Australian parliamentarians, including four senators, two members of the lower body, the house, including a former deputy prime minister came to Washington. They held a rally this afternoon at the Justice Department and a vigil. And they brought with them a letter signed by 60 members of the Australian Parliament asking President Biden to drop the charges against Julian Assange and let him go home."

He uses the occasion to press the comparison with David Hicks, an Australian whose repatriation from Guantanamo Canberra had secured despite regarding him as a genuine combatant. His verdict on the trajectory is that it had improved and remained insufficient: "it's getting better than it was 6 months ago even. But more needs to be done to impart to the White House that this is an issue worth falling on the sword for. We have to release Julian Assange."

The contingency for a Russian rescue

Kiriakou dates the first proposal to kidnap or kill Assange earlier than the Pompeo period usually associated with it: "the first time that a covert action program was proposed to either kidnap or murder Julian Assange was by John Brennan in the last two years of the Obama administration," and it "took on sort of a new life" once Pompeo arrived. He stresses the sourcing of the Yahoo News account that made it public, "they interviewed, count them, 36 current and former intelligence officers. This isn't just some renegade CIA person calling it in a tip", and states the plan as a fork: flush him out of the embassy and render him for trial, "or if he resisted, to shoot and kill him," with an understanding that MI6 rather than the CIA would do the killing.

The detail he offers as characteristic of how the agency actually plans is the branch nobody would have anticipated. "This is very common in CIA operational planning, you have to have scenario A, B, C and D." One of them covered a Russian rescue.

> "Were he to be rescued by the Russians and bundled onto a Russian government plane, in which case he would be treated as like a diplomatic pouch would be treated, you can't mess with it, the CIA was going to shoot the tires out of the Russian plane and create an international incident to keep it from taking off so they could snatch Julian."

His objection to the plan is not only its illegality but its effect on everything downstream of it: "how in the world is this guy going to get a fair trial? We're the ones who are trying to murder him."

The charge he was actually being held on

Asked in 2022 what Assange was in Belmarsh for, Kiriakou's answer is that the legal basis had already expired. "He's being held on a bail jumping charge, and the maximum sentence for the bail jumping charge has come and gone. There's no reason to hold Julian Assange. Even as he's awaiting extradition, there's no legal reason to hold him. But they just decided they're not gonna pay any attention to the law."

He also states the publishing record as a defence in itself: WikiLeaks "has never, ever in all the years of its existence had to issue a correction, had to retract something that it published, or had to apologize for making a mistake", and calls it the only organisation that solicits information and genuinely protects it, "unlike the Intercept, unlike the Guardian."

See also

- John Kiriakou
