[00:03] hello everyone I'm Kevin gustola and welcome to the unauthorized disclosure weekly podcast I'm pleased to be with you uh with you again and uh here on the show we're having John kiriaku's CIA whistleblower and a friend to come on and discuss some particular stories that are in the news um also I wanted to talk with him about the passing of a dear friend and a larger than life figure Dan Ellsberg so
[00:33] thanks for coming on the show again oh thanks for the invitation Kev and uh I wish it wasn't uh you know so sad but also I will add that in the last week or two as it had become clear that we were in the final days of Dan ellsberg's life that I've had an opportunity to learn some things about Dan that I hadn't known at all also learned from you some things about Dan and I'm looking forward
[01:03] to have you share a story but before we go forward I'd like to ask that you share what it meant to have Dan Ellsberg as a mentor and talk about in particular Dan Ellsberg as the kind of I suppose Godfather of whistleblowers out there because we hear a lot of conversation about his role exposing the Pentagon papers certainly that's his definitive
[01:34] moment in his life but less about what he was doing in the last 25 years of his lifetime when he was always there to provide Outreach to whistleblowers who needed it you know he said something to me once right after we first met and this would have been 2000 met on the phone this would have been like late 2007 or early 2008. he said isn't it a shame to be known for
[02:05] something that we did in our 20s or 30s and then not really accomplish anything of note for the remainder of our years and he said look I I'm an old man now and he he was old in 2007 he was old but he said that he was not going to rest on his Laurels and so that's why he was active in so many causes in so many marches and demonstrations and and mentoring um other National Security whistleblowers and writing he was
[02:37] prolific in his writing and he wrote very serious tomes uh and then in just the last two years of his life he he released information classified at the top secret level and he asked the justice department to prosecute him this is one of the most selfless things I've ever heard of anybody doing every anywhere in any context the the whole point of this was it it requires a little bit of
[03:07] background um the Espionage charges against me there were three of them were dropped I hadn't committed espionage and so they were dropped um the Espionage charges against Chelsea Manning in the end were commuted so Chelsea Manning couldn't appeal up to the Supreme Court uh Jeffrey Sterling was convicted of Espionage and has standing to appeal or had standing to appeal um but ran out of money and frankly
[03:38] he just didn't have it in him to keep up the fight any any more than he had already fought and so Dan was always hopeful that God forbid one of us should be charged with Espionage that we had the wherewithal to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court because he believed so strongly that the Espionage Act was unconstitutionally vague and unconstitutionally Broad but nobody had been able to get all the way up to that point at the Supreme Court and so he
[04:09] thought by God I'm 90 years old I have nothing to lose I'm gonna do it and so he had held on to this top secret nuclear related information for decades finally released it and said I'm releasing it it's clearly classified and I demand that the justice department prosecute me under the Espionage Act and they didn't and I think that they didn't for a couple of reasons first of all because they like the status quo they
[04:41] like being able to use the Espionage Act as a weapon against National Security whistleblowers and secondly I think that deep down they were afraid that Dan would win he would win and then they would have to start back at the very beginning by rewriting the Espionage Act and being forced to write it narrowly so that it could be used against the people that it was meant to be used against those spies who were working against the United States for a foreign Nation not
[05:13] against journalists not against Publishers not against whistleblowers but against spies I know that uh when you were going through your prosecution um he was crucial in advising you on how to handle including what your lawyers were suggesting that you should do uh and I know that uh first met you at the time when you were having to decide whether to fight or
[05:46] accept a plea agreement and I know that you were benefiting from having a connection with Dan Ellsberg where he could tell you okay yeah I think what they're saying makes sense or you know whatever yes yes there there was certainly not unanimity among my attorneys and I had 11 attorneys um but there were sort of analytic lines that were clearly divided clearly dividing that
[06:16] so my whistleblower attorneys were were adamant that I should fight this go to trial and fight it the risk was very very high I asked my criminal defense attorneys realistically if I go to trial and I lose what am I looking at and the answer unanimously was 12 to 18 years and the government was offering me 30 months of which I would do at a maximum 23 and I ended up doing the 23. so I talked to Dan about it and Dan said
[06:47] look this idea of challenging the Espionage Act this is not for you he said I would take the deal I would take the deal I had five kids yeah and uh and he saw the bigger picture you know when this is happening to you too it's hard to see the big picture on the one hand I had attorneys telling me this case is so much bigger than John kiriaku this is this case is about every National Security whistleblower who acts in the in the public interest you have
[07:17] to go to trial and I I realized later on that when they were telling me that and my criminal defense attorneys were telling me that they were pumping me up for the fight right because my inclination was to go into the office every day and which is what I did I went to their office every day and I'd say please get a deal make a deal get me out of this I'm gonna kill myself you gotta help me make a deal and they're like no you didn't do anything wrong we're gonna fight fight
[07:47] well they were doing that to me because they knew I was talking to friends or talking to the media and they wanted that to get back to the justice department that I was going to fight by God I was going to fight until the very end and you know what and that turned out to work but when I needed somebody to talk Common Sense off the Record that was Dan that was Dan yeah and then you went and served a sentence at Loreto prison in Pennsylvania
[08:20] and he was your pen pal he was somebody that you could write to and he you you share in your piece which I'll put up here for everyone you should go to Consortium news and read it you write the Godfather of whistleblowers and uh he was somebody who you could write to and he could write back to you he kept you he did engaged with you throughout the time that you were incarcerated and and not just me he would call my wife and check in and see how the kids were
[08:51] doing and then he would write me a letter and he always would include a book and more often than not he had written the book you know every time it was a different book by Daniel Ellsberg and he reading you know reading about Dan in his 60s and 70s like chaining himself to the fence of a of a of a navy base or or cutting through the fence to throw paint on a missile silo or you know blocking the only Road
[09:23] leading to a nuclear power plant it was it was exciting you know and there were always photographs in the middle of these books and and then he would write a letter along with it and I say in the piece too he would sign every single letter with love Dan he would always ask about my children and he would always sign it love Dan I saved all of those letters just because they were they were Treasures to me and um you know even I don't think I've ever told you this Kevin but even the guards uh at Loreto with whom I had a very
[09:56] difficult relationship as you recall um once pulled me aside to the guards pulled me aside and said hey your uh your boyfriend's in town I said what are you talking about because hey these guys and I we disrespected each other so fundamentally so deeply but they said no no we're kidding Dan ellsberg's at the college he's given a talk tonight and I said seriously I mean the the town of Loreto Pennsylvania it has 1200 people and it has a very small Catholic college
[10:28] and the it has the prison and the prison used to be a Catholic monastery so the Bureau of Prisons bought the monastery added two Wings to it and then ran it as a prison so it turned out that sure enough that night Dan was in Loretto and it was like a Wednesday night and he was giving a speech to the Department of like ethics I think it is what it was and I said are you guys gonna go and one of them said hell no and the other one said actually yeah I'm gonna go and I
[10:58] said would you tell him that I said hello and I said my best and he actually did I was shocked by it I was shocked but this is the kind of power that Dan Ellsberg had over people I'm like you don't have to like him you don't even have to agree with him but you do have to respect him because he lived what he taught and not many people can say that yeah so one of the things I had the privilege and Fortune to be able to do with my editor-in-chief former boss Jane Hampshire was host these whistleblower
[11:30] dinners where we'd get people together unfortunately you were in prison for most of them but you did come the one before you went where you were sent off to prison that's right yeah and um and so Tom Drake and jessalyn radic and others would come over and Dan came to one and I remember the dinner but I don't really remember it for an entirely positive reason but I'm kind of motivated to just say that this happened to you because jaloria actually shared a
[12:00] similar experience in which he got into a debate with Dan Ellsberg about the two-party system and at the time I was not about to vote for Obama I believe I was going to vote for Ralph Nader and that really upset Dan Ellsberg and he was really convinced that if Mitt Romney was elected Iran would be bombed and I was arguing with this octogenarian who was you know trying to convince me of the lesser of
[12:31] two evils but but those dinners were remarkable and I've been thinking with the passing of Dan how much I miss having that space because it seems like something that the community of people could really use today is like a sort of like regular every two or three months people get together check in with each other see how everyone's doing we were getting updates on how Snowden was doing in Moscow and it just helped us I think
[13:02] maintain our bearings as Obama escalated that war on whistleblowers so so true and you know I had essentially the same argument with Dan once um in in 2016 Gary Johnson who had been the governor of uh New Mexico and was then the libertarian party nominee for president asked if I would campaign with him and I like Gary he's a good guy
[13:33] um so we went to 12 States together in the west states I had never been to I had never been to Alaska for example or Oregon and I got to go with you know presidential candidate and I would introduce him at each one of his stops we had such a good time and Dan yelled at me and he's like he doesn't have any chance of winning and I said no of course not but I I hate Obama so much that I I just can't I I just can't vote for the Democrats right now and I'm so angry and Hillary
[14:03] Clinton was just like Obama in 2016 I was mad at everybody and he said no but Trump is going to win I said no Trump's not going to win and my vote would be you know it wouldn't count anyway besides I said you know he could win New Mexico and he's got a Fighting Chance in in Utah I had I had written an op-ed that I think ran in Gary's name in whatever the Salt Lake City newspaper is then I wrote one for the Washington Post saying why I was I was voting for a
[14:35] third party candidate and I used this awful awful cliche I said voting for the lesser of two evils is still evil and Dan just jumped up and down he's like look we can try to fool ourselves as much as we want but the fact is we live in a two-party country a two-party system and you have to choose one or the other and the Democrats are better than the Republicans and I just couldn't do it I couldn't do it so I voted for Gary Johnson Donald Trump got elected and I
[15:05] reluctantly doggone it I had to go back to the Democrats in 2020 but uh but Dan felt very strongly about uh about these issues and let me add one other thing if I could uh in December 2019 Peter kuznick Dr Peter kuznick who's a friend of ours and a and a professor an eminent professor at uh American University here in Washington the co-author with Oliver Stone of um of The Untold History of the United States and
[15:36] uh Peter actually endorsed my book fantastic yes yes yes Peter's a wonderful guy and he had a he had a Christmas party in December of 2019 and Dan happened to be in town uh visiting his friend uh Barbara Coppell so Dan came to the dinner and Senator Mike Gravel uh was still alive thank God and he came to the dinner and Sai Hersh came to the dinner and I remember sitting there thinking oh my God I I
[16:06] can't believe I I'm invited to this dinner like I wanted to sleep on the couch that night just so I didn't miss anything from these Giants of American History Giants and we all took pictures together and I remember thinking man I am the luckiest guy in the world to know these people it was just incredible and you know I I hate to say um Mike Revel Mike Mike died I'm gonna say six months ago or so he was buried this morning in Arlington Cemetery there was a ceremony this morning and even
[16:37] though he was entitled to a 21-gun salute uh he asked in his will that there not be a 20-gun salute 21 gun salute because in death he still wanted his um his antipathy for violence uh to be carried forward so uh there there was no salute but there was a beautiful ceremony for him today um it says he was he died in 2021 but was it that long ago now yeah but could it have taken that long for the burial
[17:08] to happen in the Arlington Cemetery uh it's possible it's it's odd because if you're being buried in the ground uh it's a it's a six to eight week wait uh he was cremated and put in the columbarium uh so I don't know why the wait was so long I can't believe it's been two years I guess it has been and you know I was proud he and I met that night at Peter's party and then um a couple of months later he asked me if
[17:39] I would be his foreign policy advisor for his 2020 presidential campaign I said I would be delighted here's a 90-something-year-old guy running for president his campaign manager was 20 years old this kid from from George Washington University and we had the best time it was just so much fun no yeah and those kids those kids ran that Twitter account the gravel Institute which became like the biggest craze in political Twitter uh so so before we leave from Dan I
[18:12] didn't plan to spend as long with this but I mean 92 years old you can understand why you would want to spend so much time talking about Dan Ellsberg and there's so many stories that can be told uh and I'm not even sharing my own personal stories because I've done that in another place uh this was about you so I'd like to hear you tell the story because I find this to be one of the most incredible Dan Ellsberg stories that I've heard in the last week of what
[18:43] happened at the Penn Awards Gala in uh Beverly Hills California which is really Hollywood area oh boy it's California it's the heart of Hollywood in in 2016 I won the Penn First Amendment award which is a big deal it was it's one of the the big four literary awards with the Penn Faulkner the Pulitzer and the Edgar Allan Poe and I was so excited to have and I wanted for letters from Loretto the book that became doing time like a spy letters from Loretta that
[19:15] you've published very kindly and so um I was so excited I called Dan and I said hey Dan because I wanted to invite him to come as my guest I said hey I won the Penn First Amendment award there's going to be this big thing in Beverly Hills and he said oh yeah yeah I'm gonna be there too they're giving Snowden an honorary award and uh he asked me to accept it on his behalf I said great so let's sit at the same table he said great so Dan being Dan just comes down all by himself you know
[19:45] no no Entourage or Hangers On or even friends that he invited so the whole table is like all my best friends from high school who live in California and my brother and my attorney my entertainment attorney and Dan and um the other big winner for the night was Francis Ford Coppola the director of The Godfather Trilogy and Apocalypse Now and so many other just you know enormous uh smash successes of Cinema he he won the the Lifetime Achievement Award
[20:17] so the the pen folks gave out a good 20 Awards before us there was you know best poetry best children's book best translation best free form whatever I I don't even know what they were and then at the end were the the big three so Dan got up to speak first and I say this piece in uh Consortium news the pen people were absolutely adamant that we stick to seven minutes seven minutes and I never ever rehearsed for speeches
[20:47] never because I figure if I don't know these issues by now then shame on me I don't deserve to be able to speak so I just normally wing it well this man I I wrote the speech out I practiced over and over and over again and I got it to exactly seven minutes so they called Dan up to the stage and you know who doesn't know Daniel Ellsberg especially in California so he gets this rousing round of applause the great the famed Dan Ellsberg and he goes
[21:18] up there and he just starts screaming and yelling about freedom and transparency and and Snowden and snowden's a hero and we deserve to know what the government is doing 30 minutes later somebody from the Penn uh organization like goes out on stage kind of gingerly like let's wrap it up Mr Ellsberg so finally Dan finishes and they they call me up and I go up I
[21:51] I go up and I I give my tight seven minute address and I got this wonderful Standing Ovation it was it was heartwarming but like Dan I didn't pull any punches in this speech I went with guns blazing at the Obama Administration um and its use of the Espionage Act and its use of drones and the fact that the government lies to us and the Director of National Intelligence lies under oath and nobody cares and I I hit him hard
[22:24] and then they call Francis Ford Coppola so I mean the guys won more Oscars than he can carry in his arms you know he's a big deal and he goes up on stage and he takes this folded speech out of his jacket pocket and he says he goes like this where's the CIA guy and I said right here and he looks at me and he says you seem like a nice guy but I am sick and tired of people criticizing my president
[22:56] and everybody started to laugh chuckle you know snort because they thought it was a joke I knew it wasn't a joke and he just like Unleashed like who are we to make fun and criticize the president the president works so hard he has the hardest job in the world and we're standing up there and our soapboxes yelling and criticizing well there's it's a big Ballroom there were 600 people in the audience and
[23:27] there's an echo and Dan had hearing aids and he just couldn't he just couldn't hear he couldn't understand what Coppola was saying so he leans over to me and he says what's he saying and I said he's criticizing us Dan he's what I said he's criticizing us and Dan stands up remember we're in the very front row right in front of Coppola Dan stands up and he goes [ __ ] you Coppola
[23:59] and Coppola looks at him and he says I've said enough I'm not saying anymore and he just walks off stage silence utter complete and total Silence from these 600 and I say in the piece we're talking about 600 I don't mean 600 people but they pulled in off the street to fill the seats I mean these are the most important producers directors there were A-list actors I was introduced by Jared Leto uh uh Dan was introduced by
[24:33] oh that famous guy not Ethan Hawke the other one anyway A-list guy uh the showrunner for some HBO series introduced Coppola um so these are serious people silence and then Kate McKinnon from from uh uh Saturday Night Live was the MC so she comes back on stage the pen people turn the lights on and she goes on that note drive safely everyone
[25:05] and she kind of smiles like what just happened here and so the pen people run up to our table oh my God we're so sorry we had no idea he was going to do something like this and I said I said I've been criticized by men far more important than Francis Ford Coppola yeah and then Dan is like [ __ ] him I don't have to take that [ __ ] from him or from anybody else and I was like Wow as if he wasn't already my hero yeah I mean
[25:38] this guy he didn't take it from anybody not from anybody I was just so proud to be associated with him that night and then a couple of guys came up to us um they were Partners at uh what's it called um the big talent agency uh see CCM well I know what you're trying to say yeah yeah and they and they gave us their cards to say that they ran their speakers Bureau and would we like to do speeches together oh my God it was just
[26:08] amazing yeah I mean Coppola may have made one of the best Vietnam war movies but uh obviously the guy who helped end the Vietnam War didn't have to take anything like that from Coppola so that's that's an incredible story and I'm glad that you shared it uh because it says so much about Dan and uh I was also pleased that in the last four or five months that Dan started to lose his
[26:41] self-control that he had tried to practice when it came to the news media because he wanted to still be able to get his columns printed at the post or he wanted to be able to communicate with someone like Charlie Savage at the New York Times who could share stories with but towards the end of his life when he knew he was going to die he started to tell the truth about how these organizations had abused him in the past and that's what I want to lead into here
[27:12] is to show you this clip um so over the weekend he died on June 16th that was a Friday so you have the 17th and 18th not only do you have Friday's coverage but you get a whole weekend coverage you get the weekend shows that also get to pay tribute to Dan ellsbury's there are plenty of opportunities for segments to run that showed you some of the highlights of Dan ellsberg's life and by and large everything mostly went well for Dan
[27:43] Ellsberg but there was this segment and one of his sons Michael Ellsberg called it out John Cusack Cusack was calling it out because it does something that was very obvious and egregious during the last 10 years of Dan's life he was used in such a way that would put pressure well on people like you John to make you seem like you had been incorrect in the way that you came forward as a whistleblower but Dan Ellsberg is the
[28:14] good whistleblower so I want to play this clip this is on PBS NewsHour and uh the person on the left of the screen for those who are viewing is Jonathan K part and he's a columnist for the Washington Post on the other side is David Brooks and he's a columnist for the New York Times and and so I'm just I'm just going to play this this is like four or five minutes and I'll stop it a few times so
[28:45] we can give um a bit of a response but I do think it's worth it because of what's being said and it shows you where the media is and what's become their calcified understanding of leaks and whistleblowing over the last decade own words this is him from a 2017 NewsHour interview the system that puts everything on the decisions of one man
[29:16] it's crazy and when I held that piece of paper in my hand the word in my mind was evil evil this should not exist this was the operational plan annually for the drug chief of staff that had been approved by General Eisenhower and I thought there shouldn't be anything in the world if it corresponds to this but there has been them and ever since now something about what they did there because it's an it's an error I don't know if you've picked up on it John but
[29:48] the book that they put up in the background is the Doomsday Machine it's a really important book people should go read it very important but it is not the Pentagon papers no it's not it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Pentagon papers and so I just want to point out that they're conflating two things the comment that he made there had wasn't actually about the Pentagon papers the thing he's talking about with the Joint Chiefs of Staff enjoy it involves the nuclear weapons of the United States and not the Vietnam War so
[30:21] sorry I felt compelled to make that correction spent several minutes talking about classified documents should not be taken out of where they belong the Donald Trump context and I generally agree with that I think most leakers uh are wrong I thought Edward Snowden was terrible but Daniel Ellsberg shows that you can do it right and so he did it over many years he tried to go up the normal chain of command to show documents to senators and other things and so it was he went through all the Hoops you should go through to prove that it's not just you being an egomaniac it's you with a legitimate
[30:53] cause and then when he finally leaked those seven thousand documents to the times and then eventually the post um you could at least say well he a went through all the Hoops B did it with the full expectation he'd spend the rest of his life in jail and so that to me is doing it the right way a thing that probably should almost never be done except in extreme circumstances which he was in okay I'm gonna stop there you want to David Brooks first yeah David Brooks what what nonsense that is
[31:24] you know this is actually very common um with uh revisionist history when when it comes to whistleblowers uh Dan was condemned by just about everybody at the time uh Henry Kissinger called him the most dangerous man in America uh Richard Nixon uh tried to uh try to uh not even try to but ordered his plumbers to to steel Dan's psychiatric records out of the office of his psychiatrist uh in
[31:56] order to um to leak those documents to the media and and have people not not listen to uh what Dan had to say the idea that that most any whistleblower can go through his chain of command and then sleep at night is just a fallacy it's just you know what what I have done my chain of command created the torture program uh the Congressional oversight committees approved of the torture program right they they funded the
[32:27] torture program they appropriated the money for it they authorized it they passed a secret authorization bill so you can't always go through the chain of command you know Tom Drake went through the chain of command uh and ended up with uh what nine counts of Espionage and the information that that Ed Snowden put out there confirmed and reaffirmed what Tom Drake had told us so that's just silly revisionist history it doesn't even make any sense okay so let's uh let's play the other
[32:59] half here from uh let's let's it's not that it's much better but let's get what Jonathan K part had to say here's I think he'll be remembered as a hero someone who stood up for principles someone who had a strong belief and then tried to do something about it I I agree with David I would add one more thing because you mentioned the name Edward Snowden and a lot of people were comparing the two when Snowden leaked all of those documents saying he's the modern day Ellsberg and I wrote a column then 10 years ago this week that said no
[33:31] he's not because while they both leaked documents Daniel Ellsberg did something Edward Snowden didn't do he stayed in this country he turned himself in and he um allowed himself to be held accountable something Edward Snowden still refuses to do and in that regard that's why I say someone like Daniel Ellsberg should be considered a hero because he did something that stood up for his for his beliefs and his value system and then suffered the consequences
[34:03] more non from Jonathan cape Snowden was the new Dan Ellsberg okay so if Dan Ellsberg saying it I'm going to listen to Dan Ellsberg and believe what Dan Ellsberg has to say secondly the reason that Ed Snowden didn't stay in the United States and face the music as Capehart said was uh exactly why Dan said that he shouldn't stay in the in the country and face the music because
[34:34] the Espionage Act is used as a cudgel against National Security whistleblowers and it is unconstitutionally Broad and unconstitutionally vague and it does not allow for an affirmative defense so Ed Snowden who told me to my face that he was willing to come home and willing to go to prison if he could just stand up in court and explain to the judge why he did what he did and the justice department said never that's why he didn't stay
[35:07] and I just I have to point out here that what it is so infuriating about both of these pundits is that this is supposed to be them paying tribute to Dan Ellsberg but all they can do is talk about themselves yes talking about things they wrote 10 years ago or an opinion that they developed 10 years ago and for look this is David Brooks he wrote the solitary leaker it was a column for the New York Times it's an
[35:37] embarrassment it describes how he believes Snowden betrayed basically everything a person could be betray in society but then here you have Jonathan k-power Cape Hart actually writing about how he thinks Snowden did not follow ellsberg's example and then this is the thing that I can't get over and I want your reaction he then had to write Ellsberg has a point on Snowden where he said in these
[36:09] are the first words of it I have no rebuttal to Ellsberg here and why did he do that he did that because Dan Ellsberg saw what Jonathan Capehart wrote or he saw what people like David Brooks were writing and he got something printed in the Washington Post because Dan had access to the newspapers and he made a point of making this argument that Snowden was correct to flee and he said that the country had changed the country was not the same country that it was
[36:41] when he came forward as a whistleblower so it made sense for Edward Snowden to leave so that he could speak out and be the advocate that he became on mass surveillance and privacy and so I just find it audacious very audacious of Jonathan K part to sit there on this show knowing that Dan Ellsberg is dead in the grave and can't respond to him and now make an argument that Dan Ellsberg already slapped down we can all see it it's
[37:13] there from a decade ago yeah oh you're so right and you know it's like these guys sit in their Ivory Tower and they just pontificate or bloviate I might even say uh without even acknowledging that if if everyone shared their opinion their entire national news staff would be in prison on Espionage charges but they don't want to talk about that all right so let's wind down our conversation and uh let's focus on the
[37:45] most pressing matter at hand which is that Julian Assange is still facing extradition to the United States and President Joe Biden and attorney general Garland and others in the Biden Administration have not stepped forward to Halt what has been condemned by numerous civil liberties human rights and press Freedom organizations around the world as well
[38:15] as parliamentarians and leaders of Australia and this continues and so um it's a let's put up on the screen here so people can see over at Consortium news uh Joe Lauria has a great rundown of what we might be able to anticipate Biden would need his pound of Flesh from Assange that's the headline and uh the subheading is U.S president would not likely move on the case without some face-saving measure to ward
[38:47] off pressure from the CIA and his own party so you know just giving his opinion that we're not going to be able to see this resolved or brought to an end without the CIA getting the outcome that they would want in the case we know the pressure that they put on Julian Assange to force him out of the Ecuador embassy um and so he looks forward to what kind of things we could see happen next and I'll just give you the five possible scenarios and then you can comment on whatever you want from this but I think
[39:20] this is good for Joe to outline Assange may have his appeal against extradition heard by the high court he may have his appeal rejected and be put on a plane to the United States that's number two three that plane may be stopped by an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights for a last-minute plea deal maybe worked out guaranteeing assange's eventual Freedom or the least likely is number five that the U.S May abruptly drop its charges against him and he goes through
[39:51] each of the possibilities but you know your comment about what we could see happen with Assange in the next few weeks or month well I've been hearing a lot of rumors that uh there could be some sort of face-saving deal uh being negotiated right now um nobody's willing to talk about the possibility publicly but the way I hear it is that there are talks about Julian taking a plea to
[40:24] something some sort of National Security crime maybe even an Espionage Act charge and then um being sentenced to time served and then being expelled from the UK and returning home to Australia that's the one possibility the other possibility is that the Biden Administration for reasons that have never been clear I think to any of us really do want to extradite him and put him on trial in the eastern district of Virginia I hope that's the unlikelier of the two uh the
[40:56] less likely of the two scenarios uh but I don't know and I think it's it's impossible to know but I think Joe Lauria is right on these really are the possibilities I'm a little bit worried about the European Court of Human Rights even though there are three precedents three precedents where where British Nationals were uh were not extradited to the United States solely because these three prisoners had some sort of
[41:27] mental illness that had been documented and because of the way the United States uses solitary confinement that was deemed to be cruel and unusual punishment and so none of these three men were extradited to the United States so with that precedent people are hopeful that maybe the European Court of Human Rights will put a stop to this with that said there's no guarantee that the European Court of Human Rights will even hear this case and we heard what's five six seven months ago that maybe they don't want to hear this case
[41:58] so I I'm hoping that that cooler minds are are prevailing and that there are some kind of uh conversations underway that we just are not aware of I I hope this does go away what we have to hold on to some kind of hope and try to continue to build some way out of this for Julian and his family uh we think about his kids of course you have five kids so you can empathize with what it's like right now for Julian to be separated and not have
[42:30] any ability to see his young kids growing up uh and of course he just married Stella so to not be able to live with her in the first years of their marriage is something you can understand he might want to end all of this and no longer go through what he's going through so I don't hold anything against him if he's like no way out no I agree I agree completely my I guess the closing the closing question that I have for you
[43:03] is how important is it for people to you know be out there and be open in their support of Julian Assange how important would it be to show up to the arraignment hearing or to be outside the justice department or to be in the area around this Courthouse because I see I see I saw Chris Hedges he hopped on a plane he went to London he seems to think that something could happen at any moment we really feel like something
[43:33] really dramatic could happen and it could be a point of no turning back like now the justice department has this Authority has this ability to hold this over our head I mean they kind of do they can charge us they just haven't successfully convicted any journalists but they do sort of have this thing now where they might be able to her grass independent journalists I also concerned
[44:03] that with what they're doing I don't think that it's the same I'm not trying to say it's the same but I'm wondering if U.S prosecutors with what happened with Trump with what has happened with Trump I'm wondering if that becomes something that works its way into the processes of the justice department as well where like if they know a just a journalist has obtained documents do they have people demand the return of those documents and if you don't then they accuse you of violating
[44:35] the Espionage Act that's a good question and nobody yet knows the answer to it but you're right you know I told you a few minutes ago that my attorneys told me that my case was bigger than John kiriaku well this case is bigger than just uh Julian Assange this case goes to the heart of the of the First Amendment to the Constitution this goes to the heart of of the news industry and and what journalism is in America because if Julian Assange is successfully prosecuted if the if the Department of
[45:06] Justice can successfully bring a case against a working journalist or even if you don't think he's a journalist a working editor then we're all liable to be charged with Espionage all of us and that uh that's not a place that I I want to be in no not at all and since we started with Dan I'll just end that you know this was the cause of Dan Ellsberg for the last uh decade seeing freedom for Julian Assange uh I believe that one of his
[45:38] parting wishes was that uh well not only would we uh find a a better path forward and and abandon this protracted stalemate of a war in Ukraine which Bears Too Many similarities to Vietnam but that we would also encourage whistleblowing and that we would fight for uh the end of this Espionage Act and its use against people who are media sources and anybody who's
[46:10] a publisher that's right I couldn't agree more all right well John thank you for joining it was really good to talk with you uh why don't you tell people where they can find your work sure thanks I I uh I post everything on sub stack so it's John kiriaku.substack.com and I write regularly for Consortium news and covert Action magazine all right thank you John thank you