Sep 132020
 
 September 13, 2020  Posted by at 6:17 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Rembrandt van RIjn A Woman Standing with a Candle c.1631

 

 

To be honest, I didn’t think it would ever happen, even though it’s been so obvious for so long. But all of a sudden, the conservative voices questioning the Russia collusion narrative and all the investigations that followed from it, are finally figuring out that those behind that narrative and all that resulted from it, are the same people who have been chasing down Julian Assange for many years.

And that to get to the bottom of the hunt for Trump by the DNC, Clinton campaign, US intelligence and last but not least the media in their pockets, the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN et al, they will have to take a much closer look at what happened to Assange. If they don’t they will never understand. How do we know it’s starting to dawn on them? Look at this illustration at the Last Refuge site yesterday. More on them later.

Note: the mostly left wing Assange supporters would do good to consider the same thing: they in turn must look into the RussiaRussia Trump collusion stories, much as they may not like the president. Because those stories are why Assange has been chased down like so much roadkill. And because the right win of America is their best chance at getting him pardoned/released. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, to put it bluntly. Sometimes you need blunt.

 

 

As I’ve pointed out countless times, the Mueller investigation of the Trump campaign -and presidency- may have come up glaringly empty, but the report they issued maintained that “13 Russians” and Julian Assange were responsible for hacking DNC emails. There is no proof of this, but since none of the “accused” can speak out, the report make the claim, and did.

Actually, a source connected to the “13 Russians” that was also named, the firm Concord Management, linked to Internet Research Agency, both owned by “Putin’s cook” Yevgeniy Prigozhin, one of the 13 Russians, did speak out and hired lawyers in the US. The case was quietly dropped when it became clear Mueller had nothing on them. The rest didn’t speak, and hired no defense, so that part of the report, nonsense as it may be, still stands.

Mueller et al could simply have met with Assange, he wasn’t going anywhere as they knew, but they didn’t, because A) the last thing they wanted was confirmation that “the Russians” did not provide any information to WikiLeaks, since that was what little was left of what the entire report was based on, and B) they wanted to make Assange look like an enemy of the US. Meeting with him would have blown both A) and B) out of the water, and he wouldn’t have been any use to them, or the DNC, or the FBI/CIA/DOJ. Assange was useful to them exactly because he could *not* speak.

 

The wake up call for the right must have been Tucker Carlson’s interview with Glenn Greenwald about Assange this week. Of which I said: “Bless Tucker Carlson for providing the platform. Bless Glenn Greenwald for his eloquent statement. Don’t miss this.” But still, as I also said: “Wonder why it took the right wing so long to wake up to how Julian Assange is linked to the whole machine. Did they really need Tucker Carlson for that?”

Greenwald said Trump could pardon Assange, and Snowden too, and there’s “widespread support across the political spectrum for doing both” (something I never heard anyone confirm, btw), and “the only people who would be angry would be Susan Rice, John Brennan, Jim Comey and James Clapper, because they’re the ones who both of them exposed”. Well, there’s your people. Those are the people who’ve been after both Trump and Assange since at least 2015.
Do both sides realize what they have in common now?

 

 

I don’t want to make this too long, and there’s more ground to cover. First, take a look at what Paul Craig Roberts had to say recently. He knows the territory. He worked extensively both as a journalist before that became a tainted term, and served under Ronald Reagan as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Like his views on economics or not, he knows a thing or two about DC. Here’s what he had to say 3 days ago, which ties right into the Assange/RussiaRussia/Mueller/CIA tall tale :

The United States & Its Constitution Have Two Months Left

To stop Kennedy they assassinated him. To stop Trump they concocted Russiagate, Impeachgate, and a variety of wild and unsubstantiated accusations. The presstitutes repeat the various accusations as if they are absolute proven truth. The presstitutes never investigated a single one of the false accusations. These efforts to remove Trump did not succeed. Having pulled off numerous color revolutions in which the US has overthrown foreign governments, the tactics are now being employed against Trump. The November presidential election will not be an election. It will be a color revolution.

[..] the CIA has controlled the prestige American media since 1950. The American media does not provide news. It provides the Deep State’s explanations of events. This ensures that real news does not interfere with the agenda. The German journalst, Udo Ulfkotte, wrote a book, Bought Journalism, in which he showed that the CIA also controls the European press. To be clear, there are two CIA organizations. One is an agency that monitors world events and endeavors to provide more or less accurate information to policymakers.

The other is a covert operations agency. This agency assassinates people, including an American president, and overthrows uncooperative governments. President Truman publicly stated after he was out of office that he made a serious mistake in permitting the covert operations branch of the CIA. He said that it was an unaccountable government in itself. President Eisenhower agreed and in his last address to the American people warned of the growing unaccountable power of the military/security complex. President Kennedy realized the threat and said he was going “to break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” but they killed him first.

It would be easy for the CIA to kill Trump, but the “lone assassin” has been used too many times to be believable. It is easier to overthrow Trump’s reelection with false accusations as the CIA controls the American and European media and has many Internet sites pretending to be dissident, a claim that fools insouciant Americans.

Indeed, it is the leftwing that the CIA owns. The rightwing goes along because they think it is patriotic to support the military/security complex. After the CIA overthrows Trump, they will use Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and their presstitutes to foment race war. Then the CIA will ride in on the Pale Horse, and the population will submit.

And yes, you are right, Julian Assange got in the way of that. Not because he hated Hillary Clinton, though he detested what she and Obama did to Libya, but because Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning provided him with material that bore witness to the crimes committed by the US intelligence “cabal”. In Snowden’s case, it was the NSA spying on -the- American people, in Manning’s it was war crimes executed overseas.

The way the “cabal” reacted to all that material -there was/is a lot- was to link Assange to a fictitious story about Russia meddling in US elections, a very convenient link because it tied into what they were already constructing to get rid of Trump.

Here is lawyer “sundance” at the Conservative Treehouse (aka The Last Refuge). The -recommended- article has a lot more info, not just on Assange, but also on the set-up of the “cabal”; he’s been digging for a long time. I know, it’s right wing media. But nobody else will cover this. And we want to get Assange released, don’t we?! So take a listen to how similar this is, written yesterday, to what I, and others, have been saying about the case for a long time.

Again, I have no idea why it took so long for people like “sundance” to catch up, but it’s people like him who may well be our best shot at keeping Assange alive. And people like Tucker, of course; you can bet Trump is watching him, and has seen the Greenwald interview by now.

 

What’s Behind The DOJ Aggression Toward Julian Assange

Nancy Pelosi previously labeled all Trump supporters as “enemies of the state.” Similarly we note the apparatus of the administrative state labels Julian Assange the same. There’s a good argument that the reason why Assange is considered such a threat to the U.S. is specifically because he could expose the lies of the administrative state.

As a consequence the U.S. intelligence apparatus has targeted the WikiLeaks founder and the Bill Barr DOJ is being extremely aggressive in their effort to get control of him. Tucker Carlson discussed this dynamic last night; albeit stopping short of the brutally honest part. To understand the risk Julian Assange represents to the administrative state, it is important to understand the extent of CIA, FBI and DOJ operations in 2016.

[..] On April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment was unsealed in the EDVA. From the indictment we discover it was under seal since March 6th, 2018. On Tuesday April 15th more investigative material was released. Again, note the dates: Grand Jury, *December of 2017* This means FBI investigation prior to…. The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time.

The grand jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation, April 2019. Why the delay? What was the DOJ waiting for? Here’s where it gets interesting…. The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.” [..]

Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange; and why the FBI would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017. Within three months of the grand jury the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018.

The EDVA sat on the indictment while the Mueller probe was ongoing. As soon as the Mueller probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London<, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed.

As a person who has researched this three year fiasco; including the ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17 intelligence agencies”, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for Obama’s anti-Russia narrative in December ’16; and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January ’17; this timing against Assange is just too coincidental. It doesn’t take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State motive to control Julian Assange because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.

This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements.

The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor.

The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative. Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he has evidence it was not from a hack.

This Russian “hacking” claim is ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus…. Well, right there is the obvious motive to shut Assange down as soon intelligence officials knew the Mueller report was going to be public. Now, if we know this, and you know this; and everything is cited and factual… well, then certainly AG Bill Barr knows this.

 

That is a lot of information in one go, and not much of it is new, at least to me or to regular readers of the Automatic Earth. What is new is that the Conservative press are figuring out that if they want to defend Trump against the “cabal”, they need to look much more deeply into the role Julian Assange has played in the whole story, especially over the past few years.

And as I said above, it would be good if the “Free Assange” side would so something similar, reach out, because the Conservative press may well be the best ally there is for their cause. It’s not about how you feel about Trump, it’s about the “cabal” targeting Trump through Assange, and the other way around.

And in the end it’s real simple: Trump has the power to pardon Assange and set him free, him and Snowden. Would you rather *not* appeal to that power, and leave Julian to rot in Belmarsh and g-d knows where next, or do you think you now understand how the game has been played, and will be going forward? Your pick. But remember: it will take Trump overruling Bill Barr and the DOJ, and the right wing can’t do that alone.

 

One last thing, something I’ve also tried to explain umpteen times: Whenever you see someone claim that Assange plays to his personal political choices, or that he has something anything to do with the Kremlin, or that he lies about anything at all, please remember this: Julian Assange has always been acutely aware of the one weakness of WikiLeaks which is simultaneously its main strength:

That is, he cannot lie, he cannot align with a political side, he cannot align with any one country or ideology (I would almost write: ”he could not” instead of he cannot, but thank God Julian is alive, so I will not).

The reason for this is that people like Snowden and Manning and many others, who are in possession of highly sensitive evidence of government or intelligence malfeasance, must be sure the material will not be used for -party- political purposes, or to make a country look good, and first and foremost that it is not distorted or lied about in any way, shape or form.

Because if Julian Assange would ever do any such thing, the bond of trust would be broken, for every single potential future source and/or whistleblower, and for all time. He would never be able to repair that. It would be the end of WikiLeaks, right there. Julian would never have allowed that to happen to his brainchild; he would die first. And they all know it, the entire “cabal”; that’s why you read in the press what you do, that’s why the smear campaigns are there. None of which are even remotely true.

A last last thing: Julian Assange is so skilled at the digital side of things that no secret service in the entire world, no matter how many people they put on it, has ever come close to hacking or breaking into WikiLeaks. That should make us all feel safer, and that is why there are all these attempts to make us feel the opposite.

 

 

 

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Home Forums Julian Assange and the Conservative Press

Viewing 9 posts - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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  • #63195

    Rembrandt van RIjn A Woman Standing with a Candle c.1631     To be honest, I didn’t think it would ever happen, even though it’s been so obv
    [See the full post at: Julian Assange and the Conservative Press]

    #63196
    zerosum
    Participant

    “look much more deeply into the role Julian Assange has played in the whole story, especially over the past few years.”
    MY OPINION:
    WE ARE LITTLE FISHES IN A BIG POND

    With TAE we have been informed of all the lies that we have been living.
    Just because we know, does not make it possible for us to go against all of those rich and powerful people and change the course of history.
    We do not have the power of C19.

    #63197
    Dimitri
    Participant

    “ Naomi Klein and Glenn Greenwald discuss WikiLeaks, the privacy implications of the Podesta archive, and the ethics of reporting on hacked emails.”

    https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/is-disclosure-of-podestas-emails-a-step-too-far-a-conversation-with-naomi-klein/

    #63202
    VietnamVet
    Participant

    What muddles the water is that the rulers and managers consistently try to hide the current organization of the economic and political world that does one thing – it makes them richer. This is Joe Biden’s world hegemony that has been in place since the Reagan Thatcher counter-revolt and the fall of the USSR. The Clintons, Bushes and Obamas all hug together. They, the media moguls and the intelligence community are all on the same team. It is the wealthy corporate superstructure built over third rate former democratic governments. But, since the disastrous handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic, the global Empire is no more. Americans are quarantined. Overseers cannot fly off and rule over their properties.

    The second older structure is the 1848 North American Empire since the Annexation of Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. This is what Donald Trump rules over very badly. All of the West Coast and the State of Oregon, in particular, is a disaster zone with over 100 days of riots, unprecedented town destroying infernos and a deadly pandemic.

    Joe Biden will try to restore the global empire and will fail. Donald Trump will continue to try to rule the 1848 Empire and will fail. Violence and Succession are inevitable.

    The only way out for Americans is the restoration of the 1787 Constitution, enforcing the rule of law for all, and the return of the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

    #63204
    A from OZ
    Participant

    There is one other highly important thing to note.

    Julian Assange is being gagged by his own “team”.

    Way back in March 2018 his internet was cut off and his Twitter account taken over, Initially, that was done by Ecuador but since then we have not heard a single direct word from him despite many, many visits from the “inner circle” to him in both the embassy and Belmarsh prison. All we ever get is second-hand bland bromides in the abstract about “press freedom”.

    He is NOT being gagged by the UK government, the prison system or the Courts. He is only on remand (not applying for Bail and not then exercising his legal right to appeal a refusal is another story I’ve gone into here before). He has the right to speak, and from pre-March 2018 it is well established that he always has a lot to say about everything. The only people keeping him gagged are the tight circle surrounding him.

    Other “supporters” have a viscerally negative knee-jerk reaction to these facts and refuse to even consider that this could be true. The best they usually can do is to make speculative excuses (such as: ‘Well maybe that’s for his own good, maybe the lawyers advised it…’ maybe, maybe, maybe – let’s hear it from the man himself.)

    PS – I’m a lawyer and there is no legal or strategic reason for a total gag on Assange. My fear is that the “inner circle” are actually selling him out.

    #63210
    zerosum
    Participant

    A from OZ
    In other words, its possible
    everyone has a price.

    #63231

    Oz- I suspect almost anyone can be threatened, including Assange’s team (or has a price, as zerosum says). And while it is true that they hold his plight over any investigative reporter’s or whistleblower’s head, and make us suspicious of people who are “allowed” to still expose the rot in governments, I have to think that the most important reason he is still alive, and still tortured, is because he has not divulged his “kill switch” code. They want what he has in his files.

    The more this drags on, the more those who are paying attention realize how desperate the diktocrats are. The dirt must be very dirty, and they are clearly terrified of its exposure. That is a weakness on their part.

    Assange is a remarkable man.

    “Kill switch” can probably be replaced by a better word- the files would dump, not disappear.
    Assange is nearing true sainthood. That, too, terrifies them.

    #63250
    Susmarie108
    Participant

    @AfromOZ: interesting insight. Julian Assange is a brilliant man, perhaps silence is an intentional tactic that he and his team are implementing?

    @Raul Ilargi: The Greenwald interview with TC was an interesting development! I consider Glenn Greenwald to be a true journalist and am forever grateful for his REVELATIONS across the economic, march to war, and corruption fronts – including the Manning and Snowden reporting (a visit to The Intercept_ is a daily ritual). Not sure that TC or FOX has the guts to stay on course to develop this story to its full potential. You suggest an opportunity for co-operation and collaboration between the “sides” over the Assange saga; perhaps Tulsi could bring the other side to the party? President Trump might win over a new segment of supporters + tick off a few enemies with an Assange pardon (why stop there…Snowden and Manning too). Is that enough to motivate the President to act?

    #63326
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    Okay, this is very tangential, but what I find weird about all the Russia hysteria is that to listen to it, you would think that the current Russian state is worse than the one that existed forty years ago at this time, when clearly and obviously the reverse is true. Though I suppose you could argue that the same Russian Deep State that was behind the previous one simply discarded an ideology that wasn’t working anymore (if it ever really did) in favor of something more modern and functional. I would certainly be hard-pressed to call the Russian Federation a real republic, but then again, the same thing could be said about the USA.

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