Hello, everybody! This is Gerald Cilenti, and it’s Wednesday, June 26th, 2024, and history is somewhat being written right now. It’s being written every day, but it’s kind of a new chapter, and it’s about freedom and speech, and Judge Andrew Napolitano is with us again to talk more about it, because he’s a man that knows about it in terms of what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, when America was the nation that was founded by the Founding Fathers, represented. Judge, thanks for being here today. It’s a pleasure, dear Gerald, as always, my friend.

You know, Judge, as I said, history is being made, but you know, it’s being forgotten soon, and it’s about Julian Assange, and how they just came to America and pleaded guilty, and he was free, and you have a great article here, writing a lot about it. Julian Assange is free, and you have a quote, and I talked about the Founding Fathers. I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude. Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, recognizing that freedom of speech requires breathing room, and it often produces angry responses, and the First Amendment was written to make sure the government tolerates that.

Julian Assange is a classic example of the exercise of freedom of speech and the tumultuous response, only in this response it was the government prosecuting him. He is, of course, the journalist who released evidence of American murders, American war crimes, and American cover-ups in Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush administration. When I had my show on the Fox, we actually, I’ll show you how much freedom I had in those days, we actually ran the tapes on air of his revelations. This was a humiliating embarrassment to the Bush administration, and the Obama administration, to its credit, under whose watch this came out, decided that the Pentagon Papers case, issued by the Supreme Court, protected Julian Assange from prosecution.

They prosecuted, quite properly, the thief, Bradley Manning, who had a top secret security clearance and stole these documents and gave them to Assange, but the Pentagon Papers case, the Daniel Ellsberg case, says the media entity that receives the document from the thief and publishes them is immune from civil liability and criminal prosecution. The Obama administration recognized that. The Trump administration did not, and it indicted Assange for espionage and charged them with enough crimes that if he had been convicted of all would have covered 178 years in jail. It was in London when the indictment came down, and the feds got a federal judge to issue an order for extradition, whereupon he hid in the Ecuadorian embassy with which the US does not have an extradition treaty, and Britain does not have an extradition treaty with Ecuador.

The Ecuadorian embassy is a little plot of land in the middle of London owned by Ecuador. Then the government of Ecuador changed, and they kicked him out after he lived there for seven years. Then the Brits arrested him, and they put him in a hellhole, a windowless solitary confinement dungeon for five years in the prison they have that they reserve for their most hardened criminals. There began a long tortuous process of extradition during the course of which it was revealed and never denied that the CIA attempted to kidnap and murder him.

A plot concocted and approved by then CIA director and later Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. On the verge of his final appeal, the United States Justice Department entered into a deal involving the British Crown Prosecution Service, as they call themselves, and Assange’s lawyers, that he would plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit espionage. The plea would be before a federal judge in the Mariana Islands. Gerald, I am an expert on the federal judicial system. I did not know that a federal judge pointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate, with FBI agents, with U.S.

Marshals, with federal prosecutors, the whole bit sits in the Mariana Islands, which is 1500 miles on the other side of Hawaii. That’s the United States that shows you the extent of our empire. So he appeared there yesterday. The judge kiddingly said, what are you doing here? What crime did you commit in the Mariana Islands? None. So he admitted to a crime he didn’t commit. She set him free. And now he’s home in Australia. So the good part is he’s free. The bad part is the feds got their pound of flesh, which is this guilty plea.

The people pleading guilty should be the Justice Department that persecuted and tortured him, and the jailers and the prosecutors in Great Britain that persecuted and tortured him. You know, there was this article in the World Socialist website, Julian Assange is free, but the struggle to defend democratic rights continues. They go on to note that Assange was targeted in a state-operated frame up. That means by which this was initiated, the means by which this was initiated are of particular importance in order to create an audience for Assange persecution. They set out to completely blacken his reputation.

The state made calculated use of the gender politics of the affluent upper middle class pseudo-left, which insisted that allegations of sexual assault were to believed even when they were obvious state-sponsored frameups. In December 2010, prosecutors in Sweden opened a case against Assange on the basis of fabricated sexual misconduct allegations, all of which were subsequently dropped. I mean, that is true. They were entirely concocted when the women with whom he slept voluntarily revealed that the government coerced them to claim that the sex with him was not voluntary. This was an effort to smear his reputation and to cause him to be arrested on the streets of London.

Eventually, Swedish prosecutors, another set of prosecutors, not the set that was involved in trying to entrap him, dropped the charges. That’s when he went into the Ecuadorian embassy, right? Correct, correct, correct. The government will do anything to keep itself from being embarrassed. It doesn’t care who it destroys. It doesn’t care what laws it breaks. It doesn’t care about basic principles of morality. The government protects itself more than it protects anybody else and it prosecutes crimes, so-called crimes, against itself far more aggressively than against individuals. So under the guise of protecting these women, the American government in concoction with the Swedish government made up this claim against him.

Did any of the prosecutors and investigators that made up this claim suffer any prosecution themselves? Of course not. They go on to say the witch hunt against Julian Assange took place along the vindictive campaign to arrest and persecute Edward Snowden, who escaped Assange’s fate only by fleeing to Russia, and Chelsea Manning, who was imprisoned for seven years by the Obama administration. In 2016, WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails which documented systematic efforts by the Democratic Party to rig the 2016 primary with the detriment of Bernie Sanders and the benefit of Hillary Clinton.

In response to the revelations, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, resigned in disgrace. People forgot all about this. Right, right. People have forgotten about it. But the Democratic Party launched a counter-attack, falsely accusing WikiLeaks of colluding with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential elections. After the loss by Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in 2016, the Democratic establishment and U.S. media became, if possible, even more viciously hostile to Assange. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal all enthusiastically endorsed Assange’s arrest and extradition to the United States.

Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post was the most explicit, declaring that, quote, Assange was long overdue for personal accountability. The New York Times praised the arrest, declaring, quote, the administration has begun well by charging Mistress Assange with an indisputable crime. The Guardian led the pack in vindictive slander, falsely and absurdly claiming that Assange had meetings with Trump’s campaign aide Paul Manafort. And it goes on. Yeah, yeah. The point is, the Pentagon Papers case, the Daniel Ellsberg case, Ellsberg stole 7,000 top secret documents from the Pentagon and gave them to the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Supreme Court authorized their publication.

The Supreme Court articulated that the First Amendment is not only the right to say what you want, it’s not only the right to hear whatever you want, it’s the right of the people to know what the government is up to. And therefore, the court said that a publisher who publishes matters of material interest to the public is immune from civil liability and criminal prosecution, no matter how the publisher got the documents. It doesn’t matter that they were stolen. Was Bradley Manning prosecuted? The thief who gave this information to Julian Assange? Yes.

And then his sentence was commuted by President Obama. Was Daniel Ellsberg the thief who gave the documents to the New York Times and the Washington Post prosecuted? Yes. And then during the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, you’ll remember this, the FBI broke into his psychiatrist office. Today they would do it by hacking the computer and the psychiatrist wouldn’t even know it. They literally broke into the psychiatrist office and literally stole the files on Ellsberg. When the federal judge literally in the middle of a trial learned about this, he threw the case out right in the presence of the jury.

The government was humiliated and the case was over. Odd though, that Attorney General Eric Holder with whom you and I have agreed on next to nothing and President Obama with whom you and I have agreed on next to nothing both agreed that Assange was protected by the Pentagon Papers case and could not be prosecuted. The Trump administration under Attorney General Bill Barr took the view that they would prosecute him anyway. And they filed, they got an indictment. They filed the indictment. That’s what began the extradition process. You may recall my telling you about a conversation I had with President Trump after January 6th, but before January 20th.

And that two week window at the very end of his presidency called me up to ask me about pardons. We also talked about the JFK assassination files and he said he was going to release them. He also said he would pardon Snowden and Assange at my request. Obviously didn’t. Obviously the powers around him talked him out of it. What Assange went through is hellish. The mental and psychological damage is probably permanent. He’s not in a safe place now because Australia, just like Great Britain, is under the thumb of the United States. He starts revealing things now from Australia.

This arrest process will start all over again. He should have gone to Ireland, right? A couple miles from where he was because we have no extradition treaty with Ireland. They hate the British. They hate the U.S. government. They would give them all the protection they needed. But now he’s in a state that they purport to have freedom of speech is virtually a vassal state of the United States. I will say this though, their current prime minister whose last name is Albanese. I didn’t know there were any Italians in Australia. The current prime minister personally lobbied Joe Biden to allow this deal to go through.

Again, a person with whom you and I wouldn’t agree with much politically, but I give him credit for doing that. You know, you write about what Assange was arrested for. The video that was released contained audio that revealed the cavalier, childish, and remorseless attitude of the military personnel who perpetrated the debts of these innocents. You go to the 2000 attack, they showed killed dozens of civilians and two Reuters employees. I mean, again, you played that video when you were on Fox. Oh, it showed them laughing, laughing at what they were doing.

They knew. Here’s an interesting question. Can they be prosecuted for murder? There’s no statute of limitations on murder. They knew they were killing civilians. I don’t know if they knew that two of them were Reuters journalists, but they knew they were civilians that they were killing and they laughed about it. That’s why I commented on what the audio revealed. And of course, one of your favorite vice presidents. I say that with tongue in cheek. Dick Cheney had denied that any of this happened. So he and Bush were severely humiliated when Assange revealed this.

You know, there’s another point to all of this. This is one little piece of information that came out that showed you the murderous attitude and the reality of the slaughter being committed during war. Yes. There must be a thousand at least of these kind of videos and realities of the American military slaughtering innocent people and not only America, but, you know, look what’s going on now in Israel with the bombing and total destruction of Gaza other than bullshit that we’re doing is to get Hamas. Oh, they’re in every, every hospital.

They’re in every school. They’re in every mosque in every church. We’re going to bomb everything to the ground because Hamas is in every one of them. And we know that they’re Hamas because I think they have it across the top of their forehead. It says Hamas, right? I mean, how did they know who’s Hamas and who isn’t? Oh, they’re, they’re AI tells them and their AI is flawless. This is the same. This is the same AI that allowed Hamas to enter on October 7th. The only good thing about this is that the murderer in chief is in very, very bad political shape, very bad political shape after the Supreme Court of Israel.

I usually don’t care what the Supreme Court of Israel does, but they ordered Netanyahu to draft the ultra orthodox that will break apart his coalition. That will cause a new prime minister that will put Netanyahu back in the dock as a criminal defendant in three prosecutions and they’re starting a fourth prosecution of him, which was just announced last week. You can’t make this stuff up. No, the big part is that whoever replaces him will probably be just as murderous. Yep. And again, what Netanyahu is going to do, as I say, when all else fails, they take you to war.

He’s ramping up the war against Lebanon and knows he can’t win. He knows he can’t win that. He’d need American troops on the ground, which I can’t imagine the American public would tolerate in order to win that war. The American public will do what they’re told to do. Oh, they don’t know. They buy the BS. I mean, you know, look how every month, nine out of 10 people I talked to about Ukraine, they hate Russia without having any of the information why this all happened. And again, let’s just look what happened with the election in Westchester County.

That guy Bauman lost, right? Yeah. Yeah. Listen, I don’t agree with him on many things, but I agree with him on Israel and Ukraine. And I was, I was rooting for him. In fact, I watched one of the rallies streaming and was cheering for Bernie Sanders. Bernie, when it comes to war and peace, Bernie’s terrific. Yeah. But he said Israel, he threw the line out there, though Israel has the right to defend itself. I think he’s retracted that. He’s not going to Netanyahu’s talk. Neither is Elizabeth Warren. Neither is Thomas Massey.

You see how many more are there. But again, go going back to the election that the front, the election had happened on Tuesday. How much money did a pack spend to defeat Bauman? 20 million dollars in a democratic congressional primary. It never happened in the history of the, of the country. All right. All from the rich Jewish sources. Yep. So we’re having a peace and freedom rally on September 28th up here in Kingston, New York. Yes, we are. And judge, who are the wall speakers going to be? Well, you, Scott Ritter, Max Blumenthal, a courageous, courageous journalist with incredible sources in Israel and in Gaza, Anya Parampil, who was Mrs.

Max Blumenthal. You want to get a rise out of her call her Mrs. Max Blumenthal instead of Anya Parampil. She’s a very, very strong-willed, very articulate investigative reporter in her own right and yours truly. And we are going to make the case for peace and we are going to expose the murders of the American government. And we hope to be able to broadcast to stream this nationwide, but we want people in Kingston. We want to block the freeway. We want that’s how many people to come to Kingston, the four corners of freedom that what we hope will be beautiful early autumn Saturday.

Okay. Judge, thank you so much. And again, thank you for everything that you do. And of course, supporting this peace and freedom rally. It’s up to us. It’s up to the people to make this happen. If we don’t unite for peace, we’re going to die in war. And I mean, again, your whole article about Assange, I mean, look what they do when you come out and speak about the hatred of war and show the brutality of it. You’re punished for it. They torture you. So we’re doing everything we can. And again, we just mentioned that you mentioned how much they gave that guy to run against Bama, $20 million.

Could you imagine if we had $20 million to promote this peace and freedom rally? Oh, boy. Yeah, it would be like the million man march. And that’s what we need. A million person march. So it’s up to everybody to make this happen. We need a million of us here because it does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men to Samuel Adams. And we’re that irate, tireless minority. And we must unite for peace or else we’re going to die in war.

And everybody, please go to the judges, web, podcasts, judging freedom. The people that he has on are spectacular. And what he’s doing and all of those that he has on there, it’s in the true meaning of the American spirit. Judge, thanks so much for being here. And we’ll see you soon. You got it all the best, Gerald. [tr:trw].

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