Stella Morris, the wife of Julian Paul Assange, joins me to discuss her husband, who is currently in a Swedish prison awaiting extradition to the United States on espionage charges. She talks about her husband's journey to becoming a journalist and activist, and why she believes he should be given the same rights as other journalists. She also talks about why she thinks her husband should be released from prison, and how she feels about the way he is being treated by the U.S. government, including the possibility of a possible 180-year sentence for espionage charges, as well as why she doesn t believe he should ever be sent back to the States, even if he is facing such a long term prison sentence. She also discusses why she and her husband don t believe that the charges against him are unfair and why they should not be treated as though they are the only ones with the right to fight for freedom of speech and transparency in a world that values the First Amendment rights and freedom of the press. Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to get immediate access to all new episodes of Daily Wire and other media outlets wherever you get your epsiode of the news and information. Go to Dailywire.plus.me/Dailywireplus to become a supporter of Dailywireplus and stay up to date on all things going on in the world of online news and social media! Subscribe and share your thoughts and opinions on this and any other stories you might be interested in! on social media by using the hashtag to join us on and in our social media platforms or share us on the social medias . and help us spread the word out there about this important stories about this and more! and other stories we should be spreading the word about this podcast! , about this episode! on your thoughts, thoughts, and your thoughts on this podcast and other important things happening in the future of this and that and on the podcast and their impact on the world as well! in this episode thank you, of course, thank you for listening to this podcast. and thank you! - Dr. Jordan Peterson Thank you, Jordan B. B. Peterson, the wonderful Dr. Peterson. - The Daily Wire plus - - Thank you so much for being a friend of the podcast, Dr. Bergman, the Daily Wire + and much more.
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00:01:10.400I'm here today speaking with Stella Assange, who is the wife of Julian Paul Assange.
00:01:18.740And I'm going to start with his bio in a strange twist, since he at the moment can't speak for himself, and then I'm going to turn to hers.
00:01:25.900Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006.
00:01:36.420In 2010, WikiLeaks published a series of leaks provided by American intel analyst Chelsea Manning and attracted widespread international attention and outrage, I would say.
00:01:50.600In early 2010, Manning, who reported being horrified by the behavior of then his colleagues,
00:01:59.100declosed three quarters of a million classified and unclassified but sensitive military-slash-diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, an online news site.
00:02:11.080The U.S. government then launched a continuing criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
00:02:16.420In 2010, Assange began to be pursued, and I say began because it went on for a very long time, began to be pursued by Swedish authorities for alleged sexual misconduct episodes.
00:02:36.020Those charges were eventually rescinded.
00:02:39.000U.K. authorities, operating as a consequence of the Swedish call, arranged a potential extradition.
00:02:48.000Assange, at that point, broke bail, violated U.K. law, and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy,
00:02:57.560where he remained under different conditions for many years, from 2010 to 2019.
00:03:04.640But was finally arrested and returned to the U.K., where he has been imprisoned since in Belmarsh, a Category A prison in London.
00:03:16.920He currently faces the possibility of extradition to the U.S.
00:03:21.960and possible prosecution there on some 18 essentially espionage-related charges.
00:03:28.320According to the Irish Times recently, it's now a year and a half since Assange completed his 50-week sentence for jumping bail.
00:03:38.780And this is where the Julian Assange story gets even stranger, if possible, despite the fact that there are no new charges against him in the U.K.
00:03:48.380He is still in the Category A prison, Belmarsh, where he has spent much of his time in solitary confinement.
00:03:57.560In May 2019, Assange was brought up on 17 new charges relating to the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917,
00:04:07.040and they carried with them those charges a maximum sentence of 170 years.
00:04:11.320The Obama administration considered charging Assange similarly previously,
00:04:17.400but decided not to, given concern that it might negatively affect investigative journalism as such,
00:19:36.580Well, I think you need to break it down.
00:19:42.740What were these 750,000 documents that were published?
00:19:47.500So you had 90,000, I think, from the Afghan war diaries.
00:19:51.220And of those, 15,000 were withheld by WikiLeaks precisely because it was considered that they needed further review.
00:20:00.640The Iraq war logs, there was a different approach, which was to have an automated, what's it called, redaction.
00:20:11.320And in fact, there was, I think, an article in Wired, there was criticism over the redactions of the Iraq war logs because they said it was being over-redacted.
00:20:21.380So one example was there had been a document that had been obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Pentagon, and that was already out there.
00:20:33.360And that this document that had been released to a journalist was redacted, but it was less redacted than the version that WikiLeaks published.
00:20:43.620Then you have the Guantanamo Bay files.
00:20:47.780In that case, it was the files of each of the detainees who were in Guantanamo Bay.
00:20:58.840Until then, no one even knew who was there, why they were there, how many were there.
00:21:04.300And there was witness testimony in the extradition hearing from a lawyer who represented one of these Guantanamo Bay detainees,
00:21:14.240who said that it was through those files that they were able to understand who had incriminated them.
00:21:23.920The person who had incriminated their client was someone who had confessed under torture,
00:21:28.500and it was through that that they were able to then win their case.
00:21:33.900So in relation to the Guantanamo Bay files, the Telegraph, for example, published the exact same data set.
00:21:43.700In relation to the diplomatic cables, it's actually very interesting because WikiLeaks, it's 250,000 cables.
00:21:53.240WikiLeaks initially had a consortium of five big publishers.
00:21:57.900There was the Guardian, the New York Times, El País in Spain, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde in France.
00:22:05.560And these five big publishers did the initial stories with WikiLeaks, but then they quickly just lost interest.
00:22:14.160And then WikiLeaks then entered into agreements with about 100 different media organizations around the world
00:22:22.040because these publications concerned every single country in the world.
00:22:26.520And through sharing these documents with newspapers, in local newspapers, they were able to report
00:22:37.300because, you know, the New York Times might not be that interested in Burkina Faso.
00:22:42.900But for the people in Burkina Faso, those State Department cables were, you know, part of their history,
00:22:50.100but also of enormous potential impact.
00:25:50.680So one of the things that's popped into my mind continually while I was reading through the unbelievable trials and catastrophes that your husband and you have been through is something like, and I'm not claiming this is the case at all.
00:26:08.700I'm just saying what popped into my mind.
00:26:10.900And certainly this is an accusation that's been leveled at me, is that someone in that much trouble must have done something wrong.
00:26:19.900And I would say, well, probably that's true to some degree because everybody has done something wrong.
00:26:26.220It's a very dangerous assumption because given that each of us has probably done something wrong, that means that we can be called out on it arbitrarily and with force when that's in the interest of people whose interests we've opposed.
00:26:39.560And then also the fact that that's the case, that that sort of doubt can be elicited, means that people who are inclined to take you out for whatever reason have an easy pathway to doing it.
00:26:52.580And maybe that would bring us to what happened in Sweden.
00:26:54.980So it wasn't very, and I have some personal questions to ask you on that front.
00:26:59.320And you're obviously welcome to not answer any questions that I might pose to you.
00:27:04.420And I hope I don't do it rudely and inappropriately.
00:27:06.580But it wasn't long after this vast trove of documents was published, and you're now making a case that they were actually published with a fair bit of care, and maybe even to a lesser degree than they might have validly been published.
00:27:22.660It wasn't long after that before the authorities in Sweden brought charges against your husband in relationship to sexual misconduct.
00:27:32.380It's very interesting to me that it was Sweden.
00:27:35.760Your husband, Julian, described Sweden as the Saudi Arabia of feminism, which I thought was a pretty nice phrase, by the way.
00:27:42.400And there's definitely something to be said about that.
00:27:45.700And that was also at the height or in the prodroma to the believe all women and me too, what would you call it, brouhaha, and the insistence that if any charges of sexual misbehavior were ever brought against someone, that it was incumbent on everyone to assume that the victim was telling the truth.
00:28:11.780And of course, that violates the presumption of innocence.
00:28:14.260It often violates your right to face your accuser, and it's preposterous on the face of it, because what that does is enable anyone who's manipulative or devious or psychopathic to use the entire weight of the legal system as a weapon, which is happening so often now that it's almost beyond comprehension.
00:28:32.240And it seems a bit too convenient in some real sense that these charges emerged just at the time that was most appropriate in some real pragmatic sense for the authorities in the UK and the US.
00:28:45.840But I'd ask you also more personally, I mean, you married this man.
00:28:49.080You had an affair with him for a long time.
00:29:38.460And I'm not saying that you are, but obviously those are the questions that, that all the people who are launching allegations against your husband and you, those are the claims that they're putting forward, essentially.
00:31:06.960So they legislated, but carved out a little exception for Julian so he wouldn't benefit from it.
00:31:13.020And that has been the norm again and again and again, that somehow Julian is treated as the exception, and then we're going to fix it afterwards.
00:33:40.720So there are four allegations, three in relation to one woman and one in relation to the other.
00:33:46.900The single allegation which was most serious is what they called lesser rape.
00:33:54.920So there are three degrees of rape in Sweden, and this was the lesser degree in the sense that there was no physical coercion.
00:34:04.060And the allegation is that Julian initiated sex when the woman was asleep.
00:34:14.820The Swedish police had text messages from the women, which they refused to hand over to the defense.
00:34:24.580And those text messages exonerated Julian, and his lawyers, his defense lawyers, were able to read them at the police station, but were not allowed to take a copy.
00:34:37.640And Julian would only be able to access those text messages once he was charged.
00:34:42.000So you have this, he was placed, deliberately placed in this position of complete disadvantage in relation to his own defense, because at no point during those nine years where Sweden was opening and closing the preliminary investigation, was he formally an accused person.
00:35:02.220Because once you're accused, you start getting all these, the rights of a defendant.
00:35:08.260And it never reached that point, because there was no case.
00:35:12.640So there was an initial prosecutor who okayed the suspicions.
00:35:20.200Then three days later, the senior prosecutor of Stockholm reviewed the allegation, this most serious, the more serious allegation, which is so-called lesser rape.
00:35:33.540Sorry, I forgot to mention the other ones were assault and sexual coercion in relation to the other woman.
00:35:38.440But, and the prosecutor said, I have reviewed the interview with women, with the woman in relation to this so-called lesser rape.
00:35:51.740There is nothing that is not credible about the account, but there is nothing in the account that is a criminal offense.
00:36:00.600That was the most senior prosecutor in Sweden.
00:36:04.180What happened then, there was a politician.
00:36:06.160This was about 10 days out of a Swedish general election.
00:36:10.460A politician for the Social Democrat Party, who had been active in the, who had held the role of gender ombudsman, who was also an attorney, then took on the two women as his clients, and contacted a separate prosecutor's office.
00:36:33.900They kind of take test cases based in Gothenburg, and he pitched this case to the senior prosecutor there, and then she took it up.
00:36:43.400And throughout that period that Marianne Nee was heading up the case, she refused to question Julian.
00:36:50.780Now imagine this, a sexual assault, a sexual assault, lesser rape and so on case, where the chief investigator, who was a prosecutor, refuses to question Julian.
00:37:06.000And since, we've learned a lot of things since, we've learned the content of those text messages, where the woman with the more serious charge, sorry, not charge, even I say it.
00:37:40.220Well, how was it, how was it that both of these charges were brought about simultaneously?
00:37:46.160Because that also seems, well, yes, it's like, what's going on here?
00:37:49.660Because I presume these women didn't know each other.
00:37:51.760I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but, and so you think, well, what, it seems a bit too fortuitous that both of these events happened at the same time, and then so soon after, the other string of events that you described.
00:38:04.880So, obviously, you know, there's a bit of smoke there, and, of course, we're also debating whether or not there's fire where there's smoke, so that's a difficult problem.
00:38:12.760But what's your understanding of how it is that both of these charges emerged simultaneously?
00:38:29.580They knew that the second woman contacted the first one, and then they spoke to each other, and they found out they had both slept with Julian,
00:38:41.020and then they both went, that's their story, that they went to the police because they wanted an HIV test because he had slept with them in this short period.
00:38:50.780I don't, I don't, I don't see any point in me speculating about that.
00:38:59.360You know, what I can speak to is the extraordinary behavior by the Swedish authorities in conjunction with the British authorities.
00:39:13.320Well, could you speculate about the motivation of the second Swedish agent, so to speak, who took on the two women as clients and who had a political stake in the issue?
00:39:23.600What exactly was she up to and why, and why didn't she want to question Julian?
00:39:32.000And it was a close call in that general election in Sweden, and he was tipped to be the new justice minister if they won the case.
00:39:40.980I mean, if they won the election, sorry.
00:39:42.400And incidentally, one of the two women was also running for politics, so in that same election for a local seat.
00:39:52.200And she actually, there are text messages as well between the women where they're talking about that they can get money if they tell their story and stuff.
00:40:18.380There's a treasure trove of documents published, let's say, exposing the secrets of many powerful agencies and people who might have wanted those secrets to be kept silent.
00:40:29.940Coincidentally, at the same time as the publication occurs, on a scale that's heretofore impossible technically, there are allegations brought about against your husband in Sweden, which is the capital, let's say, of the ideology that makes such allegations possible.
00:40:48.180At a time that's extremely fortuitous for the people whose interests are threatened by the leaks and whose interests are also furthered personally and politically by the fact of the allegations in Sweden itself.
00:41:03.120And then, despite the fact that no charges are brought against your husband, the UK justice system decides that he should be validly extradited, even though they recognize simultaneously that the fact that that is a legal necessity is a violation of a more fundamental legal principle, which they decide not to enforce in the singular case of your husband.
00:41:24.960And then, as a consequence, he says, and then, as a consequence, he jumps bail and heads for the Ecuadorian embassy.
00:41:32.140And then, do you think that decision was justifiable to jump bail, let's say, and why did he do it?
00:41:38.040And then, why, of all places, the Ecuadorian embassy?
00:41:45.820It was because Ecuador, at the time, had taken a very sort of independent, sovereign position vis-a-vis the United States.
00:41:58.740So, the United States had had its biggest naval base, I think, in Ecuador, in the world, well, at least in Latin America, in Ecuador.
00:42:09.240And they had kicked out the U.S. base and also had a very kind of proud position.
00:42:18.540They said, well, you can have your base here if we can have our base in Miami.
00:42:23.040So, they were changing the rules of the geopolitical game.
00:42:26.700And so, this ballsy attitude of the president at the time, Rafael Correa, suggested that they would be willing to protect Julian.
00:42:41.860And Julian went into the embassy on the 19th of June, 2012.
00:42:47.040And he had exhausted all his domestic remedies in the United Kingdom.
00:42:54.140The United Kingdom was giving just a few days before he would be taken off to Sweden.
00:43:02.540In Sweden, you have an extraordinary pretrial detention regime.
00:43:08.880So, he would be in prison from the moment he arrived in Sweden, even though he wasn't charged.
00:43:16.320And interestingly, because Sweden is a very interesting country, and they kind of play the stats.
00:43:22.700So, I think, I don't know if it's still true now, but for example, they have very low, or at least they did a few years ago,
00:43:31.140one of the shortest sentence times for convicted prisoners.
00:43:37.740And that was partly explained because they also had the longest pretrial detention time.
00:43:46.880So, that by the time they were convicted, they had already served, you know, their potential sentence.
00:43:54.840So, Julian would be going into a Swedish prison in a country where he didn't speak the language.
00:44:00.540But most importantly, Sweden had renditioned two asylum seekers.
00:44:09.820This is one of the most egregious cases of extraordinary rendition in which two asylum seekers were taken on a CIA flight in Sweden,
00:44:23.680were handed over by Swedish authorities to the CIA, where they were flown to Egypt, which was their country of origin, and they were tortured.
00:44:33.020And then eventually, they were able to take their cases to the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, and they won.
00:44:40.180And also, the torture committee found in their favor and said that Sweden had violated its obligations not to hand over a person to the country where they risked being tortured or killed.
00:44:56.900And on top of that, of all the extradition cases that had gone before, from the year 2000, Sweden had extradited every single person that the U.S. had asked for.
00:45:13.580So, Sweden was in, you know, Sweden has this self-image, and it also has amazing marketing in the world.
00:45:22.060It has, you know, this image of fairness and so on, and you spoke to Swedes, and they'd say, oh, well, if he came here, of course, we would, you know, it would be unthinkable.
00:45:33.980But what I've come to learn with Julian is that the unthinkable becomes reality when it comes to him.
00:45:44.700Yeah, well, they create this, he is an exception to the rule, but what's actually happening is that they're creating a new rule with his exception.
00:45:52.060That will then, that is then normalized.
00:45:55.400So, if you look at the persecution that has occurred against Julian over time, now you see a lot of no platforming by PayPal, for example, of people with platforms that are critical of, for example, the war on Ukraine or whatever.
00:46:13.420PayPal and Bank of America and Visa and MasterCard, for the very first time in 2010, created a banking blockade against WikiLeaks.
00:46:25.840They blocked WikiLeaks from receiving donations from people who wanted to donate because WikiLeaks was, you know, on a global scale, this great new phenomenon.
00:46:46.720And it started, reflected recently in Canada with the government's decision there to seize the bank accounts on the entire financial operations of anyone who they deemed inappropriate in relationship to their donations to the trucker convoy.
00:47:01.200Which was very much a tempest in a teapot.
00:47:04.400Yes, it was the most utterly appalling thing that our absolutely, utterly appalling prime minister has ever done.
00:47:10.880And that's really saying something because he's a real piece of work.
00:47:14.040And so, yeah, this collusion of corporate enterprise and government in relationship to personal finance and the funding of, let's say, political or journalistic causes is an unbelievably dire threat.
00:47:29.560And so, okay, so Julian presumed that if he went to Sweden to face these allegations, which were of insufficient magnitude and credibility to result in formal charges, that the consequence of that would be his immediate imprisonment for an indeterminate amount of time and the overwhelming probability of being extradited to the U.S.
00:47:54.480Now, we might say, you made a case for why that was a credible concern and also for a case why Ecuador was willing to protect him.
00:48:08.640Again, we have the mystery here, right?
00:48:10.400Which is, well, Assange is operating on a scale that's novel.
00:48:15.920And you said yourself that's a consequence of the novel interpenetration of his radically advanced computer programming skills.
00:48:23.160And the international horizon of journalism that that instantly opens up that he pioneered.
00:48:29.800And the danger for him, of course, is that, well, when you're uncovering everyone's secrets, you can make an awful lot of enemies.
00:48:37.940And the probability that at least one set of those enemies is going to successfully take you out, especially given that they're operating with immense resources, is extremely high.
00:48:48.560And he is also a test case and an exception, and almost necessarily so, because what he's doing has never been done before.
00:48:55.940And so it's not surprising it produces legal conundrums.
00:48:58.860All right, so the Swedes go after him on specious grounds, attempting to denigrate his reputation.
00:49:04.300There's moral hazard involved on behalf of the accusers, both politically and personally.
00:49:09.300And at the same time, there's a pronounced threat lurking in the U.S.
00:49:13.880Now, the Americans were ambivalent about this, as I read in the bio, because the Obama administration had thought about prosecuting or at least charging Julian, but had decided against it because they thought it would violate, it would pose a threat to the integrity of the press and violate the Constitution, which seems like a relevant issue here.
00:49:34.100But the charges were eventually brought forth nonetheless.
00:49:38.480And it also seems, interestingly enough, that it didn't really matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans were in charge.
00:49:45.260The Americans at the highest level of state authority were highly inclined to make life very difficult for your husband, practically and legally, and to prosecute him in some sense to the fullest extent of the law.
00:49:57.720And so, there was a first charge that had to do with password cracking or sharing, if I have got that right.
00:50:07.080But then there were 17 more charges developed.
00:50:10.720And so, you have another situation there where a reasonable and uninformed outside observer might say,
00:50:17.020Well, good God, you know, the UK is after him, the Swedes are after him, the Americans are after him, and not just on one charge, on 18 charges.
00:50:26.280And these charges carry with them, I think, a maximum sentence of 170 years.
00:50:31.620And so, there just has to be something here lurking under the surface that's just not kosher.
00:50:37.080And so, tell me what the Americans are claiming, and also why, even in the face of those claims, which are repetitive and constant and being pursued for a very long time,
00:50:49.940why you're on board with his defense, both ethically, practically, and personally.
00:50:57.760So, what are the charges? What are the Americans alleging?
00:51:00.000Okay, so, yes, the Obama administration decided not to charge Julian, but they only decided that, in 2013, Julian had already been in the embassy for a year.
00:51:14.280And, as part of the, when they announced that they weren't going to charge him over the Manning leaks,
00:51:20.260they did it through a spokesperson called Matthew Miller.
00:51:23.120And he said, as you said, that they weren't willing to charge him because there was no way to differentiate what Julian and WikiLeaks had done,
00:51:33.940even with the same publications, and what The Guardian, The Telegraph, The New York Times, and so on, had also done.
00:51:45.220And then, Matthew Miller also said, Julian Assange is not a hacker, he's a publisher.
00:51:50.040So, they had, by then, all the evidence, because Chelsea Manning had just been through her court-martial,
00:51:58.640and all the evidence had been presented at the court-martial, and so they, you know, they had the full information, they took a position.
00:52:07.800And at the end of his presidency, Obama also commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence.
00:52:13.280So, that was the political position of the Obama administration.
00:57:17.140And they use that charge as a PR exercise in order to say,
00:57:21.240oh, look, he's different from journalists, because there is this computer charge.
00:57:25.960And it's, you know, the New York Times almost gleefully saying,
00:57:31.760well, you know, he's been charged, but not for something that would affect us.
00:57:36.200That was before they introduced the 17 charges under the Espionage Act.
00:57:39.840But they fundamentally misunderstood the computer charge.
00:57:43.580But I think they didn't even care, because it was just a way of putting a wedge between themselves and WikiLeaks.
00:57:49.340But after those 17 charges were introduced under the Espionage Act, this was about a month after Julian was arrested,
00:57:58.180the New York Times put out another editorial in which they said that the case against Julian Assange strikes at the heart of the First Amendment.
00:58:06.960The Washington Post has also put one out.
00:58:09.720And in fact, all the, you know, the press freedom groups, the human rights groups, they're all on this, sorry,
00:58:14.380they're all on the same side in relation to that the case should be dropped and it's a complete outrage.
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