"Regardless of the views that people have about Julian Assange and his activities, the case has dragged on for too long..."

"... there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia."

Said Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, quoted in "Julian Assange leaves UK after striking deal with US justice department/It is anticipated the WikiLeaks founder will plead guilty to violating US espionage law at a hearing in Saipan and will be allowed to return to Australia" (The Guardian).

Under the deal, which must be approved by a judge, Assange is likely to be credited for the five years he has already served and face no new jail time....

"Did you hear Trump's take on the JFK assassination? Why he didn't release the files?"

"He said that if you knew what I know, you wouldn't tell people either. Which is crazy. What does that mean?"

Joe Rogan asked Tucker Carlson, toward the end of a 3-hour conversation.

Carlson answered:

"This case is a retribution. It is a signal to all of you that if you expose the interests that are driving war they will come after you..."

"... they will put you in prison and will try to kill you. The Biden administration should not issue assurances. They should drop this shameful case that should never have been brought."

Said Stella Assange, quoted in "Julian Assange wins right to appeal against extradition from UK to US/The WikiLeaks founder’s wife, Stella, was among hundreds of supporters at the High Court in London for the ruling" (London Times).

Glenn Greenwald asks why Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying this and AOC, Bernie, and their ilk are not.

Leave aside whatever views you have of MTG. Just put them in a corner for a second. OK, have we done that?

Now: think about the indisputable fact that not AOC, Bernie or a single Squad member could or would say most of what is in this thread, let alone in this tone, and ask why: https://t.co/ZuekWvA3Fw

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 18, 2022

"Julian did nothing wrong. He has committed no crime and is not a criminal. He is a journalist and a publisher and he is being punished for doing his job."

"It was in [U.K. home secretary] Priti Patel’s power to do the right thing. Instead she will for ever be remembered as an accomplice of the United States in its agenda to turn investigative journalism into a criminal enterprise."

Says a statement from WikiLeaks, quoted in "Julian Assange’s extradition from UK to US approved by home secretary/Appeal likely after Priti Patel gives green light to extradition of WikiLeaks co-founder" (The Guardian).

"Despite these delusions, Ms. Gilbert — a self-described mystic who has written four books, with titles like 'Swami Soup' — mostly struck me as a New Age eccentric who could use some time away from screens."

"She disdains the mainstream media, but she agreed to be profiled, and we kept in touch. Over a series of conversations, I learned that she had a longstanding suspicion of elites dating back to her Harvard days, when she felt out of place among people she considered snobby rich kids. As an adult, she joined the anti-establishment left, advocating animal rights and supporting the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests. She admired the hacktivist group Anonymous, and looked up to whistle-blowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. She was a registered Democrat for most of her life, but she voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in the 2016 presidential election after deciding that both major parties were corrupt. Ms. Gilbert’s path to QAnon began in 2016 when WikiLeaks posted a trove of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. Shortly after, she started seeing posts on social media about something called #Pizzagate. She had dabbled in conspiracy theories before, but Pizzagate — which falsely posited that powerful Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor, and that all of this was detailed in code in the Clinton emails — blew her mind. If it was true, she thought, it would connect all of her suspicions about elites, and explain the horrible truths they had been covering up. 'The world opened up in Technicolor for me,' she said. 'It was like the Matrix — everything just started to download.' Pizzagate primed Ms. Gilbert for QAnon, which she discovered through the YouTube videos of a British psychic.... For her, QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative...."

"From A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling/Valerie Gilbert posts dozens of times a day in support of an unhinged conspiracy theory. The story of this 'meme queen' hints at how hard it will be to bring people like her back to reality'" (NYT).

The article assumes this woman was a person of the left who — encountering QAnon — flipped into a right-winger. But it's pretty clear that the conventional left/right divide doesn't explain her. She's into New Age and conspiracies and fitting interesting, exciting ideas together. It's a quality of mind, a way of being, a way to feel and to have fun with your mind and with the internet.

Posing around pardons.

True of both Snowden and Assange. Exactly this: https://t.co/9ACi91c2UY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 17, 2021

"Julian Assange cannot be lawfully extradited to the US to face charges over WikiLeaks because of his mental health and suicide risk..."

"... a judge has ruled. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser highlighted the intense restrictions and isolated conditions he would be likely to face in the US, saying they mean extradition would be 'oppressive.'... [S]ection 91 of the Extradition Action 2003.... states that when 'the physical or mental condition of the person is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him, the judge must order the person’s discharge.' The court heard that Assange has been held at HMP Belmarsh in London since April 2019, and has been under a care plan for prisoners at risk of suicide or self-harm for the duration of his imprisonment. Medical notes record numerous occasions of him telling a prison psychologist and other medical staff that he has suicidal or self-harming thoughts, felt despairing or hopeless and had plans to end his life, the judge said.... District Judge Baraitser said she had accepted experts’ findings that Assange suffers from a recurrent depressive disorder, which is sometimes accompanied by psychotic features. She said she also accepted the opinion that Assange suffers from autism spectrum disorder, 'albeit high-functioning,' and Asperger’s syndrome...."

The Independent reports.   

Note that the decision is entirely based on Assange's mental state and the conditions of detention in the United States. It's not about the substantive merit of the charges against him. The judge said the crimes alleged against Assange are also crimes in the UK and specified that the prosecution is in good faith: "There is little or no evidence to support hostility by President Trump towards Mr Assange and WikiLeaks."

There will be an appeal. What's most disturbing to me is a British judge impugning the conditions of imprisonment in the United States. 

I don't remember reading — before this — that Julian Assange is autistic.

ADDED: From the 2011 book "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy":

His obsession with computers, and his compulsion to keep moving, both seemed to have origins in his restless early years. So too, perhaps, did the rumblings from others that Assange was somewhere on the autism spectrum. Assange would himself joke, when asked if he was autistic: "Aren't all men?" His dry sense of humour made him attractive — perhaps too attractive — to women. And there was his high analytical intelligence....

If you think that's just a joke, here's a Reason article from 2007: "Could It Be that All Men Are a Bit Autistic?"

The elegance of Edward Snowden.

Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange. You alone can save his life. @realDonaldTrump

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 3, 2020

Assange arrested.

BREAKING: #Assange removed from embassy - video pic.twitter.com/qsHy7ZVPg5

— Ruptly (@Ruptly) April 11, 2019

According to the NYT article about the arrest, Ecuador's President Lenín Moreno said Assange would no longer be sheltered because of "his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols." Ecuador had protected Assange since 2012.

"I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience."

"I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat. He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails."

From the PDF of Michael Cohen's opening statement to the House Oversight Committee.

You can watch the action live here.

"The problem is Mueller is straying away from his mandate to find crime and he is now looking for political sin."

"Building buildings in Moscow, using stolen material from Assange. These are not crimes. He has no authority to be a roving commissioner to find political sins. So far, I don’t see any evidence of crimes except for ones that he helped to facilitate by getting people to lie in front of his own investigators."

Said Alan Dershowitz to Sean Hannity, quoted (with video) at Mediaite.

"Manafort spoke to Julian Assange/Elvis's hair was black but mine's orange."

Jimmy Fallon has some fun with Trump's recent statement, "Other than the blonde hair when I was growing up, they said I looked like Elvis."



I love the discovery of a new rhyme for "orange," but you have to say "orange" like it's French:



And here's "Assange, Manafort Deny Report They Met. The White House Declined To Address It" (NPR)(quoting a Wikileaks tweet, "Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper's reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor's head that Manafort never met Assange").

Has fearing the memo given way to pre-minimizing the memo?

From Axios:

Inside the Trump administration, sources who've been briefed on the Nunes memo expect it will be underwhelming and not the "slam dunk" document it's been hyped up to be.

What we're hearing: There is much more skepticism inside the administration than has been previously reported about the value of releasing the memo, according to sources familiar with the administration discussions.

ADDED:

I find it remarkable how comprehensively the Democrats, DoJ and FBI have played into Trump's hands over the Nunes memo. By conspicuously trying to hide information they have aligned themselves against the public, drawn suspicion and imbued the memo with totemic power.

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) February 1, 2018

"Julian Assange’s grubby ways might be behind embassy boot."

The NYT Post reports.

“Julian ate everything with his hands and he always wiped his fingers on his pants. I have never seen pants as greasy as his in my whole life,” said one of Assange’s closest aides, Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

Donna Brazile's new book reignites suspicions about the murder of Seth Rich.

Several times in her new book "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House," Donna Brazile writes about Seth Rich, who, as she puts it on page 37, "had been walking home from a local bar—and barely a block away from his apartment in Washington’s Bloomingdale / LeDroit Park neighborhood—when he was shot in the back in what police said was a robbery attempt."

The police were there within minutes, and Seth was still alive and talking when they arrived, but he died later that morning at the hospital.

That seems at first glance like an uncomplicated acceptance of the idea that Rich was killed in an attempted robbery, but my lawyerly eye notices the unclarity. What did Rich say to the police? He "was alive and talking," but did he say this was a robbery attempt or something else? The police later said it was a robbery attempt, but why did they say that? Did they say that because the now-dead man knew or believed that? He was shot in the back. Can you picture an attempted robbery that leaves the victim shot in the back? Doesn't a robber confront you to your face and use the gun to threaten you into giving him money?

And we see that Brazile doesn't seem to accept that it was simply a robbery. On pages pp. xviii-xix, describing her first phone call with Hillary Clinton after the election, Brazile writes:

I had taken all the hits. Hearing [Hillary's] voice was the first moment I understood how tired I was of taking it. What about the Russians? They had tried to destroy us. Was she going to help? I wanted to file a lawsuit. We needed to sue those sons of bitches for what they did to us. I knew the campaign had over $3 million set aside in a legal fund. Could she help me get this lawsuit started? And don’t forget the murder of Seth Rich, I told her. Did she want to contribute to Seth’s reward fund? We still hadn’t found the person responsible for the tragic murder of this bright young DNC staffer.

Brazile is interested in getting her hands on Hillary's money, and she purports to need it to solve 2 mysteries, but it's interesting that she leaps directly from wanting to go after the Russians to finding "the person responsible" for killing Seth Rich. If Donna Brazile really believed that Seth Rich was killed by a common street robber, would she really have brought up the murder in this phone call with Hillary and demanded that campaign money be used to offer a reward? If it were a common robber, he'd have melted back into the population of Washington, D.C. long ago. Why would you think a reward would pull anything in?

Later, at pages 148-149, Brazile talks about the Assange interview (on August 9, 2016) that sparked theories that Rich was assassinated.

On the tape I saw of the interview... [h]e dropped his smirk and said, “Our sources take risks.” Assange was implying that Seth was a source for WikiLeaks! When the interviewer pressed him on his relationship with Seth, Assange left it vague, responding, “We do not comment on our sources. We have to understand how high the stakes are in this case.”

I had been saddened by the crazy conspiracy theories that ignited on Twitter and Reddit. They wounded Seth’s family. I knew this accusation was not true. 

She doesn't say how she knew. She just drops that into a description of an encounter with Bernie Sanders. Sanders showed concern about Rich and asked about his family, and Brazile talked about going to visit the family "and help them plan the memorial and scholarship fund."

The story devolves into praise for Sanders. He's "no-nonsense...  always very grateful to people who tell him the truth." And he sent his regards to the Seth Rich family. So Bernie's listening to the story is used to bolster the truth of the story. He likes people who tell the truth, and Brazile talked to him about the murder, so what she's telling us now must be true. And Bernie's a good man who cared about Rich's family, so we ought to be good and care only about the feelings of Seth Rich's family. That packaging of the Seth Rich mystery makes me suspicious.

Brazile also writes about fear that she might be a target of violence. At page 180:

As I was preparing to fly to Las Vegas for the last debate, Julie, Patrice, and Anne took me aside. They were worried about me traveling alone. The attacks on me had become so frequent and so vicious that they preferred that I have someone along who would watch out for me. What they did not know was how I had been cautioning my family that they should be extra careful now. Our name, Brazile, was distinctive, and it would have been easy for my many sisters and brothers and their children to become the target of some crazed person out to harm me. Several of my siblings said they wanted to come stay with me just until Election Night to make sure I was safe, but I told them no. All I could think about was Seth Rich. Had he been killed by someone who had it out for the Democrats? Likely not, but we still didn’t know. 

But you told Bernie you knew! Or, I mean, you told us that you told Bernie you knew. Why did you call the conspiracy theories "crazy" when you yourself were — in real life — afraid that someone might be coming after you?

If they came after me like that, I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. This became a very heated conversation. I wanted to maintain my autonomy and not to cause anyone harm, but my colleagues were genuinely concerned for my well-being. Anne mentioned several people who had agreed to escort me, but I instructed her to thank those people and reaffirm that I would travel alone.

If they came after me like that.... Like what?!

ADDED: I looked up more details in the L.A. Times:

When police got to the scene, they found Rich had been shot multiple times, and his credit cards, wallet and watch were still on him. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Police ruled his death a homicide — an attempted robbery turned deadly. But questions loomed.

"There had been a struggle. His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything," Rich's mother, Mary, told NBC shortly after his death.

It's possible that Rich was confronted and he resisted and was trying to get away when he was shot. The shooter might have chosen to flee at that point rather than to search the body for something to steal.

That's how you add it up to robbery.

A reason not to see assassination is that there was a struggle. An assassin would have come up from behind and delivered the kind of shot that would not have given him an opportunity to struggle and would not have left him in any condition to speak to the police before dying.

Brazile's book left out details that made me less suspicious of the "attempted robbery" theory. So I'm a little suspicious about why she did that!

"There's something wrong with Hillary Clinton. It is not just her constant lying. It is not just that she throws off menacing glares..."

"... and seethes thwarted entitlement. Watch closely. Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen."

Tweets Julian Assange after taking this hit from Clinton:

.@HillaryClinton says @JulianAssange is a "tool of Russian intelligence". Watch the interview tonight on #4Corners. pic.twitter.com/htY89d7GVe

— 4corners (@4corners) October 15, 2017

New York Magazine says: "Right Wing Tries to Paint Harvey Weinstein As a Democratic Problem."

The post is by by Benjamin Hart, whose evidence includes this:

America's leading fake feminist, @HillaryClinton, still silent on Harvey Weinstein. pic.twitter.com/qIandk16pC

— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) October 7, 2017

I never thought of Julian Assange as "right wing." Not everyone who has a problem with the Democratic Party is right wing, though I'm very familiar with the way Democrats "try to paint" their critics as right wing. (I get called right wing all the time, and I don't think I espouse any right-wing positions.)

Assange has a second tweet with the text "Harvey & Hillary. A love story" and this image (click to enlarge):

Bucket news.

1. "An 'improvised explosive device' was detonated on a Tube train in south-west London during Friday's rush hour, Scotland Yard has confirmed... Eighteeen people have been taken to hospital mostly with burn injuries.... Pictures show a white bucket on fire inside a supermarket bag, with wires trailing on to the carriage floor" (BBC).

2. "A Norfolk school that advised teachers to provide buckets for pupils to vomit in during lessons has backtracked, telling parents that 'genuinely unwell' children will receive proper treatment... The bucket guidance surfaced in a document given to teachers at the start of the year at Great Yarmouth Charter academy.... 'We all know children say things like that to get out of work. You never pretend to be ill to get out of work because we expect you to work through it. If you feel sick we will give you a bucket. If you vomit – no problem! You’ve got your bucket. That’s probably all your body wanted – to vomit. If you are really ill we will make sure you get all the attention you need,' the document said'" (The Guardian).

3. "If Roald Dahl had his way, his eponymous 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' hero would have been black, the author's widow revealed. Liccy Dahl said that when her husband first wrote the golden ticket-hunting character of Charlie Bucket in the 1960s, 'he wrote about a little black boy.' 'I don't know why (it was changed). It's a great pity,' Dahl told BBC Radio 4 Wednesday" (NY Daily News).

4. "Prince Harry watched on as school children got soaked during a visit to a conservation project that aims to teach youngsters to value the countryside.... An instructor threw a bucket of water over one shelter as children sat inside it to test whether it was waterproof, and there were shrieks and giggles from the children as water poured through a hole in the roof and drenched them. As children clambered out of the den Harry shook the instructor’s hand and said 'that’s cruel!' One of the children quipped 'we survived'" (Daily Mail).

5. "An ex-fugitive builder who held a complaining labourer in position as his compatriot colleague chopped his ear with a trowel was sued on Thursday.... 'I was working at the ground floor. The colleague was carrying a bucket full of cement from the upper floor. Some of the cement was falling from the bucket onto me. I begged him to carry the bucket with care and walk down slowly. He refused to listen to me. He went up and returned with the builder who immediately seized me. He hit my face with a trowel...'" (The Gulf Today).

6. "[Hillary] Clinton has little doubt that Assange was working with the Russians. 'I think he is part nihilist, part anarchist, part exhibitionist, part opportunist, who is either actually on the payroll of the Kremlin or in some way supporting their propaganda objectives, because of his resentment toward the United States, toward Europe,' she said. 'He’s like a lot of the voices that we’re hearing now, which are expressing appreciation for the macho authoritarianism of a Putin. And they claim to be acting in furtherance of transparency, except they never go after the Kremlin or people on that side of the political ledger.' She said she put Assange and Edward Snowden, who leaked extensive details of N.S.A. surveillance programs, 'in the same bucket—they both end up serving the strategic goals of Putin.' She said that, despite Snowden’s insistence that he remains an independent actor, it was 'no accident he ended up in Moscow'" (The New Yorker).

7."Two Nova Scotians have been charged criminally in unrelated horrific animal death cases — a man who allegedly drowned a litter of kittens in a bucket, and a woman who allegedly left a dog to die in an abandoned car.... 'It's what we refer to as breathlessness — so when an animal is drowned, it's basically the worst sensation you can ever come across is you know you're about to die,' [said Jo-Anne Landsburg, chief provincial inspector for the Nova Scotia SPCA]" (Guelph Today).

8. "How This Woman Retired at Age 32 — and Says You Can Too.... After graduating from the University of Chicago's law school, [Anita Dhake] decided she would work hard until she paid off her debt and saved enough to retire as soon as possible. She did the math, and that meant quitting once she had saved 25 years' worth of living expenses, which she would keep relatively low. She wouldn't have a fancy car or house, but would make up for it with the personal freedom and energy to check off her personal bucket list" (Popsugar).

Wikileaks offers a job to fired Google engineer James Damore.

1/ Censorship is for losers. @WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore. https://t.co/tmrflE72p3

— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) August 8, 2017