Tag: wikileaks

Wikileaks: USAID Spent Half-Billion Influencing Journalism through Shady NGO “Internews Network”

The fallout and aftermath of Elon Musk’s investigation into USAID as part of President Trump’s radical revolution in his second-term in office, has revealed stunning reports of government funding for far-left efforts and wasteful efforts. Musk has said that Trump has authorized him to look into the Department of Education, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and explosively, the Pentagon.

Wikileaks is now claiming that another part of the far-left USAID funding has been influencing foreign and domestic media with nearly half-a-billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding for the “Internews Network”, a non-profit funded primarily by the government that trained journalists, pushed certain news and agenda that fit the government’s desires, and also that the network developed “exclusion lists” that were meant to pressure advertisers to bankrupt other media outlets that did not serve the government’s agenda.

The U.S. government was also pushing such ‘exclusion lists’ through a variety of other state-supported organizations and entities, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, Yale, Newsguard, and by coercing big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. This was all part of the left’s Censorship Industrial Complex.

The Gateway Pundit is litigating against the government at the moment in Missouri v. Biden on related issues about censorship, deplatforming, and demonetization.

Internews supported and funded those censorship efforts.

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Assange Freed, but Supporters Say Guilty Plea a ‘Big Blow to Freedom of the Press’

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange agreed to a plea deal with the U.S. government and was released on bail, leaving Belmarsh maximum security prison and the United Kingdom (U.K.) on Monday morning WikiLeaks announced on X, formerly known as Twitter.

His wife, Stella Assange, an attorney who has worked for years for his release, celebrated the deal on X.

“This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations,” WikiLeaks wrote. “This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised.”

A federal judge must still approve the plea deal.

Assange is en route to appear Wednesday in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands near Australia. He is scheduled to return to Australia after the hearing.

In exchange for his release, Assange agreed to plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material in violation of the U.S. Espionage Act, The New York Times reported.

Under the terms of the agreement, Justice Department prosecutors will seek a 62-month sentence, which is equal to the amount of time Assange has served at Belmarsh while he fought his extradition to the U.S. The deal would credit that period as time served, which would allow Assange to return home, according to CNN.

The deal would also disallow him from later making any claim that his long prison time in Belmarsh, where he was confined to a cell for 23 hours a day, was unjust, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald.

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JULIAN ASSANGE IS FINALLY FREE

Julian Assange has agreed to a plea deal with the United States. He left Belmarsh on Monday and is headed to Australia, WikiLeaks said.

“He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK,” WikiLeaks said in a tweet early Tuesday morning London time.   

Stella Assange, tweeted: “Julian is free!!!! Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU- yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true. THANK YOU. tHANK YOU. THANK YOU.”

Assange was released as a result of a plea deal with the United States, the BBC reported. The British national broadcaster said:

“According to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, Assange will spend no time in US custody and will receive credit for the time spent incarcerated in the UK.

Assange will return to Australia, according to a letter from the justice department.

The deal – which will see him plead guilty to one charge – is expected to be finalised in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, 26 June.” 

The New York Times reported that Assange agreed to the one count of the Espionage Act — “conspiracy to disseminate national defense information” —  in exchange for a five year sentence, which the U.S. agreed had already been served on remand in Belmarsh.

WikiLeaks released this video of Assange walking onto the pane on his way out of London, where he was imprisoned for five years. 

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Assange To Be Freed: DoJ Agrees ‘Time Served’ Plea Deal With WikiLeaks Founder

In a shocking turn of events, Julian Assange will plead guilty to leaking US national security secrets and return to his native Australia, under a deal with Biden’s DoJ that ends a nearly 15-year battle nightmare for the WikiLeaks founder.

After spending more than a decade holed up and imprisoned in London – mainly to avoid being sent to the US – Assange, 52, is expected to be sentenced to time served (62 months in a London prison) during a court appearance Wednesday in Saipan, in the US Northern Mariana Islands, avoiding a potentially lengthy sentence in an American prison.

Prosecutors had been in talks with Assange to resolve the 2019 case, The Wall Street Journal reported in March, with one sticking point being Assange’s desire to never set foot in the United States.

To enter a felony plea, defendants generally have to show up in person in court. 

Assange’s team had floated the possibility of pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, the Journal reported, which would mean Assange could enter the plea remotely.

The Justice Department and Assange’s legal team reached a compromise under which Assange wouldn’t have to travel to suburban Virginia, where the original case is filed, and prosecutors could still get a felony plea, the people said.  

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Julian Assange Is Being Murdered by a Fake Case that Has No Basis in Law

In the 1970s Pentagon Official Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times published them. It helped to end the war by showing Americans how they had been deceived by Washington. Washington tried to prosecute Ellsberg and the New York Times, but the presiding judge declared a mistrial citing government misconduct so severe as to “offend the sense of justice.”

Four decades later documents were leaked by Manning to Assange at Wikileaks who made them available to the New York Times and The Guardian, both of which published some of the documents, and the leaked information was published by Wikileaks. Assange was not the leaker but had the role of the New York Times in the 1970s. The documents exposed US war crimes and deceptions by Washington of allies.

In the intervening years between Ellsberg and Assange “the sense of justice” has departed the American and British governments and courts. The American and British media whose free speech rights are destroyed by the persecution of Assange actually helped the two corrupt governments to build a public case against Assange. Consequently, the written US Constitution and the unwritten British Constitution have been undermined as protections against vengeful arbitrary actions of governments. Assange has been incarcerated in one form or another for more than a decade in complete violation of habeas corpus. The British play a game of keeping Assange in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison, where he most certainly does not belong, while appeal after appeal plays out. It is a way of imprisoning Assange without convicting and sentencing him.

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Julian Assange Granted Right to Appeal Extradition to U.S. Over First Amendment Questions

Julian Assange can file an appeal by Friday to fight his extradition to the United States, according to a new ruling from a British court on Monday. The decision, first reported by the New York Times, comes as Assange sits in a London prison over computer hacking and espionage charges first brought by the U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald Trump.

Assange’s right to fight his extradition comes down to fundamental questions about how the 52-year-old WikiLeaks co-founder would be treated in prison if he was actually extradited to the U.S. to face federal charges. One early British court ruling in 2021 noted that the U.S. prison system allows the use of solitary confinement, largely considered torture by other wealthy countries. It was on that basis the court initially denied the extradition to the U.S., though that was reversed by a higher court a year later.

The British court also noted U.S. law allows the death penalty for espionage, another practice seen as barbaric by many people in the rest of the world. Even so, Assange’s efforts to appeal his extradition had been denied until Monday’s ruling. Another issue central to the extradition fight is whether Assange can claim protections under the First Amendment since he’s an Australian citizen.

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JUST IN: Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Will Not Be Extradited to US for Now

A UK court ruled on Tuesday that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will not be extradited to the United States for now.

The UK court is requesting assurances from the US around Assange’s First Amendment rights, and that he would not receive the death penalty by the US government for leaking classified documents.

This is strange, since the Biden family can hold and release classified material to business associates but not Julian Assange?

If the US fails to give assurances, Assange, an Australian citizen, will be able to appeal his extradition in May.

CBS News reported:

A U.K. court has ruled that Julian Assange will not be immediately extradited to face charges in the United States, giving the U.S. government three weeks to “offer assurances” that the American justice system will abide by several specific tenets in its handling of the WikiLeaks founder’s case.

The British court said Assange “has a real prospect of success on 3 of the 9 grounds of appeal” he has argued. Specifically, the court demanded that U.S. justice officials confirm he will be “permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (which protects free speech), that he is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen and that the death penalty is not imposed.”

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Former CIA coder sentenced to 40 years in prison for WikiLeaks ‘Vault 7’ breach

A federal judge sentenced former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte to 40 years in prison on Thursday afternoon on espionage charges for the largest leak in agency history, in addition to child pornography convictions.

Comparing the WikiLeaks “Vault 7” leak of top secret Central Intelligence Agency cyber-espionage tools to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” U.S District Judge Jesse Furman said Thursday he was “blown away by Mr. Schulte’s complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”

“The impact on our nation’s intelligence operations was enormous and we will likely never know the extent of the damage caused, but no doubt it was massive and real,” Furman said before imposing the 480-month sentence.

“It did have, as substantiated by the deputy director’s unclassified letter and even more substantiated by a confidential letter, an immediate and catastrophic effect on the CIA, and caused untold damage to national security,” the Obama-appointed judge said at the conclusion of the two-hour sentencing hearing.

Furman sentenced Schulte to 400 months imprisonment on the espionage counts and separately to 80 months for child pornography counts.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked for the judge to impose a sentence of life prison for Schulte’s convictions of what they called “some of the most heinous, brazen violations of the Espionage Act in American history.”

“Schulte’s theft of an arsenal of extremely sensitive intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — which in turn publicized it to America’s adversaries — is ‘one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States’,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing letter.

Schulte, who has been detained at federal jails in Manhattan and Brooklyn for over six and a half years, requested nine years’ imprisonment followed by five years’ supervised release.

Federal prosecutors argued an additional terrorism enhancement on his sentence was warranted because Schulte’s theft of the arsenal of extremely sensitive, intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency — and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — was intended to satisfy a personal vendetta and “clearly calculated to retaliate against the United States as a whole.”

The 35-year-old asked for a sentence of time served, citing the “immoral human rights abuses” he says he endured during his pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

In his lengthy 28-minute sentencing statement, Schulte decried the conditions of his “torture cage” at the Bureau of Prison facility, calling it “New York City’s very own Auschwitz,” and “something only the SS could come up with.”

Judge Furman during sentencing called Schulte’s comparison to Nazi concentration camps “offensive”.

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Biden Is Overseeing the Silent Death of the First Amendment

In early 2024, a new, grim chapter may be written in the annals of journalistic history. Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks, could board a plane for extradition to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison on espionage charges for the crime of publishing newsworthy information.

The persecution of Assange is clear evidence that the Biden administration is overseeing the silent death of the First Amendment—with global consequences.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé during the Watergate scandal is seen as a triumph of truth over power. Their investigative reporting led to the downfall of President Nixon, cementing their status as champions of press freedom. However, what if this tale had taken a dark turn, with the journalists prosecuted for espionage and silenced under the guise of national security? While this is mere fiction, Assange’s plight is all too real.

Assange, the standard-bearer of our era’s investigative journalism, awaits extradition in a British cell in Belmarsh Prison, a fate that could stifle the beacon of transparency he represents. At a time when the world grapples with the erosion of press freedom, with journalists imprisoned and killed, Assange’s case raises profound questions about the consequences of challenging power and unveiling uncomfortable realities.

The legacy of WikiLeaks goes beyond exposing government misconduct; it pierces the veil of secrecy shrouding global affairs. The release of Collateral Murder, the haunting camera footage from a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad showing the murder of several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, shocked the world. As we’ve seen in the past two months, the killing of civilians and journalists in war continues. In the last two months, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed dozens of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On Thursday, human rights groups determined that Israel had deliberately fired on a Reuters journalist in southern Lebanon—a blatant war crime.

The aim of targeting journalists is to keep information where governments want it—under lock and key. That is why Wikileaks is such a threat—because, since its founding, it has fearlessly worked to wrest that information out of the hands of the powerful and put it in the hands of the people.

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Corporate Media Are the Anti-WikiLeaks

It was impossible to imagine four years ago when WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange was hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown in Belmarsh Prison that corporate media, which had smeared Assange, could stoop to new lows of government servitude.

But it has now happened with the arrest of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, for allegedly leaking top secret government documents. The leaks exposed a number of significant lies told by both the U.S. government and corporate media about the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Among many items of interest, the documents revealed that U.S. Special Forces as well as NATO forces are on the ground in Ukraine; that Ukraine is significantly unprepared for its planned spring offensive;  as well as evidence of U.S. spying on its allies and  António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations.

According to Al Jazeera:

“Several purported U.S. intelligence assessments paint a more pessimistic outlook for the Ukrainian military than the U.S. has provided publicly. They suggest Kyiv is heading for only ‘modest territorial gains’ in its much-anticipated spring counteroffensive.”

In other words, the content of these leaks expose lies told directly by the U.S. and NATO, as well as the corporate media that serve them.

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