Coup d'État by Jerome R. Corsi

Author:Jerome R. Corsi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2020-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Obviously, the DOJ realized the indictment would have been on shaky ground if the charges had been related to Assange’s role publishing classified documents, due to the Supreme Court case New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). In that case, the 1971 Pentagon Papers led to the Supreme Court’s six-to-three landmark decision that journalists have a right to publish stolen classified government documents, provided the journalists did not participate in the theft. The Pentagon Papers case involved the theft by Daniel Ellsberg, an employee of the Rand Corporation, of a highly classified secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam War.

That study was explosive because the Pentagon Papers provided evidence from classified documents that established the government of the United States lied to the American people about the premises for the Vietnam war, as well as the conduct of that war. Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara knew that the U.S. was doomed to lose, given the strategy to fight a limited foreign war in what was truly a Vietnam civil war. In 1971, the U.S. government went to the Supreme Court to demand that the New York Times and the Washington Post be prohibited from publishing Ellsberg’s stolen Pentagon Papers study. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of extending to the newspapers First Amendment rights, rejecting the government’s argument that the legal theory of prior restraint could be used to prohibit the newspapers from publishing (that is, due to the anticipated harm to the national security of the United States).

In the March 2018 indictment of Assange, the DOJ avoided charging him with a Pentagon Papers offense regarding the publication of the 2016 emails stolen from the Democrats. The March 2018 indictment of Assange goes so far as to avoid charging Assange or WikiLeaks with any crime related to publication. Instead, it charges that Assange allegedly became a coconspirator to the theft when he agreed to assist Manning by cracking a password that would allow Manning to steal more documents from government computers. Interestingly, despite Assange’s insistence that Russia had nothing to do with the theft of the DNC emails, the Mueller prosecutors never sought to interview him.

In reverting to the old 2010 case to indict Assange, the DOJ appears to have punted, admitting by default that Mueller could not prove that Assange committed a crime in 2016. But in doing so, the DOJ created a major problem. In 2013, the DOJ had passed on prosecuting Assange, arguing appropriately that if he were prosecuted for publishing Manning’s documents, the DOJ would also have to prosecute publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian in London, all of which had also published the Manning documents.208

In returning to the 2010 case to charge that Assange was a coconspirator in Manning’s document theft, the DOJ put itself on shaky ground. In the final analysis, it is not credible to believe the DOJ had acquired new

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