If you watched Rachel's Maddow's first half hour last night you saw two highly disturbing stories. One was about how the far right extremist, even white nationalist polticians were gaining support in Europe.
She reported an overlooked story about how the new Austrian prime minister decided to put together a ruling coalition with the white nationalist party, the Freedom Party, started by Nazis and closely allied with Russia. The coalition fell apart when a video emerged of the Freedom Party leaders were shown making plans to get funding from Russia and to advance Russian interests in return.
Read:
Corruption and Collusion Can’t Stop Austria’s Far-Right: Austrian nationalists were caught red-handed in an attempted foreign conspiracy—but the party’s future is as bright as ever, Foreign Policy Magazine.
The other story was about the Justice Deaprtment decoding to try to extradite Julian Assange for espionage not for hacking, but for publishing national security secrets. Even though he may be a poor excuse for a journalist this is still an alarming and blatant affront to the First Amendment and if Trump succeeds it will mark a major step in his turning America into Amerika.
Maddow was reacting to this story:
Julian Assange Espionage Act Charges Escalate Trump’s War on Journalists He Calls the ‘Enemy of the People’ This isn’t about one narcissistic and naive man who may well deserve prison time, but about the Pandora’s box opened by charging him this way.
It may be up to the UK whether they allow Assange (a country with troubles of their own what with Theresa May announing her retirement today) to be extradited. The UK has the power not to allow this to happen when the asking country want to proscute someone for political reasons.
If he is tried here it would be a trial agruably far more significant than any of the trials in the Mueller investigation because it would put a core tenet of the Constitution on the line.
Rachel said it was a tactic to pick an unlikable, even a despicable, character like Assange who also has a 2010 rape allegation against him in Sweden as the first case rather than a respected journalist. The notion is that if they convict Assange this will opemn the door for going after any journalist if they publish secrets. As Rachel emphasized this is what journalists in countries with a free press do.
I hope and expect the unlikely and unlikable defendant we’ll be rooting for would have a defence team composed of the best constitutional lawyers working pro bono.
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(Poll: I watch MSNBC so much their logo is burned in to my OLED TV screen. This is called burn in and is a not yet solved problem with OLED TVs.
Friday, May 24, 2019 · 2:18:25 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
suckback made a salient comment
Both of those stories are terrifying, but, they are not the only part of this nightmare that was reported on Maddow last night. The reporting about Trump giving Barr the power to look at all the intelligence from all the security services in service of their plot to find wrong doing in the Russian investigation is a serious lynchpin in the narrative the right has been building under Trump. If as I fear they rush to indictment of any of the people involved in the Russian investigation then they will have set the narrative ahead of the House getting around to impeachment. And we should all remember how easy it was for them to set the narrative with Barr’s “summary” of The Mueller Report.
My response:
I agree that Trump’s turning Barr into his Reichsführer is another nightmare inducing scenario, but I can only write about so much. This could end up having a good outcome because I think what Barr will find is that the FBI acted properly, and in fact scrupulouslty, in opening their investigation, that is if he reports his findings honestly, admittedly a huge if.
Another possible benefit to this authoritarian overreach is that it will change Mueller’s mind about asking to testify in a closed hearing (with a transcript made public ).
Friday, May 24, 2019 · 2:43:16 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Not behind the NY Times paywall, from the editorial board:
Julian Assange’s Indictment Aims at the Heart of the First Amendment: The Trump administration seeks to use the Espionage Act to redefine what journalists can and cannot publish.
Conclusion: “With this indictment, the Trump administration has chosen to go well beyond the question of hacking to directly challenge the boundaries of the First Amendment. Mr. Assange is no hero. But this case now represents a threat to freedom of expression and, with it, the resilience of American democracy itself.”
Excerpt:
The new indictment goes much further. It is a marked escalation in the effort to prosecute Mr. Assange, one that could have a chilling effect on American journalism as it has been practiced for generations. It is aimed straight at the heart of the First Amendment.
The new charges focus on receiving and publishing classified material from a government source. That is something journalists do all the time. They did it with the Pentagon Papers and in countless other cases where the public benefited from learning what was going on behind closed doors, even though the sources may have acted illegally. This is what the First Amendment is designed to protect: the ability of publishers to provide the public with the truth.
President Trump has waged a relentless campaign against the news media, going so far as to repeatedly label it the “enemy of the people.” But with this indictment his administration has moved well beyond dangerous insults to strike at the very foundation of the free press in the United States. The Espionage Act has been used against those who disclose classified information only rarely, for good reason. It has never before been used against a journalist.