{"id":125265,"date":"2019-01-07T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=125265"},"modified":"2019-01-14T11:27:07","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T11:27:07","slug":"giuliani-says-assange-should-not-be-prosecuted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/01\/giuliani-says-assange-should-not-be-prosecuted\/","title":{"rendered":"Giuliani Says Assange Should Not Be Prosecuted"},"content":{"rendered":"

31 Dec 2018 – Donald Trump\u2019s lawyer said today that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange should not be prosecuted and he compared WikiLeaks publications to the Pentagon Papers.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for President Donald Trump, said Monday that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange had not done \u201canything wrong\u201d and should not go to jail for disseminating stolen information just as major media does.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s take the Pentagon Papers,\u201d Giuliani told<\/a> Fox News. \u201cThe Pentagon Papers were stolen property, weren\u2019t they?\u00a0 It was in The New York Times<\/em> and The Washington Post.<\/em>\u00a0 Nobody went to jail at The New York Times<\/em> and The Washington Post.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Giuliani said there were \u201crevelations during the Bush administration\u201d such as Abu Ghraib.\u00a0 \u201cAll of that is stolen property taken from the government, it\u2019s against the law. But once\u00a0it gets to a media publication, they can publish it,\u201d Giuliani said, \u201cfor the purpose of informing people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t put Assange in a different position,\u201d he said. \u201cHe was a guy who communicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giuliani said, \u201cWe may not like what [Assange] communicates, but he was a media facility. He was putting that information out,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery newspaper and station grabbed it, and published it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. government has admitted that it has indicted Assange for publishing classified information, but it is battling in court<\/a> to keep the details of the indictment secret. As a lawyer and close advisor to Trump, Giuliani could have influence on the president\u2019s and the Justice Department\u2019s thinking on Assange.<\/p>\n

Giuliani also said there was no coordination between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. \u201cI\u00a0 was with Donald Trump day in and day out during the last four months of the campaign,\u201d he said. \u201cHe was as surprised as I was about the WikiLeaks disclosures.\u00a0 Sometimes surprised to the extent of \u2018Oh my god, did they really say that?\u2019 We were wondering if it was true. They [the Clinton campaign] never denied it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giuliani said: \u201cThe thing that really got Hillary is not so much that it was revealed, but they were true. They actually had people as bad as that and she really was cheating on the debates. She really was getting from Donna Brazile the questions before hand. She really did completely screw Bernie Sanders.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery bit of that was true,\u201d he went on.\u00a0 \u201cJust like the Pentagon Papers put a different view on Vietnam, this put a different view on Hillary Clinton.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giuliani said, \u201cIt was not right to hack. People who did it should go to jail, but no press person or person disseminating that for the purpose of informing did anything wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assange has been holed up as a refugee in the Ecuador embassy in London for the past six years fearing that if he were to leave British authorities would arrest him and extradite him to the U.S. for prosecution.<\/p>\n

You can watch the entire Fox News interview with Giuliani here:<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=xWW3sTzNgIg<\/p>\n

_________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of <\/em>Consortium News and a former correspondent for\u00a0<\/em>The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,\u00a0Sunday Times\u00a0of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at<\/em> joelauria@consortiumnews.com<\/a>\u00a0and followed on Twitter\u00a0<\/em>@unjoe<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

31 Dec 2018 – Donald Trump\u2019s lawyer said today that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange should not be prosecuted and he compared WikiLeaks publications to the Pentagon Papers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":122286,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,65,62,139,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","category-anglo-america","category-media","category-justice","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}