Closing the Barn Door.....

EU passes law on protecting whistleblowers (and facilitators) … days after Assange’s arrest

Don’t say bureaucrats in Brussels don’t appreciate irony. Following the arrest in London of Julian Assange, the co-founder of whistleblowing site WikiLeaks, MEPs overwhelmingly voted for a law on protecting whistleblowers.

Assange is facing extradition to the US, where he is wanted for allegedly facilitating the leak of confidential US documents by former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning. The US law frames his actions as a “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” – a charge that carries a five-year maximum prison term and which Assange supporters call as an obvious pretext to get Assange in US custody and slap him with further indictments.

Less than a week after the Wikeleaks co-founder – who, love him or not, is the decade’s biggest publisher of whistleblower materials – was snatched from the Ecuadorian embassy by British police, the European parliament passed a new law that requires member states to adopt national legislation that would offer comprehensive protection for whistleblowers.

Only 10 EU nations, including the UK, have such laws in place now, the parliament’s website stressed. But with 591 MEPs voting ‘yay’ on Tuesday, that will soon change.

The proposed directive says “protection of whistleblowers as journalistic sources is crucial for safeguarding the ‘watchdog’ role of investigative journalism in democratic societies,” and requires that not only those exposing misdeeds of their employers, but also other individuals must be protected by the law from retaliation.

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't this country have whistleblower protection and yet that didn't stop Obama from prosecuting more whistleblowers than any other president combined. What good are laws if they can be ignored just because they are inconvenient to the powers that be?

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assange

Do they really think people are going to respect a gambit like that?

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Shahryar's picture

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snoopydawg's picture

Here is more utter BS. I missed seeing this from Mueller's ridiculous indictment on the Russian intelligence officers.

Prior to the publication of the stolen Democratic-party emails and internal documents, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks exhorted Russian government hackers to send them “new material.”

That is what we are told by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Russian intelligence officers.

(I won’t offend anyone by calling them “spies” — after all, they were just doing electronic surveillance authorized by their government, right?) Assange wanted the Russians to rest assured that giving “new material” to WikiLeaks (identified as “Organization 1” in the indictment) would “have a much higher impact than what you are doing” — i.e., hacking and then putting the information out through other channels.

But time was of the essence. It was early 2016. If Hillary Clinton was not stopped right there and then, WikiLeaks warned, proceedings at the imminent Democratic national convention would “solidify bernie supporters behind her.” Of course, “bernie” is Bernie Sanders, the competitor who could still get the nomination. But if Assange and the Russians couldn’t raise Bernie’s prospects, WikiLeaks explained, Mrs. Clinton would be a White House shoo-in: “We think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”

In a nutshell: Knowing that Russia had the capacity to hack the DNC and perhaps Clinton herself, WikiLeaks urged it to come up with new material and vowed to help bring it maximum public attention. By necessity, this desire to hurt Clinton would inure to Sanders’s benefit. And sure enough, WikiLeaks eventually published tens of thousands of the Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence.

So...I have a few questions.

First, why was there no Sanders-Russia probe? Why, when President Obama directed John Brennan, his hyper-political CIA director, to rush out a report on Russia’s influence operations, did we not hear about the WikiLeaks-Russia objective of helping Sanders win the Democratic nomination? Brennan & Co. couldn’t tell us enough about our intelligence-agency mind readers’ confidence that Putin was rootin’ for Trump. Why nothing about the conspirators’ Feelin’ the Bern?

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think there is any basis for a criminal investigation of Senator Sanders. But there appears to have been no criminal predicate for a “collusion” investigation of Donald Trump, either - not a shred of public evidence that he conspired in the Putin regime’s hacking, other than that presented in the Clinton-campaign-sponsored Steele dossier (if you can call that “evidence” — though even Christopher Steele admits it’s not). Yet, Trump was subjected to an investigation for more than two years — on the gossamer-light theory that Trump stood to benefit from Moscow’s perfidy.
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A more serious question:

Why hasn’t Assange been indicted for criminal collusion with the Kremlin - the same hacking conspiracy for which Mueller indicted the Russian operatives with whom Mueller says Assange collaborated?

The same conspiracy for which the president of the United States, though not guilty, was under the FBI’s microscope for nearly three years?

The Assange Indictment: Weak and Potentially Time-Barred

The most striking thing about the Assange indictment that the Justice Department did file is how thin it is, and how tenuous. Leaping years backwards, ignoring “collusion with Russia,” prosecutors allege a single cyber-theft count: a conspiracy between Assange and then–Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning to steal U.S. defense secrets. This lone charge is punishable by as little as no jail time and a maximum sentence of just five years’ imprisonment (considerably less than the seven years Assange spent holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid prosecution).

This is very peculiar. Manning, Assange’s co-conspirator, has already been convicted of multiple felony violations of the espionage act — serious crimes that the Assange indictment says WikiLeaks helped Manning commit . . . but which the Justice Department has not charged against Assange.

Why? Probably because espionage charges are time-barred. Which brings us to the possibility — perhaps even the likelihood — that Assange will never see the inside of an American courtroom.

As I pointed out on Thursday, the 2010 Assange-Manning cyber-theft conspiracy charged by prosecutors is outside the standard five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes: The limitations period was already exhausted when the indictment was filed in 2018. To breathe life into the case, the Justice Department will have to convince both British and American judges that this comparatively minor conspiracy charge is actually a “federal crime of terrorism,” triggering a three-year statute-of-limitations extension.

For some reason, the extension statute — Section 2332b(g)(5)(B) — makes the extra three years applicable to cyber-theft offenses under Section 1030 of the penal code, but not espionage-act offenses under Section 793. I am skeptical, though, that the Justice Department’s cyber-theft charge qualifies for the extension. Prosecutors haven’t charged a substantive cyber-theft violation under Section 1030; they have charged a conspiracy (under Section 371) to commit the Section 1030 offense. That is not the same thing. Typically, if Congress intends that its mention of a crime should be understood to include a conspiracy to commit that crime, it says so. It did not say so in the extension statute.
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As I have explained previously, I accept the intelligence agencies’ conclusion, echoed by Mueller, that Russia was behind the hacking of Democratic email accounts. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between (a) accepting an intelligence conclusion based on probabilities, and (b) proving a key fact beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal case.

The intelligence assessment here may be sound, but the legal case Mueller would have to prove to a jury has problems. To state the most obvious: The Justice Department and FBI did not perform elementary investigative steps, such as taking possession of, and performing their own forensic analysis on, the servers that were hacked. Instead, they relied on CrowdStrike, a contractor of the DNC, which has a strong motive to blame Russia.

Why Isn't Assange Being Charged With "Collusion With Russia"?

It goes without saying that I disagree with Russia did anything to our election and so far I haven't seen any evidence that will convince me. But the questions and information are worth noting.

Probably better to read the article to since there is more....

Yeah I'd say that sign that Julian is holding shows how things are backwards here.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Alligator Ed's picture

@snoopydawg This whole Assange kidnapping following lots of legal games-playing and proceeding the Amerika via extradition has a peculiar smell to it. As your comment so correctly identifies, the current charging, especially late by statutes of limitation, is truly little a price for an extraction like this which is receiving world-wide attention. What's the aim? Additional but yet unspecified charges? Or perhaps to get things on the record which Trump wants to get on the record--and then shove that meal down the maws of Dems to choke on?

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snoopydawg's picture

@Alligator Ed

I doubt that Trump has had Julian dragged from the embassy in order to stick it to the democrats. Especially since he's languishing in the London version of Gitmo instead of inside a hospital finally getting medical treatment. But time will tell what the real story is.

If you have more thoughts on this I'd love to hear them.

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Not Julian.
Wasn't a concern for them until he was shackled and imprisoned.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

snoopydawg's picture

Some rewriting of history is going on it seems. Looks like Wilson has great job security though.

When U.S. forces raided the compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding out, for example, they found a letter that showed the al-Qaeda leader was interested in copies of Pentagon documents published on WikiLeaks, the prosecutors said.

According to prosecutors, leaked reports on the Afghan war included information on militants’ improvised explosive device designs and attacks, including details of U.S. and coalition countermeasures against such home-made explosive devices and their limitations.
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Manning was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in military prison for leaking classified data, but had 28 years of his sentence commuted by President Barack Obama..

Chelsea has spent 40 days in prison

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lotlizard's picture

ordering federal employees to inform on each other.

https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/this-really-is-big-brother-leak-...


(images from Hullabaloo July 2013 archive)

I used to be a regular reader of Digby’s Hullabaloo until 2015–2016, when that pro-Hillary “all Trump all the time” bodysnatcher thing seemed to engulf her too.

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