 Last Friday, we learned that British home secretary pretty Patel approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, where he'll be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for doing the crime of journalism. Yeah. Now there are still avenues that he can take to appeal this within the UK. He can also appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, although I'm not necessarily optimistic about his chances there. But what's really important, the next step, I believe, aside from the legal fight is to exert pressure on the Biden administration because he can unilaterally choose to drop this case against Julian Assange. And if this does not happen, if he does choose to prosecute Julian Assange under the Espionage Act and he's successful, the effect that this will have on the future of journalism going forward is truly horrifying to say the least. Now, there hasn't been much pressure on the Biden administration, despite how important this case is. However, one individual, one world leader is brave enough to stand up to Biden and exert pressure on him to drop the case. And that is Mexico president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said on Tuesday he will ask US President Joe Biden to address the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange saying Mexico would open its doors to him if he were released. British Home Secretary Preeti Patel on Friday approved the WikiLeaks founder's extradition to the United States to face criminal charges. I'm going to ask President Biden to address this issue. Humanism must prevail, López Obrador said at a regular news conference. Mexico could open its doors to Assange if he were released, he added. The Mexican president is set to meet his US counterpart in July after skipping the recent US hosted summit of the Americas and Los Angeles to protest the White House's exclusion of the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from the events. He is the best journalist of our time in the world and has been very unfairly treated worse than a criminal. This is an embarrassment to the world, López Obrador said. And for Amla to say that he's been treated worse than criminals is actually true and we'll get to that in a moment here. But basically the reason why this has to be the next step and even if the chances are slim, it's the most important best chance that Assange has is because Biden, he is doing what the Trump administration started, right? Obama chose to not pursue criminal charges against Assange, but then Trump was elected and then decided to take up this case against Assange. So Biden is continuing with Trump's legacy. So I don't necessarily think that you can make a compelling case to Joe Biden to drop the charges because we fear for what this means for the First Amendment and journalism going forward. But what we can do is shame him into doing the right thing. And unfortunately, really journalists who have his ear are the ones who have to make the case. I mean, this is going to impact them as well. So the fact that there isn't more pressure, more noise about this is truly startling. But at least we have a world leader in AMLO who's saying, listen, drop the charges. We'll take them in over here in Mexico. This is really important to have somebody care this much about democracy on the world stage. It seems like this is really uncommon, but I'm thankful that, you know, AMLO is making this case. Now, Kevin Gastola was interviewed by Philip DeFranco yesterday and he explains not only why this is so unprecedented, but the lengths that the U.S. went to to intimidate Julian Assange. We've seen in continents like Africa, South America, and the Middle East countries that are much, much, much less free and open that they do this to journalists. But it's always held up and celebrated that in the West, in Western democracies, in like UK and the United States, that we won't do this to the press. And they had always set a boundary that this law, the Espionage Act from 1917, which is over 100 years old, that they would only use this to target people who leaked information to the press who were violating their oath allegedly. Or the agreement that they had signed when they got a security clearance. Throughout history, they had threatened press groups or they had threatened media organizations. They threatened journalists with prosecution. They had stopped and never gone beyond threatening a number of journalists and organizations with prosecution. But now with this case, they have claimed the authority to decide who is and is not a journalist. Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo and another former CIA official were summoned to give testimony and share what they know. There was a source for this Yahoo News report that got a lot of attention because the headline was in bold and it said that it accused Mike Pompeo and the CIA of being involved in developing secret war plans to kidnap or poison or even consider killing Julian Assange outright while he was in the embassy. We get to 2017, 2018 and this company called Undercover Global. It's a private security company run by a man named David Morales. He develops this arrangement with which we think it goes all the way to the CIA, but there is still some things to be proven before we state that definitively. But we know the CIA had access to audio and video recordings from inside the embassy and they're involved in going after his attorneys trying to identify Julian Assange's who we know now are his children. He has Stella and his family interested in all his visitors collecting and putting together files on people. They were going after doctors to collect his medical notes, but one of the things they did that was the most outrageous towards the baby that was coming in who they suspected was Julian Assange's son. They tried to steal a diaper from his son to do a DNA test to try to confirm whether it was his or not. The fact that they had cameras, they were bugging all parts of the embassy. They bugged the women's bathroom where attorneys were actually already going into to meet because they believe that other parts of the Ecuador embassy were being snooped on. And so this is all known because of documents that are in the possession of his lawyers. He's got one lawyer named Aitor Martinez who represents him in Spain and they have all these documents, files they have. There's whistleblowers that came forward and passed on information. There's two of them. They're unnamed. We don't know who they are. They're in fear for their safety that they could be retaliated against. And unfortunately, I don't think many people know about all of these details. It seems conspiratorial. It seems as if this is something out of some sort of a movie. But this is real life. There's evidence. There's leaks showing what the U.S. has been doing. So imagine, like put aside Assange for a second, right? Because regardless of how you feel about Assange, imagine he's prosecuted successfully under the Espionage Act. Well, he published documents that exposed the U.S. government's war crimes. So imagine going forward, a journalist gets these leaks. Well, they might not want to publish them for fear of retribution from the U.S. government. I mean, prosecuting a publisher, this is truly a new low. This is a direct attack on the press itself who's supposed to keep governments in check. Now, for more context, the Guardian explains that use of the Espionage Act to prosecute him should be seen for what it is an attack on the freedom of the press as the Night First Amendment Institutes carried to Sel wrote in 2019 when the charge sheet was published soliciting, obtaining and then publishing classified information is what good national security and investigative journalists do every day. Ms. Patel could have turned down the American request. Britain should be wary of extraditing a suspect to a country with such a political justice department. Her predecessor, Theresa May, halted the extradition proceedings of Gary McKinnon, who hacked the U.S. Department of Defense. The UK could have decided that Mr. Assange faces an unacceptably high risk of prolonged solitary confinement in a U.S. maximum security prison. Instead, Ms. Patel has dealt a blow to press freedom and against the public who have a right to know what their governments are doing in their name. It's not over. Mr. Assange will appeal. The charges against him should never have been brought. As Mr. Assange published classified documents and he did not leak them, Barack Obama's administration was reluctant to bring charges. His legal officers correctly understood that this would threaten public interest journalism. It was Donald Trump's team which considered the press an enemy of the people that took the step. It is not too late for the U.S. to drop the charges. On World Press Freedom Day this year, the U.S. President Joe Biden said, the work of free and independent media matters now more than ever, giving Mr. Assange his freedom back would give meaning to those words. And that is exactly right. So if journalists have the opportunity to ask Biden a question and they do not ask him about his hypocrisy here, I mean it's journalistic malpractice, but they're only shooting themselves in the foot because this affects every single journalist in the country. And not just journalists. This affects Americans because we have a right to know what our government is doing as the article laid out. I think we had a right to know that our government was committing war crimes and lying about the death toll in these countries that we were terrorizing. These are the leaks that Chelsea Manning brought to Julian Assange after other outlets would not publish them. And Julian Assange may now be prosecuted because he chose to share something that was definitely within the public's interest. So Biden, if he wants to actually take us in a different direction, as he said he did when he was first elected and undo Trump's legacy, undo the attacks on freedom of the press, you're not serious if you continue with this prosecution, if you continue with this case. So I'm not necessarily sure what's going to happen, but I hope that Biden at least listens to the case that Amlo makes when they meet in July. And I hope that he drops these charges because this is just too important. I don't care what you feel about Julian Assange, but a lot of folks need to understand this is bigger than Julian Assange. This is about press freedom and democracy going forward. And as quickly as we are losing our democracy to the far right, we cannot allow liberal Democratic Party administrations to be complicit in the fall of our democracy and be complicit in the fall of press freedom. It's totally unacceptable and this is something that every single American has got to pay attention to and care about.