 Every single one of these three-letter agencies have played a role in the war on Julian Assange and the war on WikiLeaks. And why are they so out to get Julian? Because Julian exposed the realities of U.S. empire. He exposed what it means to be an empire. He exposed not just the bombings, the war crimes, the torture, but also the shady bathroom deals and economic exploitation of our State Department. And because he did that, there's been a 12-year vendetta against Julian, against WikiLeaks, and against anybody who aided and assisted them. We saw that. We saw that with the torture of Chelsea Manning, with the kangaroo court, court martial she got, and with the longest sentence ever given for giving information to the media. We've seen that with Julian, who was trapped in an embassy. He was subjected to according to the United Nations Working Group, arbitrary detention, and psychological torture. Those are both findings of U.N. experts. So I call on Merrick Garland to drop the charges against Julian Assange. These unprecedented charges brought under the Espionage Act, which is as misnamed as the Department of Justice, marked the first time a publisher of truthful information has been indicted for publishing. This trial would be an assault on the First Amendment. But Julian Assange is not a U.S. citizen. He doesn't operate in this country. So this is the U.S. claiming the right to go anywhere in the world, find and persecute its critics in the form of journalists, torture them and bring them to this country and disappear them into a dungeon. It is not just our First Amendment that is in peril, but press freedom across the world. Thank you very much. I'm Joe Laurier. I'm the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, which was begun by Robert Perry, the late Robert Perry in 1995. Robert was an investigative reporter, one of the premier ones at his time at the Associated Press, and he broke most of the big Iran Contra stories, including giving us the name Oliver North. Bob, in December 2010, Bob wrote a piece about Julian Assange in which he said that Assange was doing exactly what he did as an investigative reporter for the AP, which was to encourage his sources, to give more information, even to ask them to commit a small crime by stealing a document if it would prevent a larger crime from happening. Also, in December 2010, Vice President Joe Biden told Meet the Press that they would not indict. Julian Assange, if they could not prove he actually stole the documents, they never indicted him. There's never been proof that he stole the documents, even though the Trump administration thinks that he did. Why is not President Joe Biden telling the Justice Department now to follow what he said in December 2010 and drop the indictment? Well, a couple of things happened in the interim, the Vault 7, 2017 release of the CIA files, and of course the DNC League, none of which are in the indictment against Assange, but politically make it incredibly difficult for Biden, I believe, with the pressure from the CIA and the Democratic Party to drop this indictment. He also says he wants to be independent of this bill, and we know how that works. So at Consortium News, Bobby, what we think and we're trying to continue is real journalism, even though we're living in a pretend democracy, but the pretend free press and a pretend system of justice, this pretend journalism, it cloaks the aims of megalomaniacal leaders pretending that they're spreading democracy while violently pursuing their geo-strategic and economic interests overthrowing democracies along the way, if needed. As they play act as journalists with their wards and having their ego stroked, the media pretend as conjure a make believe world behind which these deeds are hidden. Some people struggle to break free of that deception, attempting to see the world as it is. No one in this century has helped us understand the world as it is more than Julian Assange and Mickey Riggs. That's why they're destroying him through the instrument of this Department of Justice. They do not want us to see what he's allowed us to see. He's blown their cover and for that he's paying a huge price that he'll continue to pay if we don't try to stop it. Thank you. Now how weird it is to be here at the seat of government. I assume this is the seat of government. Oh, where is this? Does anybody know? I know we're in Washington DC. Excellent bit of help from a chap over here. Well, welcome everybody. I always fail a bit Henry V on occasions like this. Feel like making the edging call speech, but I can never remember it. There was something about we happy few, we banded brothers, and there was a bed in Lincolnshire tonight that would consider themselves at first they were not here. Because I know I was a bit surprised that there aren't several hundred thousand people in front of me at one of these things. We only should be out on that piece of grass where the Washington Memorial is. And there should be a million of us standing there flabbergasted because extraordinary travesty was taking place under our very noses. And yet in the corridors of power, they apparently can't even sniff it. The stink of rotten meat that's under their noses. And the abrogation of anything that one might consider the proper rule of law is thrown out of the window because it's Julian Assange and Julian Assange was the distributor of some inconvenient truce. And on the basis of that alone, nothing to do with Magna Carta or the rule of law, or libertarian democracy or any of those things that our masters claim to hold to pretend in this situation. So we're about a hundred, I would guess, making a rough head count. A bit like it was seven months ago, a year ago, maybe hell on the girls, at Max Brandy, on 2nd Avenue when we stood outside the British Embassy complaining to Peter Patel about how it was two and a half years ago that we were in Parliament square in London. Having a word with the idiot Boris Johnson who is now left office, I believe, which is a very good thing. I need to be replaced by somebody who will probably be a lot worse. I wish. How else is there to say about Julian Assange today? What? You are teaching me how to use a fucking microphone. Thank you, Madam. No, I'm sorry if I was too close. It's a trick, isn't it? You have to be really close to it. See where I come from, you need your lips to be touching it or it ain't going to work. What was I saying? Something about Julian Assange? It's all very well for me to be joking and exchanging technical expertise with members of the audience about microphones. But Julian is still in Belmont Prison and he's still on to being extradited to the United States so that the government of the United States can kill him in private. We're still here on the street making our protest whenever we get the opportunity with Randy and Sophia and the rest of the team. I've watched Stella as much as I can whenever she makes one of her speeches. She must be getting pretty fed up with saying the same thing over and over and over and over again and always being exactly correct and right about absolutely everything that she says to me. None of this prevails upon any of the arseholes and idiots walking up those renders truck and freer sails now. Nice. Well done. Well, I believe it's now that we have to go or they have to go. The League of Team are moving on towards the European Court of Human Rights. I don't know when that is going to be. I'm not okay with all the dates, but it will be. But the unfortunate thing is that it will probably not be for a year or two years or something like that. All of which time pretty but tell or whoever her successor is will keep Julian banged up in Belmont, getting sicker and sicker and sicker and pushing her closer and closer to death. What more can we do? Nothing more. Everybody here and everybody listening to this. All you can do is keep doing what you're doing. Never, ever shut up. Never be quiet. Well, how else can I say it? I don't know. I'd love to stand here and chat with you all the day, but I have to fly to Raleigh tomorrow to do a gig. And I suppose not really to. I suppose not really to. But in the defense of Julian Assange, in the defense of the truth, in the defense of liberty and in the defense of democracy, I'm really happy to be here. And I want to voice out with three happy family brothers and sisters. Thank you. That's all I'm going to say. Yeah, well, should I care about Julian Assange? Shall I take this home? That's for you. Okay. Thank you, Roger. I love you. Thank you, Roger. Hey, well, honestly, I love you too. And I'm happy I could pop down here today. And now I have to go to a studio to work on a piece of music. And I'm not quite sure what I think. That there is a line and a reason to. So three Julian Assange today are brought up. What's your son's name, Merrick Garland? Is he the one who we should be? Merrick Garland, down your job. It's so obvious what the right thing to do. I've told the story again and again and again. And I'll tell it to you, Merrick Garland. This is what my mother said to me when I was 13 years old. And I was struggling with something. She looked at me and she said, what's up with you? And I said, I'm struggling with something. And she said, let me tell you something, Roger. Answer your life. You struggle with difficult questions. It's going to happen again and again and again. When you do, I have some advice for you. I want you to look at the question from all sides. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read about it. Listen to all opinions. Look at the question from every possible side that you can. When you have done that, you will have done all the heavy lifting. The hard work is over. The next bit is easy. What's the next bit, mum? And she looked me in the eyes and she said, do the right thing. Merrick Garland, do the right thing. Three trillionaires aren't at lunchtime today. Please. All right. I think that's all I have to say. We've been doing these rallies again and again month after month. I see you getting the images walking away. Thank you for coming and showing up to cover Roger being here. It's so important that he actually forces the press to pay attention. But otherwise, it seems like the Beltway press, the mainstream press, doesn't give a flying fuck about press freedom. Because this is the single most important case about press freedom in our lifetime. If Julian Assange goes, the First Amendment goes. And he is not even an American citizen. And now we see all the guys with the badges, the lanyards. They're going. They're going. We were glad they were here. But they need to show up every time we're here. And they need to show solidarity. This is a matter of media solidarity. That's right. And Roger was complaining last night that the Washington Post told him that they were not going to cover his concert. They explicitly told him that. And he told Jeff Bezos to go screw himself. The richest man or one of the four richest men in the world. I don't know. It's like competing with Bill Gates, owner of the Washington Post. Well, the Washington Post has never come and covered any of these rallies. And I also heard that Charlie Savage, thinking from the New York Times, he didn't cover the important press conference of lawyers who are spied on in the Ecuadorian embassy by the CIA. Because he told the person planning that press conference, which was aired by Joe Laurier's consortium news, that it was a stunt. You know what the problem is with the mainstream press? They actually think that Julian Assange is not only guilty of some high crime because they are stenographers for power. They're humiliated by him because he was one of the only people doing the job they were supposed to do, which is to hold power to account. They're jealous of him. They hate him. And so they won't show up here. And the shocking thing is, as I revealed in the gray zone, the Washington Post's top national security corresponded. Ellen Nakashima had her phone and laptop seized by CIA assets at the Ecuadorian embassy when she went in to meet Julian Assange. I published a photo of her open phone in the files of those CIA assets that came out in the Spanish court. Can you imagine if Vladimir Putin's FSB did that to a Washington Post reporter? It would have been all over the front page of the Washington Post, the New York Times. It would have been a national scandal. Did Ellen Nakashima say anything? No, crickets. Crickets from the Washington Post. Their own reporter was spied on by the CIA, but they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. That's the hand that feeds them. They are totally complicit. And so I'm disgusted. I'm so disgusted with the press committing suicide by abandoning Assange and letting our security state actively destroy him physically and psychologically it's so upsetting to me. And that's why it's so important that you all are out here. Every camera that's out here is so important right now. You are on the front lines of the battle of our lifetime. Amen. The press freedom against a security state that spans the Department of Justice through the CIA, which is not supposed to be spying on American citizens, but which did so at the Ecuadorian embassy on foreign soil and which is using the FBI as its own private Praetorian guard to take out political enemies at home. Do not let the Libs resuscitate and rehabilitate the espionage act just because it is being leveled against the bad orange man. Do not let them do that. Do not let them resuscitate the undemocratic security state measure that was used to jail Eugene Debs. Do not let them revive and polish and whitewash the undemocratic act that is being used against Julian Assange who is not even an American citizen. It was used against so many dissenters. This is such a dangerous time and we are seeing the security state act in so many ways. We actually just learned through a trial in Michigan where several men are on trial for an attempted assassination and kidnapping of the Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer that the FBI had paid an asset, nicknamed Big Dan, who was a former post office worker who said he got twice as much money from the FBI as he got from the post office to infiltrate a band of right-wing goofballs and incite them into a plot to attack the cottage and home of Gretchen Whitmer and kill and kidnap her. The FBI planned that plot against the Michigan Governor which actually helped sway the 2020 election when the news came out because we never heard about the FBI's fingerprints. But most shockingly, how did he find that band of goofballs? He had actually gone up with them into the Michigan State House for an armed protest against Gretchen Whitmer's lockdown measure in earlier in 2020 and what we learned from this trial through Big Dan the Informant when he testified is that the FBI explicitly told the Michigan police to stand down and allow those armed men into the Michigan State House. Setting the stage for something that happened right down the street from here which gave birth to a new more powerful security state. So the FBI is the absolute enemy of democracy and the enemy of the people and we are standing here opposed to the security state that seeks to take away all of our rights. Let's keep a clear mind here about what's taking place with the Espionage Act. Let's not let it be resuscitated whitewash and polished because it's being used against someone that many of us might find odious because remember Julian Assange was demonized in the same way. He was personally demonized and falsely branded as a rapist before he was branded as what Joe Biden called a digital terrorist and all those charges turned out to be false. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for being on the front lines of the battle of our time for press freedom.