 Yesterday, a British court concluded that Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, should not be extradited to the United States on charges of espionage and of hacking government computers. If he had been and found guilty, he faced a maximum of 175 years in prison. But for now, Assange remains in Bellemarsh Prison, with lawyers representing US authorities appealing against the ruling. Despite seemingly on the cusp of freedom, the judge presiding over the case rejected arguments that the WikiLeaks co-founder would not get a fair trial in the US, but instead chose to block his extradition on the basis that certain aspects of his prison experience across the Atlantic could lead to him successfully taking his own life. In response to that surprising conclusion, the US Justice Department seemed happy at winning the key points of the argument, saying, While we are extremely disappointed in the court's ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raise. In particular, the court rejected all of Mr Assange's arguments regarding political motivation, political offence, fair trial, and freedom of speech. So is this good news or not? Even if Assange does walk free, has a terrible precedent now been set for freedom of the press? With me to discuss that and more is Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister, economist, author, present Greek MP and a very public advocate for Julian Assange in recent years. Yanis Varoufakis, welcome to Downstream. Thank you. Yanis, were you surprised at the decision, particularly with regards to Mr Assange's mental health being the reason that he wasn't extradited to the United States? I was expecting an even worse verdict. I was expecting that the judge would order his extradition in the United States. So, you know, a gift host, horse, you don't look at it in the mouth. I'm quite happy that the decision went the way it went. And as a Democrat, I consider the judge's right to ridicule herself with ridiculous arguments and with a verdict that is going to go down in history as abysmal. You know, I recognize her right to do this. What matters to me more than anything is that Julian is released, that he should not end up in a supermax prison for 107 years, that press freedom is not dealt that kind of a blow along with the sacrifice of his life. You've spoken to him a few times in the last 12 months. You wrote on your personal blog twice last year how you'd spoken to him in prison. You probably know, as well as almost anybody, what his personal mental state is. Was that an accurate depiction of how he's feeling? Is he really on the cusp of not quite, you know, wanting to be with us anymore? Look, if I had been incarcerated for such a long time, especially the last months and years in Belmarsh for 23 hours a day on my own in solitary, most of the time without access to news without a capacity to read and write freely, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that I would have flipped. I would have tried to kill myself already. And I do not know any sane person that wouldn't under the circumstances. So the language that the judge used was an affront to civilized values. But it was accurate in the sense that, yes, there is no doubt that his life is in danger, either from COVID-19 or from malnutrition or from, you know, a heart attack or suicide, but whose life wouldn't be under those circumstances? Those circumstances were designed to take his life. The perpetrators of war crimes are actively trying to kill a man who exposed their war crimes. Yeah, it did seem quite a strange sort of in the judgment, which I would recommend all of our viewers go and read it online. It did seem a strange judgment because obviously that's how a great deal of the U.S. prison system seems to work. But focusing briefly on the political content of the charges, there was the 17 charges of espionage from the Espionage Act, I believe, in 1917, is it Yanis? 1917 Espionage Act, one of computer hacking. And the reason why this set of charges hadn't been brought previously under the Obama administration is that it was just too politically regressive to mobilize a piece of legislation from a century ago. Trump didn't have those misgivings. When Trump went on with the Espionage Act charges, initially it was the computer hacking one that the espionage ones came later, the sort of liberal press in the United States, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, said that this was overstepping the mark, that it was a liberal, that it was an attack on the freedom of the press. And yet you've got a British judge basically saying that all of them were wrong and that Donald Trump was right. Is that a correct assessment of how the judgment played out yesterday? Yeah, she disgraced herself. This is if there is any extradition request anywhere in the world which is political, it's this one. Now the extradition treaty between the United Kingdom and the United States does not permit for extradition on the basis of political crimes. So the judge genuinely, genuinely threw herself under a moral bus with the phrasing that she used. But as I said, history is going to forget her. She's eminently forgettable. What I do hope is going to happen to unfold in the next days and weeks is that Julian will be released and that's the only thing that we need to focus on his release. Look, if you want me to give her the judge the benefit of the doubt, which I'm not inclined to do, but let's say that I am. What I would say is that given that in the past, the high court, the higher courts have reversed lower court judgment in the cases of criminals whose extradition was requested by the United States authorities on the basis that the prison system in the United States is not fit for purpose in civilized societies. Effectively now the higher courts are going to have an even harder time sending him over to the United States because they will have to reverse an opinion by the lower courts. And they will have to do it only on the basis of not the political arguments, but on the argument on whether his mental health is in jeopardy. And I don't believe that there is anyone, even Donald Trump himself, who would challenge that taking a man like Julian Assange who suffered the way he has over the last decade and shove him in a supermax solitary confinement cell for 170 years, that it's not going to have a negative effect on his mental health. So implicitly what you're saying there is that actually this conclusion, although it's politically problematic actually, this is possibly the best case scenario for Julian Assange personally, because it's going to be very difficult for the US State Department to win an appeal? Yes, very much so. I think that it is good for Julian, it's good for Stella, his partner for John Shipton, his wonderful father, for press freedom more generally, but I think it's a terrible indictment on the British judiciary. If there was a case for standing up against a campaign to destroy the soul and body of a man who simply did that, which any journalist had an obligation to do, this was it and they missed it. It's a great defeat for the British judiciary. You mentioned just a moment ago about the extradition treaty between the US and the UK and effectively forbids people who are charged with political crimes being extradited and this was an inconsistency that I found really interesting and I want to know your opinion on it because in the judgment, I think the judge makes, I don't agree with it, but it's a persuasive argument that Mr Assange isn't a journalist. Now for our viewers, I don't think the government or judges should determine who and who is not a journalist. It's a very dark path to go down, but I can see that interpretation. But then of course, like you say, if he's not a journalist, he would be a political activist. I don't agree with that, but that's the only other conclusion you can have and therefore he's furnished with these rights and he wouldn't be extradited. Again, I just want to know the sort of the gray space that Assange has been put in here, he's neither a journalist nor a political activist. He's basically conferred with no rights whatsoever. I mean, that does seem genuinely terrifying and I am surprised it's not caused more consternation in the press. Yes, the Guardian came out with a bit of a good editorial recently and Owen Jones wrote a column, but broadly speaking, that's a really new precedent, isn't it? It has been so for many, many years now. While some of us were campaigning in the very bleak years when Julian was being effectively abandoned by the very journalists who benefited enormously from the journalistic work that WikiLeaks and Julian himself did. During those bleak years, the Guardian, the BBC and many other people who are now reluctantly coming to see the light had abandoned him and had actually thrown him to the dogs, so to speak. I have memories of those years, but look, as you say, they are damned whatever they say, whether they claim that he's a journalist or not. The extradition request is simply an attempt to ensure that the public does not know what the United States government and other Western governments have been doing in our name, behind our backs, and what they have been doing, were crimes against humanity. But let me challenge you on one premise. You said that you thought it was quite persuasive, the argument by the judge as to why he's not a journalist. I am not at all persuaded by her argument and I would caution against accepting that this was a persuasive argument because if it is a persuasive argument and if a judge can make such an argument, then maybe tomorrow your journalistic credentials are going to be questioned. The credentials of anyone who is working for any news organization, the purpose of which, is to bring to the public facts, incontrovertible facts about how power has been abused by governments. We wouldn't want that, would we now? Allow me to correct myself, Janus. Persuasive is perhaps the wrong word, internally coherent. That doesn't apply to the 17 charges from the SBNRJ Act, but from the one charge of computer hacking, which I believe only has a maximum sentence of five years anyway. We're not in a completely different ballpark, but there was this communication between obviously the source, Chelsea Manning and Assange, which one could argue overstepped the boundaries of journalistic permissibility. Why would one argue that? Because a journalist has sources with whom he discusses and even tries to elicit more information. I don't think that, but I think it's a coherent argument. I don't think so. I think it's a grossly incoherent and unpersuasive argument to say that you are not a journalist because you had a source and you've tried to elicit more information from your source is to say that you're a journalist, not that you're not a journalist. So you disagree outright with that. So let's take a separate, yeah, good. Obviously, I don't think that you and Assange should be extradited to the United States, it's important to say that. So on the second point of kind of the argument that would come from the State Department, that this huge tranche of data, which was made public a decade ago, that this endangered the lives of hundreds of people. And this is of course where they try to pull on the heartstrings. We're not talking about CIA operatives. We're not talking about senior officials and Homeland Security, but translators, sources, political figures in places like Iraq, Afghanistan was not redacting their names a mistake, do you think? Because again, that could be another criticism that this wasn't really living up to the kinds of journalistic standards we need when we're exposing power in this way. Look, I'm not an expert on these matters, but what I do know, because I did follow the proceedings of the court very meticulously and very carefully. When this argument was put to the court, the defense, Julian's defense, Julian's lawyers, asked the prosecuting side to come up with a single case where a single person named was imperiled in any way by this process. And the solicitors, the barristers representing the United States government didn't come up with a single example and failed to produce even additional evidence or associative evidence that anyone's life was put to risk by any of the publications by WikiLeaks. But Aaron, more generally speaking, as I said, I'm not an expert. I have to make a political statement here in response to this pertinent question of yours. Who has actually put these people's lives in danger? WikiLeaks, Julian, all the war crimes perpetrated by the United States Army in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in all those places. I think the answer is obvious. No, I'd have to agree with that. You spoke a moment ago about how a number of outlets, which actually had cooperated with WikiLeaks 10 years ago in the Anglo-American world, I'm thinking the New York Times, The Guardian, kind of turned their back on him. Washington Post used WikiLeaks stories in their various editorials, although they weren't involved in initial reporting. Do you think that they turned their back on him because there was this interpretation of events where, for a long time, people in the United States, particularly within the liberal intelligentsia, were saying WikiLeaks had helped Trump to win? And that actually that was a major reason why people who previously had somewhat been on his side turned their back on him, do you think? No, definitely not. And the reason why I'm so abrupt on this is that they had turned their back on them well before Donald Trump appeared on the horizon. You remember the Swedish case against Julian? They had turned against him about that. And I found out absolutely disgraceful because I had extensive conversation with Julian in Ecuador's embassy in London, during which, as a feminist, I was putting into him that he should go to Stockholm and answer whatever charges are laid against him by women, because we men, we are the defective sex and we have an obligation to be answerable to any woman that accuses us and to face them in a court of law. And he was absolutely adamant that he would very much like to do this, except that he was absolutely convinced that he wouldn't even get the chance to do this. The moment he ended up in Stockholm, they would extradite him to the United States. And I remember how people from the Guardian, friends of mine working in the Guardian, working in American liberal newspapers and so on, were saying to me, but this is all baloney. This is what Americans would say or bullshit. My English friends would chip in. There's no way that anybody's going to ask for his extradition in the United States. And I would say to them, you know what, this is the real fear. And he had been abandoned. Look, in 2015, I had a personal experience of character assassination. And I know how the whole system works. How in order not to discuss the issues at hand, in my case, it was, you know, this bankruptcy and the fact that they wanted to push down the throats of the Greek people and not a huge loan in exchange for public property. In the case of Julian, the revelations regarding war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere, what the powers that be trying to do is to assassinate your character to make sure that nobody wants to listen to whatever you may have to say that is pertinent to them. Because you have been portrayed as a monster on the basis of fake news. This is what they've been doing with Julian. Now, I'm not saying that Julian is the same. I mean, personally, I have to tell you, and I'm saying this because he knows that we're very strong, very strong friends. But, you know, like with many of my friends, he infuriates me at times. So, you know, I remember when he came out supporting Brexit, I was leading a campaign against Brexit. So, you know, we've had a falling out on this. His position regarding Donald Trump, I didn't like it. I told him in no uncertain terms. So what? This is not the reason why they are trying to kill him. And let's be clear, they're not trying to extradite him. They're trying to kill him. And they're trying to kill him so that people like you and other journalists around the world think twice before exposing war crimes by the United States Army. Do you genuinely think that when you say that they want to, because obviously this was a big part of the defense, that they would like to kill him, do you think that's a sort of ancillary point? Or do you think the State Department would have liked to end the life of Julian Assange as quickly as possible? Just to clarify your point. You don't have to take it from me. Remember Hillary Clinton actually asked her staff whether they could use a drone to take him out. Do you remember that, you know, a chap called Joe Biden referred to him as a high-tech terrorist? There is no doubt they want him dead. Both parties, by the way. Obama was a bit cleverer than Donald Trump in the sense that he felt that the case wouldn't go smoothly for them. It's not that they were more liberal or more humane. And Aaron, let me ask you this. Julian has not been convicted of anything. And yet he spent the last year, more than that, in solitary confinement. You don't do that even to a serial killer. And they did it to Julian when I was speaking to him because I visited him in Britain's Guantanamo, otherwise known as Belmarsh. And, you know, I asked him how he was. In fact, I commented that because when he started speaking to me, it was a torrent of information, of viewpoints and so on. And I said to him, I'm glad to see that you are so lucid. And he said to me, well, you don't understand. I spent most of the time locked up trying not to lose it, not to lose my mind. And all my energy, all my mental capacity is focused on the moment when I can speak to somebody like you now or on the phone or whatever. And I have a moment where I try to bring everything out. But you've got to understand that 23 hours a day, I'm struggling to keep it together. Now, what crime has he committed? What crime has been convicted for? None. And this is how they are treating him. I have no doubt that he has been treated more harshly than any convicted terrorist or convicted criminal in the United Kingdom. That says it all. And your point about Biden and Hillary Clinton, that particular wing of the Democratic Party being quite candid about what they think about Assange, given that Biden is obviously going to end the Oval Office pretty soon in the next couple of weeks, do you think there's any possibility that his case will now be treated differently? Do you think there's the possibility of Trump pardoning Julian Assange? How do you think this will now play out in the next couple of months from the US side? Look, I'm one of those people who thinks that when it comes to foreign policy, to things that happen outside the United States, there is almost zero difference between the two political parties. When Biden was elected, I had colleagues of yours here in Greece interviewing me saying, so what do you think that will mean for Greece now that Joe Biden is going to be president or for the European Union? And I said, nothing. American policy, foreign policies does not change when the occupant of the White House changes. Now, is there a chance that Donald Trump will pardon him? Yes. Is there a chance that Joe Biden is going to pardon him? Yes. It will all depend on their calculus concerning their cost minimization policy. That's all there is to it. I don't think there is any ideological difference. I don't think that one is more humane than the other. When it comes to bombing people or treating Julian Assange with a modicum of civilized virtues. My final question, really. What next for Julian Assange? Obviously, there's this appeal that's forthcoming from the US State Department. If that's rejected and he's free to go, have you spoken to him or people familiar with what he'd like to do with his case regarding where he would like to live, what he might do, or has that not even ended the conversation? No, I have not spoken to him recently. Since the last time he called me from prison, I think he lost his privileges, so I have not spoken to him. Let's take it step by step. First things first, he needs to be released. He needs to be reunited with Stella and his two young sons and his father and all of us. He needs to have a moment, a long moment of recuperation. Secondly, he needs to find the place where he can live without the threat of a renewed extradition demand, because if he goes to France, if he goes to Germany, nothing stops the United States from starting the process all over again. Even in Australia, from what I hear, which is his own country, he's an Australian citizen, he's not immune from another court case that centres on some future extradition requests by the United States. Let's get him out of there and then find somewhere where he can be safe and secure, where he can actually live. That's, I think, our number one priority at the moment. There's no tentative thoughts about next steps politically. He's obviously, he's had to confront and fight through a great deal over the last 10 years. Has he never sort of spoken about what he'd like to do when he's free, if he would continue with WikiLeaks and so on? Oh, there's no doubt he will continue. Nothing will stop him except for an early grave. This is one of the great merits of Julian. His mind is racing away all the time. I've learned so much, even while talking to him in prison, even on the phone for the 10 12 minutes that we got to speak, his perspective on the world, his analysis of what's going on in Germany, in Russia, in China. It doesn't mean that I agree with his analysis every single time, but I can tell you that it is an education because it's always thought-provoking stuff that come out of his mind. So I have no doubt that this kind of intellect is not going to just go away and retire. He will continue and he will continue to write and he will continue to do his journalism, the way he does it, and he will continue to pursue his anarchist views regarding information and about knowledge. He believes that nobody should have a monopoly of it, and on that I agree with him. Yanis Varoufakis, thank you for taking the time to talk to us here today. Thank you. Always great to speak to Yanis Varoufakis, not only a hugely intelligent person with, I think, great insights on the big challenges of the century, but also very politically committed. He's never afraid to say what he thinks. And if you want to see more interviews like that over the course of 2021, hit the subscribe button. Navarro Media, thanks to your support, did incredibly well last year. We managed to find new audiences, break, I think, really incredible stories. We want to do more of that in the year ahead. And we've always been consistent. We can't have a different politics without building that different media too. And if you want to help us on that journey, go to navarromedia.com forward slash support. You can become a supporter and help our work reach even more people. My name is Aaron Bassani. You've been watching Downstream. Thanks for joining us. Good night.