 Yahoo News broke an absolutely chilling story about a CIA plot to possibly kidnap or extra-judicially assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This is genuinely disturbing to hear about but nonetheless it is incredibly important and the threat of freedom of the press losing its freedom has never been greater in my opinion and this story is very very long. It's in-depth and so I'll link to it down below if you want to read it. Those of you watching on means TV or listening on Spotify you can get this article on Yahoo News's website or through our YouTube page, but I'm not going to read the actual article I'm going to go to a more concise shorter summary by Jake Johnson of Common Dreams who basically gives us the main takeaways here in the most shocking elements of this story and they are truly gut-wrenching. So under the leadership of then-director Mike Pompeo the CIA in 2017 reportedly plotted to kidnap and discussed plans to assassinate WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange who is currently imprisoned in London as he fights the Biden administration's efforts to extradite him to the United States. Citing conversations with more than 30 former US officials Yahoo News reported Sunday that discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred at the highest levels of the Trump administration. According to Yahoo the conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency's multi-pronged plans also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates sowing discord among the group's members and stealing their electronic devices. While Assange had been on the radar of US intelligence agencies for years these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks ongoing publication of extraordinary sensitive CIA hacking tools known collectively as Vault 7 which the agency ultimately concluded represented the largest data loss in CIA history. President Trump's newly installed CIA director Mike Pompeo was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7 set a former Trump National Security official. They were seeing blood. Yahoo's reporting makes clear that Assange is not the only journalist US officials have attempted to target in recent years. During the Obama presidency, according to Yahoo, top intelligence officials lobbied the White House to redefine WikiLeaks and some high-profile journalists as information brokers which would have opened up the use of more investigative tools against them potentially paving the way for their prosecution. So at risk of sounding hyperbolic, I'm going to say it anyway, this is autocratic and I know that this word is used too much but this is exactly what we'd expect from authoritarian regimes who don't respect freedom of the press. I mean, the US government not long ago was rightfully condemning the Saudi regime for their assassination of a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, and they were contemplating doing the same thing, targeting journalists. It's just it's not it's not surprising to know that our institutions and people in government don't really respect the rule of law and they don't respect the Constitution but still to hear these details it really is sickening like it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up and the journalists who they were targeting who they wanted to redefine as information brokers that includes Laura Poitras who helped publish the Snowden leaks. She also released a documentary called Citizen Four about Edward Snowden and also Glenn Greenwald who published the Snowden leaks. He was the main publisher and I'm not a fan of Glenn Greenwald anymore but his publication of the Snowden leaks was objectively good it was important and he gets credit for that forever. Now Edward Snowden put out a tweet about this saying if you're a journalist American or otherwise you need to understand that turning a blind eye to this story moves the entire world toward a paradigm where the criminalization of journalism is routine you have to speak up on this one and that really is important and I'm glad that he said that. Journalists have to speak up. I don't care what outlet you are corporate independent MSNBC CNN Fox News everyone should be speaking up and ideally if the more liberal Democratic Party leaning outlets speak up like MSNBC and CNN I think that's a good thing because they have more credibility and legitimacy than Fox News. If Fox News covers this which I don't believe they they talked much about this but if they released any articles about this people might just dismiss it and think well this is Fox News but this is a serious story this is a serious threat to freedom of the press and the Julian Assange story just isn't being taken seriously by a lot of Americans and WikiLeaks as an institution I think has lost a lot of trust because of 2016 and the whole Russia kerfuffle right they view Julian Assange as a Trump supporter a lot of liberals do at least in my experience liberals dislike Julian Assange because of that reason when I showed up to his town hall with my senator I asked what he can do to you know stop the extra judicial attempts by the Trump administration of Julian Assange and people were like gasping when I said Julian Assange's name but this isn't about Julian Assange it's not about Republicans it's not about Democrats this is about the first amendment and freedom of the press which is seriously in jeopardy so the fact that this plot to assassinate or kidnap him seemingly fell through is good news but you've got to understand that this story it's not over right the Biden administration is continuing what Trump wanted to do which is extradite Julian Assange to the United States and a judge rejected that appeal not necessarily on grounds that it would be a violation of any laws but because that judge believed that the conditions in the US prison system would not be hospitable to someone like Julian Assange who would be especially vulnerable but the US is appealing and that appeal might go through and if that happens for the first time we will prosecute a journalist for publishing leagues using the espionage act which is a dangerous precedent to set so this is you know an alarm that should be going off in every journalist's head and everyone should be talking about this in mainstream media but it's usually crickets when we get stories about Julian Assange so you know it's authoritarian it's scary to see but this is the trajectory that we've been headed on for a very long time and it's really difficult to put the cat back in the bag once the cat's out of the bag when it comes to journalistic freedom in the United States and the freedom of publications to publish these leaks that are really important so I don't know what else to say this is disturbing um but I'm not that surprised by it even if the details are very shocking