 Welcome to CNLives, live coverage of the two-day US appeal against Julian Assange at the High Court inside the World Courts of Justice. In London, I'm Joe Laurier, editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Consortium News is one of a small number of media outlets around the world that were granted video access to the courtroom. A remote link, and we watched every minute of the proceedings today, and it ended with a bang, a very fiery performance by Julian Assange's lawyer Edward Fitzgerald. But they belong to the prosecution. Today, they presented their case about why the decision on January 4th by Magistrate Vanessa Berets in the lower court to overturn her decision that day on January 4th to not extradite Julian Assange to the United States. The US, of course, has indicted Assange on numerous counts under the Espionage Act and as well as a conspiracy charge to commit computer intrusion faces up to 175 years in jail, and that becomes part of the story too. How many years he might spend in jail if Assange is extradited to the United States. He languages still 30 months now and Belmarsh Prison High Security in London as he awaits his fate. Julian, at first, it was said by Kristen Kraffensen, the editor-in-chief for WikiLeaks outside the courtroom, that he was not being allowed to attend. When the broadcast began, we were able to look into the courtroom. He was not in his room. He did enter. He walked in and out of the room when we actually saw him at time pressing his face up against the glass door on the outside. He was wearing a surgical mask on his mouth. He was chatting at some point to the guard and he looked pretty stoic at other times and they were discussing some very personal and difficult issues for Assange. As I said, it was the prosecution day and James Lewis was at it. Lewis, a British prosecutor working for the United States government to represent them, paid by the British taxpayers, but he represents the United States and he put on a show. He put on more like an American prosecutor than a typical British one. He's tough. He's direct and he will say many things that are questionable as we will go through. He essentially resurrected many of the arguments that we'd heard during the month-long extradition hearing in September 2020 that Assange is a malingerer, that he's in no way close to being ill enough not to resist the urge to kill himself. There was the attack on Michael Koppelman, the chief medical witness for the defense. That is really central to the case. We also saw an attack on Beretsa, the lower court judge. Very harsh terms Lewis used to describe her and her judgment. Then there was quite a bit about these assurances that we heard about after the ruling was made on the 4th of January this year by Beretsa, not to extradite. Suddenly the US came up with assurances that they filed and these assurances were that Assange will not be incarcerated in a supermax prison or certainly not in a SAM, Special Administrative Measures, which is about as harsh of isolation as the United States can offer, maybe anywhere in the world. He would not also, if he is shipped to the US and he will be housed at the Alexandria Detention Center, attached to the Eastern District of Virginia Courthouse, well close to it anyway, and he would not be in isolation there. These are the promises or assurances that the United States have given that the Assange team do not trust. So quite a bit of the day was spent on that. Then the sentence Lewis talked about what kind of sentence he would get and it won't be 175 views. Overall, the strategy of the United States was to tell these two high court judges and it's the Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, who is the most powerful judge in all of England and Wales. He's the Chief Justice of England and Wales and also Lord Justice Timothy Holroyd. Holroyd was at the August 11th hearing, a special hearing that was held because the US challenged the grounds on which they were granted appeal. Initially the high courts, they could appeal. That was in July 7th. That was already seven months after the decision by Barathe and they could appeal, but not on these health issues of Assange. Well, the US wasn't satisfied with that. So they went to court on August 11th and they won. They were able to bring up these health issues, which came of course today at the Royal Court of Justice and Holroyd, who made that decision in favor of the United States, winds up on the court even though it might be seen that he sided with the US. He might not be objective, but it's perhaps balanced by the judge Ian Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice, who happened to be the judge in the Laurie Love case. Now Laurie Love was a hacktivist who was arrested in the UK and the US tried to extradite him. This was in 2018 and the lower court approved the extradition when Love appealed to the High Court, none other than the Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, with another judge decided to overturn that extradition order and bar his extradition to the United States because it would be oppressive in that he would be suicidal and he also had physical illnesses as well. Here was the same judge Burnett on the bench today in the Assange case. I'll get to Laurie Love a little bit more in a minute, but I just want to run through some of the things that Lewis was saying and the response. Lewis spoke from 10.30 a.m. London time up until about 4 p.m. and the last half hour was given to Fitzgerald, Edward Fitzgerald Assange's lawyer and that was one of the most dramatic, if not the most dramatic part of the day, the response of Fitzgerald. We've seen him before during that long two weeks, sorry four weeks in September of 2020. He's very deferential towards the judges, seems to be hesitant sometimes, but today he was fully on board. I've called it a fiery rebuttal in the story that I've written that's up now on consortium news. Lewis, he ripped Baratza apart and he went after, as I'm going to tell you, Michael Koppelman. Fitzgerald and his response defended Baratza, saying that this was a carefully reasoned and considered judgment. Of course he will because she judged that Assange would not be extradited. He called on the court, the two high court judges, to respect the findings of facts from the judge of first instance who lived through the hearing. In other words, Baratza heard the testimony of all of these witnesses from both sides, not the high court judges. So he's imploring the high court to listen to the judge who actually heard all the evidence. It got so bad at one point that Fitzgerald said, I sometimes wonder whether my learned friend, that would be Lewis, is reading the same judgment we are. So he tried to portray Assange, as I said, as a malingerer and he was on someone faking his suicidal tendencies and he disputed the defense testimony that Assange was severely depressed with psychotic episodes and was at great risk of killing himself if he is extradited. Now Lewis took aim, especially in the afternoon, to Michael Koppelman who on September 22, 2020, took the stand in Old Bailey, a different courthouse. He gave oral testimony, he had already submitted two written testimonies before that. Koppelman, of course, did not appear. Today, none of the witnesses appear at the high court, at least it's unusual to call witnesses, none are scheduled, it's a two-day hearing. Lewis tried to, the reason Lewis and the U.S. are going after Koppelman is because he figured very strongly in Barat's judgment and he swore on the earth that Assange had a history of clinical depression, he said his risk of suicide would increase if extradition, extradition rather were about to happen. Now Lewis then spent more than an hour, maybe it was two hours it seemed. It seemed interminable, not very compelling, where he actually just read the transcripts of his cross examination of Koppelman. Koppelman no longer there to defend himself but he's reading the transcripts and it did drag on a bit. What Lewis really didn't like about Barat's judgment is when she wrote, quote, I preferred Professor Koppelman's testimony over the prosecution expert witnesses. Lewis contended she gave no reasons, it was just her opinion and never backed it up. This really set Fitzgerald off later. It wasn't a direct confrontation between the two lawyers, it was all day with Lewis and then the last half hour of Fitzgerald. In that last half hour he really criticized Lewis for saying that, he said that he was looking for reasons for reasons and that Barat's had given Cogent reasons why she prefers Koppelman. In her judgment she cited Koppelman's testimony that Assange was suffering from hallucinations, that he paced his cell until exhausted, that he punched himself in the face, that he banged his head against his cell wall and he repeatedly called a suicide hotline because he told Koppelman that he thought about killing himself hundreds of times a day. This is faking it according to Lewis. Fitzgerald said the judge saw and heard Koppelman give his testimony, she was best placed to judge his integrity. She found he did give impartial evidence to the court, it's not true that Koppelman left things out. This is the main charge that Lewis made today that Koppelman hid evidence, particularly in one instance, that he hid evidence and therefore he misled the court and he actually violated the truth statement that every witness has to sign, in other words the oath and he violated that according to Lewis because he left things out. And Fitzgerald's saying that he didn't, that the judgment of the rates is full of detailed evidence presented by all the expert witnesses from both sides but she came down on the side of Koppelman. That was too much weight given to that, that's the argument that the US side is saying. They did never challenge the admissibility of his testimony, they say too much weight has been given it to it and they want it tossed out. They want his, this testimony upon which her judgment not to extradite Assange because he could commit suicide, they want that testimony turned out. Well Fitzgerald just blew his gasket and he said, he said this picture that Koppelman is a lone wolf is absolute nonsense. So that he did provide a lot of evidence and some of it was corroborated even by the defense, sorry by the prosecution witnesses. There was, in certain instances grounds where they agreed with one another that was misrepresented by Lewis and something we pointed out in the article we wrote on Monday, great to tell about these issues where there was the US side is misleading the court by saying that there was no agreement between both sides and particularly on the issue of Assange's autism which could make someone nine times more likely to commit suicide. So Fitzgerald said if one respects that this district judge heard this evidence and had a reason judgment then my learner friend is only making an attempt to re-litigate the case because the US lost. There's a powerful statement from Fitzgerald not to re-litigate in a high court. They lost, they tried to show how Baraita misapplied the law and how this witness Koppelman was untrustworthy, misled the court and should have his testimony thrown out. And one of the key accusations against Koppelman by Lewis is that he withheld the identity of Assange's partner Stella Morris and lawyer and their children and therefore he removed the reason why Assange might not commit suicide. That if you have small children, his Lewis argues you're more likely not to kill yourself because of a feeling of obligation towards your children. So he's construing that Koppelman hid this from his preliminary report in December of 2019. He hid that from the court. In fact by March 2020 the US side knew, the judge knew about the existence of Stella and the children. The preliminary report talked about a woman but didn't mention who it was. This for Fitzgerald and for the US, this is their line of argument, is grounds to throw out this testimony because he violated his oath of telling the truth. Fitzgerald came back and said that it was actually normal for a witness to protect the identity of an informant if he's asked or she's asked. And in this case he said it involved Morris's safety not just to privacy. Why? Because we expect tomorrow, Thursday, that Fitzgerald will, when it's his term, to spend most of the day addressing the bench. Fitzgerald can be expected to outline how Morris and her children's lives were hounded by the Spanish security firm UC Global who were contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency. We reported Monday that Koppelman was under attack actually had an ethical duty according to the British Psychological Association to put the safety of children before any other obligation. That's completely contrary to Lewis. He actually said in the court today that his primary obligation was to the court. Nothing else was as important as that. But that is an interesting report that should come up tomorrow in the argument by Assange's side that his obligation was to protect the children. Well, Barreza, who was no fan of Julian Assange, as we know it because the majority of her judgment on January 4th, not to extradite, was actually favored United States on all the legal points about the Espionage Act, about it being, even though he may be a journalist, he could be charged with this. This was very scary stuff. And in fact, Barreza, we all know now because of the Yahoo News story that the CIA was seriously considering assassinating or kidnapping Assange. But that came up in the September 2020 hearing when some of these UC Global Spanish security firm witnesses testified anonymously in Assange's court that they've worked for the CIA and they set up a 24-7 live stream from inside the embassy. So he was spied on everywhere in the few small rooms he could move around in the embassy but also that they had just heard the CIA discussing with them an possible plot to kidnap him or poison him. So this was already in the news from September 2020. What Yahoo did was, of course, get the US side and get it confirmed by former CIA, former White House lawyers, former national security officials that indeed they did seriously discuss that. And this is what we expect the lawyer, Fitzgerald, tomorrow to explain why Koppelman did not mention Morris and the kids because there's one instance in particular that the UC Global witnesses testified to last September 2020 is that they were instructed to take some diapers from out of the trash to test the DNA to see if that child was indeed doing Assange's. This is where it got to. So it became known that she was indeed the partner, she was indeed the mother of Assange's children in March 2020 when there was a bail application. It had to be declared where he would live and he would live with Stella if he got bail, he didn't get bail. But everybody found out about this relationship and the US, it seems to me, doesn't have an extremely strong case if this is the way they're trying to get Koppelman's testimony thrown out. They don't like Baratza accepted his testimony. They're trying to say that there were no reasons in the judgment where Fitzgerald went through several of them in his short 30 minutes and he'll probably go back to that together. So Koppelman is key to the US case to get him because that is what convinced Baratza not to extradite Assange, mostly his testimony. She said I preferred his testimony over all the others and that set him off. Now Laurie Love I mentioned before was freed. His extradition was overturned by one of the two judges that was in the courtroom today. For Assange's case, that's the Lord Chief Justice. After Laurie Love's extradition order was overturned, the US dropped the charges. She was free. I'm sorry, he was free, Laurie. Well, Laurie Love was at an event at St. Pancras Church in London previous last night and said that he would like to be inside the courtroom and indeed he was because at the end we could hear what sounded like Laurie we've later confirmed but someone who was in the courtroom was, Laurie Love stood up and read out what sounded like an oath because we heard do no harm. So he was either reading the Hippocratic Oath or even that British Psychological Association Oath when we quote here that we say Koppelman had to put before any obligations even to the court to protect the children. That's what the British Psychological Association Oath says they have primary obligation. The primary obligation is to protect the children. So it's not a matter of opinion but this sounded like Laurie Love reading that or the Hippocratic Oath. Of course he was clever to wait till the judges left the room so there was no chance for the judges to order him to leave and we heard him standing up and speaking about that. That was a dramatic moment towards the end of the case. Now there was also actually Laurie Love's case came up was brought up by Lewis. He said that there was a difference because he's quite well aware that there's this parallel that's trying to be made by Assange's side between the Laurie Love case and Assange. They were both suicidal. One was ordered extradited and it was overturned. Assange was ordered not extradited. The U.S. is trying to get that overturned to extradite. So Lewis is pointing out what he says are two differences between these cases. One, Laurie Love also had physical ailments not just psychological that caused her to be suicidal. Him, excuse me, him to be suicidal and the other thing is the Turner test is a test used by courts to determine whether someone is so suicidal that it would be oppressive to extradite. The Turner test was not applied, Lewis says, in the Laurie Love case but it has been in Assange's case. But tomorrow for sure, very likely, we'll still try to make that parallel. Just to go, excuse me, just to go a little bit deeper into the faking it to the malingering part. This came up already in 2020, September, but here again we hear that he was faking his severe depression, his autism and his suicidal impulses because there are prison notes that describe him drinking coffee in the company of other prisoners. He being alert, making good eye contact. Assange had no history of mental illness. Lewis said, although he was briefly admitted in his 20s to a psychiatric hospital in Australia, but he has no history of mental illness. This is what Lewis is arguing. U.S. is arguing. He had a chat show called the Julian Assange show on Russia Today. He negotiated his asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy and he helped Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, escape from Hong Kong. So because of all of this, this guy cannot be having mental illness. Well, of course, the witnesses for the defense, many of them testified that you could still be suicidal. You could still be severely depressed and have moments of clarity and be able to play pool. That's another one I forgot to mention. He's playing pool in the prison. So Assange is faking it. This is the level of the argument the United States has got right now. Fitzgerald in his rebuttal at the end, he was quite furious and he said that this is not, I quote, this is not Cato or Cleopatra committing suicide rather than face their enemies. This comes out of a man who is suffering a mental disorder that the impulses to commit suicide are not a rational decision or a voluntary act, but they came from that very mental illness. We're going to move on to this issue of the assurances. And this is very key and used up quite a bit of time today. So the U.S. made those assurances that Assange would not go in isolation in Alexandria for pre-trial and he would not be sent to Sam's special administrative measures, the harshest isolation conditions the U.S. have in the ADX Florence prison in Colorado. Assurances were that the U.S. made, well first, when did they make these assurances? The Assange side is saying this had to be made before the hearing was over, the extradition hearing in the lower court, that if you tried to introduce it now, it's fresh evidence and it's very difficult to put in new evidence in an appeal court. It's only reviewing the evidence that was in the lower court. So the U.S. is saying, sorry, the Assange is saying this is new evidence, the U.S. is saying, well, we, sorry, we didn't put it in before, but we had no idea that Baratso was going to put so much emphasis on the special administrative measures possibility, which by the way is decided by the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons in conjunction with an intelligence agency, a domestic prisoner, probably the FBI and a foreign prisoner as Assange is by the CIA. So the CIA, which plotted and discuss seriously killing him will have a say in whether he goes into the special administrative measures or not, which is quite chilling when you think about it. I suspect tomorrow, by the way, and we'll be reporting again live after the court day is over, that the U.S. will make something of that new information about these plots to kill or assassinate Assange to show that A, it had even further stress on Assange, his psychological state. And by the way, it goes back to 2010. It was the first time WikiLeaks tweeted about a foyer that was sent to try to find out whether the CIA had plans to assassinate the WikiLeaks editor, and they refused to confirm or deny and WikiLeaks put up a tweet November 2010, 11 years ago, next month, saying that this was not justice. So they were already aware and worried about CIA in particular, maybe trying to assassinate Julian Assange. So the CIA could put him in the SAM. So the assurances did not come before Lewis said, because they didn't know she was going to put so much weight to this issue of the prison conditions that he's suicidal and that the horrible inhumane conditions of American prisons, which took up a lot of testimony in the September 20 hearing, we heard a lot about how bad American prisons are, that she combined the two, his tendency towards suicide, his severe mental depression, his and his ideations of suicide, calling the suicide hotline of Samaritans repeatedly, that combined with an American prison was too much even for Vanessa Barreza. So the Americans decided that it seems after that to say, well, we won't put him in SAMs. We promise. But of course, is a condition if he doesn't do something. And what is that something? Well, Lewis spelt it out. If he does something that threatens the national security of the United States, broad term that's used, overused for years, going back decades when the United States wants to do something, they say it's a national security threat. It almost justifies anything. So Assange could go back into the SAMs, even according to these assurances. There's also an assurance he cannot go to Colorado, Florence, ADX. But if you look at the paper, it does say that that if he does something wrong, if he does something to upset the US threat, well, how could he threaten national security, even by their own standards, it would have to be that he's resumed publishing somehow, from inside a prison, making phone calls to London telling them to publish this without running his company again. If that were ever possible, I think that would probably land him in SAMs. But it could be something far less than that. So these assurances, according to the Assange side, are not worth the paper that they're written on. But Lewis said that he's never been in the history, the long history of cooperation on criminal justice matters between the United Kingdom and the United States. There's never been once a complaint by the United Kingdom to the United States that an assurance the US gave Britain was not complied with. So they never complained to the US. That might be true. It doesn't mean that the US always followed their promises. Maybe they broke some of them, but Britain didn't complain in the unequal relationship between the United States and Britain. It's not hard to imagine that, unless it was a really serious matter, that British officials would not like to upset the Americans by saying, look, you said you wouldn't throw that guy in SAMs, and he's been there 20 years now. Anyway, he says there's never been a complaint, and he's using it as an argument to show that the US totally trustworthy government. When we say we're not going to put him in SAMs, unless he does something, we won't put him in SAMs. He also said, at any time, at any part of an extradition process, even in the appellate stage, you can put these kinds of assurances. That could very well be true. So that might not be a big issue about whether it's fresh evidence or not. The issue really is whether these are trustworthy promises or not. Now, he extended that to the question of the... He said, we can't live by a crystal ball, Lewis said. What do you mean by that? He meant that the judgment that Baraitse Mey was based on examinations of Assange from even before January 4th, months before that, sometimes a year or more before that, so that these are two-year-old examinations and diagnoses of his mental illness. He's arguing that has to be now. He can't predict the future, because what Baraitse is saying is if we send him conditionally to the United States, and if he goes into SAMs, there's a very high likelihood he will kill himself. That's what she accepted from the defense experts, particularly Michael Cobleman. So Lewis is trying to say, well, you can't predict what's going to happen a year from now, two years, if he goes there. It has to be a current, ongoing medical examination. Fitzgerald came back and said, that's nonsense, that all the time people have to try to look ahead to make decisions in a courtroom. But that's another attempt that they made to say, well, you got to throw this out, because we don't know what kind of condition he'll be in when he finally arrives in the United States. How is he going to be suicidal then? It's dynamic, Lewis said. Comes in those. Sometimes people want to commit suicide who are very suicidal at times. That's passing for a while. It's kind of extraordinary that that was the crystal ball argument. Then we came to the issue of the sentence. Everybody knows that Julian Sarge is facing 175 years in an American prison. That 175 years is according to the sentencing guidelines for each of the charges that he has been charged with. They run not all at once, but one after the other, so that if he serves 10 years on one, the next charge that he may be convicted on would begin. That adds up to 175 years of frightening number outliving any human being. Obviously, it's a death sentence. It's a life sentence rather to be charged on a cell use. Well, what is Lewis trying to say about that? He's not going to get 175 years. No, the longest anybody's ever served for the crimes that Assange is accused of, i.e., the Espionage Act, is 63 months, he said. Reality winner. Well, I wrote that down and it took me quite a while actually when I was writing the article about this a couple of hours later that a name popped into my head, Chelsea Manning. She was charged under the Espionage Act in the military court and she was sentenced to 35 years. She wasn't facing 35 years. We're trying to find out how many years she was facing, probably 100 or something. That's also that number as large because they like to do plea bargaining. Almost 90% of U.S. criminal cases ended in some kind of plea bargain. We're going to put you down the river for 50 years, but if you confess to this, even if you know you didn't do it, we'll reduce it to seven years, four years. And if you write on somebody else that you know, we'll even reduce it some more if you're involved in some kind of conspiracy. So here is Lewis saying it's not going to be 175 years. This is ridiculous that Assange's lawyers are talking about this like a life sentence. It's only going to be 63 months maximum. And then again, I remember Manning. So he just, he had to know that. It's just a falsehood to say that, but you know, it took me a while to figure that out because I accepted that. But again, again, let's think about this. Reality winner is not Julian Assange. Reality winner on, there's no way the damage, she did really no damage to the national security agency. She's never been in prison. Julian Assange has exposed enormous crimes, corruption, undermine all the confidence in the legitimacy of these governments, effectively the U.S. ruling circles in these countries that have a pretty good game going and they don't want some journalists to expose it all, right? Or expose a lot of it. They got to stop that. That's what happens in very repressive regimes in totalitarian regimes. And we're looking at happening right now to Julian Assange. He is not reality winner. They're not going to give him 63 months if he's convicted. I would be very surprised. And then he put a little sweetener at the end, Lewis. He said, you know, and you may even get credit for time served in Britain. He's been 30 months in Belmarsh. So 63 minus 30, you're facing from now 33 months. Trying to tell this is not for Assange and his lawyers. It's for the high court judges to show that he's not going to be going to harsh conditions, Sam's, and he's not going to serve that long of a sentence. So let's have him. Can you please extradite him to the U.S.? And once we get him, of course, all bets could be off. So I'm going to end that right now by saying, but thank you for listening and tune in again tomorrow evening or more or less around the same time. We're going to be live tweeting our producer for CN Live, Kathy Vogan has done a great job live tweeting. I'm furiously writing notes and writing up two reports, one after the morning session. That appears around nine a.m. Eastern time and then one after the entire days over where I pull it all together, which is now up on consortium news. So I thank you again for watching and we'll see you tomorrow night, day two, the last day of the U.S. appeal against Julian Assange. For consortium news, I'm Joe Laurier. Bye-bye.