 Welcome to CN Live's Daily Report on the Julian Assange expedition hearings at Old Bailey in London. This is Joe Laurier reporting for CN Live. Day 10, an interesting day in court, a bit different than the others. There were no technical breakdowns or coronavirus scares or anything like that. We just had some testimony that we're going to go through here. In the morning we heard from Christian Brothof, a professor of computer science at Berne University in Switzerland. What he did for the defense was lay out the chronology of the publication of the unredacted state department cables that are at the heart of this issue. Now we've gone over this territory before, and I suspect we'll hear about it again. We heard last week from John Getz, the German journalist. He spoke in detail about this, but Brothof was brought in by WikiLeaks to do an investigation by the defense, an investigation into the publication of these cables to set out this chronology. What he told the court was, of course, as Goetz had said and others, that the origin of the publication of the unredacted state department cables that had the names of informants. Remember, the government is harping on informants being endangered by having their names released by WikiLeaks. They're saying even that those are the only publication crimes that he's facing is when he published something with the names of informants, which they consider defense information and therefore protected by the Espionage Act. Oh, there's no separate statute against naming informants. While they focus on that, that's why the state department cables and how they were published and in what order is crucial. The government and their indictment is saying that Assange published these cables with the big impression, and that they've left about the first two weeks in court, that he was the first and the only one basically to publish these cables. And therefore he's liable for violating the Espionage Act because, again, those informants names are supposedly defense information. Whereas Brothof pointed again to the book by David Lee and recording of The Guardian. They published this book in February of 2011. One of the chapter titles was actually the password to this unredacted cable. If you recall, WikiLeaks had put the entire unredacted portions that were not yet had been redacted and published by media partners into this temporary website with the password. And the intention was to spend a year to roll these out with partners in various parts of the world dealing with cables that were related to their area of interest. And instead, David Lee, we learned actually pressured Julian Assange very much so to give him the password. And a passage from David Lee's book actually reads David Lee and Luke Hardy. They wrote in third person about themselves. And I'm quoting from the book that Assange was pressured by Lee to give him the password to the entire redacted file. Assange refused. After more pressure, he finally said he'd given 50% now. And Lee refused and quote, he said, all or nothing. And then this is a direct quote from David Lee, what happens if you end up in an orange jumpsuit and wrote to Guantanamo before you can release the full files. In return, he would give Assange a promise to help to keep the cables secure not to publish them until the time came. That allowed Lee to pressure Assange to the point where he relented. He gave in. He gave the password to David Lee. And he was under strict orders not to publish any of these documents until there was agreed upon time. Again, most of these cables were for newspapers other than The Guardian and the major media partners who had already published several articles before this. Well, in February 2011, David Lee and Harding published his password as a chapter title. It wasn't until August 25th that a newspaper in Germany, Freitag, and this is Guantanamo's testimony, published that they knew about this, that the password led to this website, temporary website that had the unredacted files encrypted. They did not actually provide the details how to do it, but they gave hints. And we then learned, and there's a lot of other smaller players in here, a BitTorrent that was put up a blogger here in Australia named Nigel Parry in the relation of Bob Parry, who also wrote that he was trying very hard to put the two together, the file and the password to try to open up encryption. And then finally, who succeeded was Cryptom.org, this New York-based website that's described by the prosecution as a rival to WikiLeaks. And it indeed is. It's older than WikiLeaks and they've been in the business of putting out dumps of classified material for a long time. So Cryptom published that and WikiLeaks learned of course of this and they held a vote online, a global vote. People could vote on Twitter and Facebook, whether WikiLeaks should now also publish. And one of the arguments during that debate over that vote was should WikiLeaks publish this so that the people, the informants who might be at risk inadvertently now by this leak by Cryptom could then get to safety. If the feeling was that only governments would perhaps know about Cryptom, a very few people would, and that they could also use the password and the password to try to unencrypt it themselves and that they would put these informants in danger. So it was ironically, and I'll tell you why, the strength and the breadth and the width and the reach of WikiLeaks, the many, many followers they had that WikiLeaks used to try to alert informants to get out. Now, at one point Gratov was under cross, so on a redirect examination from Mark Summers and Mark Summers asked him, have you seen these documents on Cryptom recently? And Gratov said, yes, I accessed them last week. These are the sorry, the State Department cables unredacted. He said he accessed them last week, and Summers then asked, was Cryptom ever prosecuted for this? Gratov said, no, the defense never provided me with this kind of information. It's an interesting question that hangs out there. Why is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, why is Julian Assange, the one who's under prosecution right now and the threat of extradition, why was he arrested? Why was he guided for doing something that Cryptom did before him? And that was the result of this action by the two Guardian journals by putting the password out there. This is a question that hangs over the court. Why wasn't the New York Times and the Guardian and the Spiegel and Baiz prosecuted for publishing the same documents that WikiLeaks did at the beginning of this with the Afghan and Iraq cables as well, and some of the State Department cables? So clearly they're going after Assange, and we learned later why, from Joel Smith, the prosecutor, who clearly said that, and this is the most interesting thing of the whole day's testimony, in my opinion, that they admitted in their morning testimony, the prosecution, Joel Smith, the prosecutor, that the government was trying to establish that even if WikiLeaks was not the first to publish these unredacted State Department cables with the informant's names, that it may WikiLeaks liable, more liable than the others who published before them. Why? Because WikiLeaks had a larger reach on the internet and included a search engine with the files, while the ones like Krypton still does not have a search engine, as far as I know. So Krypton, the torrent site that published it, they didn't have a search engine. So WikiLeaks has a much larger audience and had a search engine. So the government is admitting now it doesn't matter who published first. We're not going after the others. We're going after WikiLeaks because of the influence that it has. This is really key here. It has the influence that the smaller websites did not have to publish really damaging information to the United States. Some of this damaging information has come out in open court over the first two weeks and now the first day here. That includes assassination programs, torture, the torture of some of a Lebanese German man who was completely taken by mistaken identity, admitted to by the CIA later on. This is all played out in the court and this is what WikiLeaks has revealed. Now the defense is trying to bring all this out to show what the value of WikiLeaks is, that it is unveiled these kinds of crimes. That's the very reason the government is now admitted in black and white for everyone to hear why they're going after WikiLeaks because they had more influence. Now the New York Times has even more influence than WikiLeaks, but they have nowhere near published the amount of material damaging to the US that WikiLeaks has. Of course the New York Times, one could say state managed to some extent. They are very much close to government and they could be counted on usually not to publish embarrassing information. I tweeted earlier today that the US government since the Second World War has been committing crimes, has been overthrowing governments, has been invading countries to pursue their economic, strategic and economic interests, although the corporate media covers it up by saying that this is spreading democracy. Here comes Julian Assange almost single-handedly removing that cover from what the US has really been up to. This is the key role of foreign policy reporting and that's true reporting in my view in the big corporate media, particularly in the US, which is never to really reveal what US motives are, to paint them as being benign, as trying to bring democracy to poor people around in the world, a rehash of white man's burden of colonial days. Here's Assange revealing that that's the target. That is why they're going after Julian Assange. They basically said it in court today because not that, but that they have too much of a reach. So the other players are going to let go, the establishment media, they still feel it's on their side, so they're going after Assange. And it's a very similar argument in a way, the way they've dropped the charge that's in Gordon Cromberg, the assistant US attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, who has said in his affidavit that Assange is not a journalist. Well, they've dropped that now. They are not saying he is a journalist, but they're saying nothing precludes them from prosecuting a journalist in the Espionage Act because subsection 93, we went through that 79 and 3e, we went through that yesterday at some length. So the government is admitting that they're going, that they can go after a journalist, hence Assange is a journalist. And now they're admitting that the journal, that Rick Leakes didn't publish these cables first, but it doesn't matter because they've got a lot of influence and reach. So we're going to go after them. It was stunning to see this again played out, and one wonders what impression this is making on Magistrate Vanessa. Vereza, I do have to say that as the prosecution has done with every witness, they tried to undermine the impartiality this time of Grotov. They didn't question his expertise as a computer scientist, but he was basically called, you are a biased and you are partial, they called him. Because why? Because in 2017, he'd signed a petition, like many of us signed, of a letter, an open letter actually, to go to President Donald Trump in 2017, asking that the grand jury be ended in the charges we dropped against Julian Assange because of the threat to press freedom. Grotov testified he didn't remember signing the letter. That didn't seem very strong, but that's what he said, and it's possible he didn't remember, but Smith, the prosecutor used that as a way to undermine his impartiality, so you're just a WikiLeaks reporter. So how can we believe anything you're telling us? Well, of course, what he was telling us was based on his expertise as a computer scientist in analyzing these documents to show when and the public record about when, who published first. And he did a study, not only of that, but also of which documents were classified or not. Because again, the prosecution brought up, which they had before, these 133,000 other state department cables that were published by WikiLeaks in August. Now, I think the government's trying to muddy the waters here by including those August releases, which dealt with documents from U.S. missions in many, many countries, Ukraine, Yemen, Israel, Russia, China, Syria. These were tables from the U.S. missions in these countries that Gotov studied and testified that none of them were classified, none of them were classified of the 133,000. The government's alleging some of them had a marking inside in the content, not in the metadata or above where you would see if it was classified or not, that these were marked strictly protected. In other words, there were performance names there. Now, I don't believe that the government's firmly established, although they may have or they might be right, that in some of those documents there were performance names, but nothing on the scale of what was released in the unredacted cables in the chronology, as we've been discussing first because of this password by David Lee and Luke Harding in their book, which led to all the events up to WikiLeaks deciding on September 2, 2011, the day after Krypton dumped the entire thing for the public to read, to also publish it. They did it in order to alert informants and after a vote, and this was something that the government just kind of passes over. This is an important reason why WikiLeaks published them is because they were already out and the point needs to be made that WikiLeaks would not have put out the unredacted cables on September 2, 2011 had it not been for Harding and Lee putting out the password on a February level, which led to the Freightag article and then the attempts by various people to crack it, which Krypton did and published before WikiLeaks. So without the Lee password as a chapter title, WikiLeaks would never have done it because as we heard, they were planning to roll it out over here. Now, the Guardian at the time on September 1st after WikiLeaks made a statement, blaming the Guardian for this catastrophe because they put the password out on there, they issued a statement saying, and I quote from the Guardian, this was from September 1, 2011, the day before WikiLeaks published, but the day of the publication by Krypton that quote, it's nonsense to suggest the Guardian's WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way. Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. It contained a password with no details of the location of the files. And we were told it was a temporary password, which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours. It was a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person who created the database. No concerns were expressed when the book was published. And if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security, they had seven months to remove the files that they didn't do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian's book. That's the Guardian's position. We move on to the afternoon. And I'm not making a judgment about whether that was true or not, whether they may very well have thought that it was a temporary password, but clearly it wasn't. So there was either miscommunication there or they're not telling the whole truth, but it was an active password that they published. So it could have been a big screw up that led to all of this and nothing to Ferris the intended by the Guardian. But indeed the publication of that password led to the sequence of events that we heard in the morning testimony in which led to the government admitting that yes, okay, WikiLeaks wasn't the first and they weren't the only one. The indictment only talks about them publishing it, but they had this reach and therefore we got to throw this guy in jail because he's dangerous. The afternoon saw quite an interesting reading of testimony by Cassandra Fairbanks. Cassandra Fairbanks is a writer for Gateway Pundit. She's openly a WikiLeaks supporter. Before her testimony was read and she was standing by to testify online. The government and the prosecution said that they agreed that she had stated that she's a WikiLeaks supporter. So that was an important contention. A point of contention was whether this was hearsay or not. She is going to testify about what she heard from a Trump insider about what was planned by the U.S. government against Julian Sange. Back in an October 2018 conversation, the defense made an interesting point where I was not aware of, I don't know if this is only in British law or also in U.S. law, but they said that hearsay doesn't apply to political testimony. So that's probably the reason why her testimony was read by Edward Fitzgerald, the lawyer for the defense, and Cassandra did not actually appear on the screen. But what she read was quite dramatic. Parts of this was known already because she's tweeted about this and spoken about this online. But she testified in the read testimony that Donald Trump, president of the United States, had personally ordered Julian Sange's arrest from the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April 2019. And she said she learned about this in October 2018 directly from a man named Arthur Schwartz, who's a Trump backer and she says a member of the president's inner circle and a close aide to Donald Trump Jr. And what he told her in 2018 was that the U.S. would have a Sange taken from the embassy, that he would only be charged with the Chelsea Manning leaks and not for Vault 7, the CIA Vault 7 leaks that came in the Trump administration in 2017 or for the DNC email releases in 2016, that the United States would again go after Chelsea Manning to get her to testify more, to get her to testify against the Sange. And that Richard Grinnell, who was at that time in 2018, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and later became the director of national intelligence, had worked out a deal with Ecuador to hand a Sange over. He also told her that the order to get a Sange had come directly from Trump. And he said that the U.S. would not seek the death penalty against the Sange, simply to make the, well, to make the extradition possible, since that would stop it from Britain. And Ecuador also had stated that President Alen and Moreno had stated that if they're going to kill them, and she acted both of the words in usual, we won't turn them over to the U.S. So that was one of the assurances that Moreno wanted that he wouldn't face the death penalty and Britain would not extradite him for that reason either. So that is what she learned from Schwartz in October 2018. And guess what? It all came true. Everything that she said exactly happened that way. Now, of course, before she knew that all came true, she went to London to see Julian Assange and went to the embassy. This would have been in January 2019. And she told Assange everything about what she'd heard from Schwartz, even though Schwartz had told her not to tell anyone. So she says in her testimony that Assange put a radio on to try to block their conversation because he was aware that he was being surveilled. When she returned to Washington from London, she was contacted by a furious Schwartz who said that he'd learned exactly what he had told Assange. And of course, she concluded that it was the only way he could know that was through surveillance of the embassy, U.S. surveillance of the embassy. And when she tweeted about all of this, Rick Rennell then contacted her employer at the gate where Pundit tried to get her fired. A panicked Schwartz informed her that there was an investigation into who leaked the information to her, namely him. I want to make an aside here. I know Richard Rennell. He was the spokesman for John Vulton at the UN. I was a UN-based correspondent for a quarter century. And I was there when Rennell was the spokesman. He was quite disliked by the press and by me, I said, he goes, he didn't like a question I asked at the room briefing once. And he rang me up to chew me out. So I could imagine him ringing up Cassandra Fairbats post to try to get her fired. I also know Cassandra met her in Washington. And she certainly is a WikiLeaks supporter. And she did assigned, one might say, a service by going to try to warn him. Not that it would help him very much, because everything that was laid out by Schwartz happened. He was dragged out of the embassy. He was only charged with demanding leaks. They're not seeking to death penalty. And now we did learn about Trump's direct role in that. Now, why is that important for the defense? Because they're trying to make an argument here in these hearings that this is a political prosecution. And if that can be made, that clearly violates the United States, United Kingdom extradition treaty, prohibits an extradition in a political case. Now, Queen Elizabeth II, that was petitioned to help Assange. And she responded, she doesn't intervene in political matters. So it was maybe a slip there by the queen that she admitted this was a political case. But here we have Cassandra Fairbats hearing from this Trump insider, saying that Trump ordered the arrest of Julian Assange and the prosecution we've heard from other witnesses, the prosecution of Julian Assange. And this came after he turned down the supposed deal that Dana Roebacker, the congressman came to the embassy. We heard about that yesterday in the testimony from Jennifer Robinson, that Roebacker came and made this offer. You give us the name of the source on the files, the DNC files, and we'll get you, we'll drop charges. Assange refused to release his source. And lo and behold, we have Donald Trump ordering Julian Assange's arrest. So a pretty interesting day in court, not as Phil and Graham Packers yesterday, but we have one more day of testimony, I think, from a witness who couldn't appear today. The whole issue of witnesses and their schedules became along the discussion court that we have privy to us in the media who have who have video link access. Normally in the US court, when these kinds of discussions take place, they're either in the judges chambers, or they come up to the bench and whisper one another. But in the British court, it's right out in the open. So we got to hear all this argument about witnesses and basically the coronavirus scare of last week, which cut out a day and a half of testimony, screwed up the defense's witness schedule, and they're trying to reschedule it. So they're going to try to, she's getting very impatient about this, Vanessa Barrezzo, and wants this thing done. She's really pushing this forward, moving this forward as much as she can. So after tomorrow's testimony, we're going to be hearing for, I think for three days, medical testimony about the state of Julian Assange's physical and I presume also mental health. So that was today, day 10. Again, the chronology of the leaks and the government essentially saying, well, it doesn't matter if Julian Assange didn't go first. They published the redacted files. Of course, it does matter because if you listen to the testimony that we heard today from the professor in Switzerland, and you hear other testimony that we heard earlier, it matters that weak leaks would not have ever published that redacted files, had this whole chain of events not happened. But government is trying to gloss over that. And secondly, we heard Cassandra Fairbac's dramatic testimony about Trump, about Grinnell, and Grinnell having worked out the deal. And so we got what turned out to be true, the exact strategy of the US government to get Julian Assange. Before I leave you, again, if you're stopping in the Starbucks to get a cafe latte, think about sending that $5 over to us at patreon.com. Backslash, CN Live so we can continue to bring you these daily video reports in detail about what goes on in that courtroom in London on the major, major extradition hearing of Julian Assange, the publisher and former editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. So for CN Live, this is Joe Lauria, signing off until tomorrow.