WBD330 Audio Transcription

A Plague of Malice: The State v Julian Assange

Interview date: Monday 5th April

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with John & Gabriel Shipton & Janine. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this special episode, I talk to Julian Assange’s father and brother, John and Gabriel Shipton. My friend Janine also joins us to discuss the plague of malice regarding Julian’s case, his alignment with the Bitcoin ethos, and how you can support his defence.

“The law in Julian’s case was constantly abrogated top to bottom; conventions of asylum, human rights, due process, and conspiracy...a plague of malice”

— John Shipton

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: John, good to see you again, well I can't physically see you, but you know what I mean, good to see you again; are you well?

John Shipton: Hi, Peter, good to see you.  Yeah, well and things have come a long way since we did that interview a couple of years ago.

Peter McCormack: Yes, we've got a lot to catch up on.  Gabriel, nice to meet you, we haven't actually met before, but nice to meet you.

Gabriel Shipton: Yeah, nice to meet you too, Peter, I'm a big fan of your show.

Peter McCormack: Thank you, that's slightly surreal for me, but thank you.  We are joined by my good friend, Janine, who is one of the best journalists I know who is an absolute expert on the case, she's followed it in great detail, often encouraging me to cover it and sending me things I should be reading.  I asked her to join us today because I think it's important that we do the best job possible and she's just going to be able to add a lot more value.  Welcome, Janine, nice to finally actually have you on the show.

Janine: Yeah, hello, thanks for bringing me on.

Peter McCormack: No problem, so we're here to talk about Julian, the situation with the case.  Gabriel, just for us to get this kick-started, I think it's best to outline what is it you want to get out of this interview today?  What do you want from the people listening?

Gabriel Shipton: We want to reach out to the Bitcoin community and just really ask them for help.  Julian needs their help, he's one of their own and we're trying to raise a war chest to fight the next step of the legal battle in the UK against the extradition to the US.

Peter McCormack: For a starting point we should do a recap of what the case is about, why this is a miscarriage of justice, because I think that there's a lot of people who are fully aware of Julian's plight, but they perhaps don't know the specific details of what is happening here.  John, do you want to start this off?  Do you want to start by explaining what it is Julian is accused of and just give us a recap of why this is essentially a miscarriage of justice?

John Shipton: Julian is charged from the US 1917 Espionage Act with 17 counts of espionage and one count of computer intrusion.  In the usual circumstance, accumulating charges like that results in 175 years' jail.  In the espionage court in the United States, nobody has ever been acquitted; they're all guilty, every one of them. 

The consequence to the oppression and intimidation of journalism is worldwide; in the Western World, it's easy to see as you don't see anybody revealing anything really since Edward Snowden.  Further to that, the crushing and destruction of the great attribute of the American constitution, the First Amendment allowing advocation and freedom of speech, the crushing of that is dilatory throughout the Western World.  They will all copy the United States in the treatment of Julian as they all copied the treatment of prisoners of war in Guantanamo when the United States abandoned the Geneva Conventions of War in the treatment of prisoners; and that will be the circumstance.

Peter McCormack: Janine, do you want to add anything in here in relation to the consideration of the impact of this on wider journalism and reporting?

Janine: Since 2019 in April, when he was arrested, I've actually been collecting lists of journalists, media organisations, human rights organisations making statements about how this would impact their field.  It's been pretty unanimous across the board, across countries around the world, that they believe that this will make specifically national security reporting a lot harder, because national security reporters have to deal with material like this all the time. 

Obviously, they don't publish it in the same way that WikiLeaks does, which is that they don't allow the public a lot of the times to have access to the information as well or even a lot of the time, instead of relying on source documents, they rely on special access to government officials who may not be telling them the truth and they often have limited ways of verifying it.

If this is what's going to happen in the future to anyone who obtains, and in obtaining national security information, not even classified information, just information that is pertinent to national security, if that's what's going to happen to anyone who receives or uses that kind of material to write stories, then this is going to affect a lot of investigative journalism around the world; especially given that he was not in the United States at the time of publication, he's not an American, WikiLeaks is not mostly based in the US and so the fact that the US can just come and tell a foreign journalist that they are not allowed to publish and that they are beholden to US law is really terrifying.

Peter McCormack: If we don't have the ability for journalists to be able to reveal or expose certain information, it essentially gives a shield to the US to engage in any acts internationally without any form of public lens on what they're doing.  I guess that's the fear here.

Gabriel Shipton: Yeah, you are already seeing it.  Editorial boards of The Guardian, Washington Post, they're all putting out editorial now in support of Julian because they are seeing the effects of this prosecution.  They have these national security articles or things that they want to publish about national security that they can't publish because they're looking at this prosecution and they say, "If we publish this, then we're going to end up with an espionage charge".  That's why they're putting out editorial comments in support of Julian and these charges being dropped.

Peter McCormack: So, it's a wider issue than just Julian's own plight; there are other more severe consequences should Julian be extradited and face trial in the US?

John Shipton: Yes.  In particular you can see, say for example, how it reflects on commentary upon Bitcoin.  The United States and its organs will be able to direct commentary to suit itself.  They use the tool of what I call Judicial Abductions to steal and oppress technology.  For example, Michael Lynch in the UK who is a tech billionaire who came to a particular way of manipulating information; CEO of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, is judicially abducted in Canada; Ola Beanie, the same circumstance in Ecuador. 

So, not only do the United States use these mechanisms to oppress commentary on whatever circumstance it wishes to oppress commentary, but also it guides the information that we receive to suit themselves.  In the case of Bitcoin or any other coinage, any other new insight into how the dynamics of the internet work, it will just utilise those to their own advantage, disadvantaging us.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so I want to a find out a bit more about how it's going.  Just before that, how is Julian now?  Obviously, we had the 4 January extradition rejected, his bail was also rejected.  How is he doing personally?

John Shipton: Not the best, 23 hours a day in lockdown since last March because the jail is infested with COVID.  We last visited Julian in March; he hasn't seen his lawyers in seven months.  They sit in their jail cells and contemplate their personal tragedy; that's the circumstance.  They are allowed, since they have no visits at all, a number of phone calls depending upon whether they have enough money to keep their accounts up to date; so if they ring me, it costs about $20 each call.  If the prisoners have a flow of income into their telephone accounts, they can make these calls and keep some contact with the outside.

Peter McCormack: Are they being prevented access from seeing people due to COVID restrictions?

John Shipton: Yes, but the jail is in complete lockdown since March, last March.  They are able to see the pastoral care, so a priest can come and call by and say, "Hello", on occasion.  I give you an example of that; the Pope Francis said a prayer for Julian and passed that to the Vatican hierarchy.  The Vatican hierarchy then passed that to the English Roman Catholic hierarchy who passed it to the local church; and that church, local to Belmarsh, he went and saw the jail priest and the jail priest went and advised Julian that the Pope had said a prayer for him in the Vatican.

Consequently, the entire Catholic hierarchy in Italy and England is aware of the Pope's sympathies to Julian's circumstances.

Peter McCormack: Whilst we have Covid restrictions on, prisons are essentially in lockdown, so prisoners are being kept in their cells, unable to see family, friends and lawyers; but we have been able to find ways for TV companies to be able to make TV programmes.

John Shipton: Yes.  Gabriel is the expert on that circumstance.

Peter McCormack: Can you shed some light onto that, Gabriel?

Gabriel Shipton: Yes, the jail system is not a nice place really.  It is dysfunctional, but the jail system, obviously, in the US is a lot worse.  If Julian was extradited to the US, he would go into this supermax prison where they keep El Chapo, which is basically a concrete box that you are basically buried in.  You have no contact, no visitors at all, I think you get one phone call a month to family in that prison.  That is what the judge ruled, that it would be tantamount to a death penalty if he was extradited with those conditions.

Peter McCormack: Janine, can you just give a bit of an update specifically with regards to what the judgement was?  We know it was rejected because it was a high suicide risk, but the UK court did agree with the US charges.  Do you feel like that was some form of compromise or do you think it was just an accurate judgment?

Janine: Unfortunately, a lot of the arguments that the defence made regarding this was that this should be considered protected journalistic activity.  There was also a number of technical arguments with technical experts regarding the feasibility of some of the US's claims about who did what and the degree to which they did certain things; and unfortunately, they were all rejected.  The only arguments basically that the judge ended up accepting, and she left them to the bottom of the list as she was reading out the judgment, is that she believes there is a high risk of suicide and that the prison conditions in the US would not be able to protect him to the degree that prisoners are protected at least from suicide or, for example, solitary confinement.

I do want to bring up briefly that while the current conditions in the prison are largely being affected by COVID restrictions, preventing prisoners from visiting with their family members, unfortunately his solitary confinement in the prison actually preceded the COVID-19 restrictions.  He was already being held often for 23 hours, up to that or longer, in his cell prior to the pandemic; that was his treatment before this.  So I think anyone who thinks that this is just something that prisons have to do because of COVID, that's not the case and in fact they were doing it before COVID.

People should be aware that according to the UN standards, having someone imprisoned in their cell alone for 23 hours a day or more is considered torture; that is solitary confinement.  Actually, I think their standard is 22 hours or more a day without human contact; that is considered torture, especially if it's done in excess of 15 consecutive days, which has been the case.  Basically, you have an entire prison of people who are in violation, at the moment, of the UN standards of how people should be treated.

Peter McCormack: Is this specifically that Julian was being kept in his cell 23 hours a day or is it the condition of the prison itself?

Janine: It sounds like currently that's the condition of most of the prison, if not all of it.

Peter McCormack: Prior to COVID?

Janine: Yes, prior to COVID he was often being kept for more than 23 hours a day in his cell.

Peter McCormack: Do we know why; why specifically him?

Janine: The first question should be, "Why is he even in Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison to begin with?"  There is no excuse anymore because he has effectively won his case.  Yes, there is an appeal going on, but he has won his case.  Also, he was never charged with a violent crime, so the idea that you should have a non-violent prisoner in a maximum-security prison that's usually reserved for terrorists, convicted or otherwise, it's absurd as a basis.

Then further than that, yes, I mean there are some arguments that because it's a national security case then that warrants him being held in a maximum-security prison, but again that doesn't justify why he should be given solitary confinement; especially now with the ruling from the judge that this type of confinement is not ethical, it's not okay and it puts him at risk of suicide.  It makes no sense to me why they continue to treat him in the exact same way as they are supposedly fearing he will be treated in the US.

Peter McCormack: It's hypocritical.

Janine: Yeah, I would say so.  Whether the judgment is fair, I mean we could spend a lot of time getting into the various conflicts of interests and biased statements that various judges in the UK involved in the case have made over the course of his imprisonment since 2019, but that would take quite a while.  I would just say that I do not believe in the judges' impartiality and in fact there have been arguments made by the defence about the extent to which that isn't the case and unfortunately, those have not been accepted for some reason.

Peter McCormack: We should get into that.  Can you give a summary, as best you can?

Janine: One of the more disturbing elements for me, at least, was actually with one of the judges that he first saw after he got arrested, which was Judge Snow.  It was a very short hearing; it was right after he got arrested and there wasn't much said.  It was basically him being given what he was being charged with and did he plead guilty or not guilty or did he think he was guilty; also, given the extradition, did he consent or not to the extradition and of course he didn't.

Judge Snow, I believe, called him a narcissist and various other words, that for a judge who has not met him before, there was no trial it was just a hearing.  For him to make those kinds of personal comments about someone was disturbing, which shows that I feel like, given how high profile this case is, there are a lot of people, including in the judicial system that have preconceived opinions about this case and about him, unfortunately, so that has coloured their judgement.

Then regarding the Judges actually, the whole reason or part of the reason we believe that the current Judge for the case, or at least the one that presided over the lower court with the extradition hearing in the last year, Vanessa Baraitser, she actually came on because a previous judge was found to have a number of conflicts of interests regarding not only her husband but also her son.  Some people may say, "Well that's her family, what does that say about her?" 

Actually, she had previously recused herself from a different case involving Uber in the UK I think in 2017, so there is a standard that if your family has financial conflicts of interest because you are part of that family, yes, you are an individual person, but that is part of the family's financial interest and therefore it affects you.  So, she recused herself on that basis, but she didn't for this case, even though her husband and her son both have national security-related contacts and financial relationships and business relationships and, in fact, have previously expressed statements that were negative towards Julian.

Peter McCormack: Do you want to add anything in there at all, Gabriel or John?

John Shipton: Yes, I was in Scotland doing an interview, and a fellow suggested that we write a book about it and the book title would be, A Plague Of Malice.  This smearing has been going on for 11 years now and in particular I can give you some examples of the judges' ruling making a conclusion that this is a show trial.

In these cases, in the UK system, the due process requires that each side be equally armed.  Julian was in a glass box at the back of the court and the glass box had slots in it, about 30 millimetres wide, an inch and a half wide, and a raised floor.  Consequently, in order to speak to his barrister and solicitor, Julian had to get on his knees and whisper through the slot.  The barrister on the other side had to stand on his or her tiptoes and put their ear to the slot in order to hear what Julian was saying.

There was an appeal by the defence to move Julian into the well of the court where the American prosecutors were sitting alongside the UK prosecutors and passing notes easily and whispering instructions.  The judge refused this, so throughout the three-week hearing, we had these repeated farcical circumstances, quite wicked really, and that was to illustrate that the judge continued the malice that’s been displayed in the persecution of Julian all these years.  Her demeanour in the court was, to Julian or his defence lawyers, firm to the point of being callous and dismissive, whereas she allowed the prosecution constant privileges of comment and interruption.

The judgment of Vanessa Baraitser seems to me to fulfil the requirements of the current executive, Boris Johnson, who is in the case of Gary McKinnon, was active as Mayor of London in the defence against extradition of Gary McKinnon in 2006 as a Member of Parliament; he was active in the defence of David Bermingham in defence against extradition; in the case of Lauri Love as an MP, he was silent and made two helpful comments.

In the Prime Minister's Question Time in April last year, Jeremy Corbin's last question as opposition leader on Julian Assange and the extradition treaty, Prime Minister Johnson observed that the treaty between the United States and the UK, the extradition treaty, was lopsided and made no adverse comment against Julian, which is an important change in the attitude of the executive to Julian. 

Previously, every opportunity the executive got they would make some comment, rather like, "He's got to face the music", that was PM Morrison or Prime Minister May, "Everybody's got to face the law", as if Julian had avoided the law.  The law in Julian's case was constantly abrogated top to bottom; conventions of asylum, human rights, due process and conspiracy between this Crown Prosecuting Service and the Swedish Prosecution Authority, a plague of malice.

Peter McCormack: I know it's a very different case but is there any level of hypocrisy here in the case of Harry Dunn?  I am not sure if you're aware of this, but a lady named Anne Sacoolas was driving on the wrong side of the road and she knocked him off his motorbike and killed him, and fled the country under diplomatic immunity, which she doesn't actually have.  There was an application for extradition for her to come back here and face trial.  Is there any level of hypocrisy here?  Are you aware of that case?

John Shipton: I'd like to comment that it goes further than hypocrisy.  It is contempt, because the United Kingdom did make a request for Anne Sacoolas, the murderer of Harry Dunn, to be returned to the UK and that request was ignored and then finally, after some pressure, contemptuously declined.  It refers to what Prime Minister Boris Johnson was concerned with, that the extradition treaty denies the United Kingdom its sovereignty.

Peter McCormack: John, you know I adore you and the work you're doing, but I do have to just challenge the use of the word "murder", yet because she hasn't faced trial.

John Shipton: Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm getting a bit -- it's a little harsh, yes.

Peter McCormack: It could be a manslaughter charge by dangerous driving, but at the same time I think as a country and a nation we feel that she should be extradited here to face trial for that, because she was driving on the wrong side of the road and the use of diplomatic immunity has now been proven to be wrong, but it does feel hypocritical.

Are you yourself, Janine, aware of the case and is there any relationship here, because it does feel like the US seems to feel like it has preferential treatment of its own citizens?

Janine: Yeah, I definitely do think that it is relevant and in fact, I can't remember when, I think it was last year; but at some point, Harry Dunn's family actually did say that the UK shouldn't extradite Assange if the US isn't willing to extradite her.  To me, I'm honestly not surprised because I feel like these two cases together and the different results of them so far has to do with the fact that the US Empire is top dog right now, it's not the UK anymore; it is not the British Empire.  So the US Empire does not feel like it's beholden to the international rules like this that would apply in this case. 

They have demonstrated that over the past two to three decades at the very least.  They're not holding themselves accountable to the international criminal court with regards to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, so basically the US does not feel like it should be held accountable to this and therefore they don't have to act to extradite someone, even if there is a relatively clear-cut case that some wrong was done; again, hasn't faced trial but also, I find it disturbing that this is a case where someone died, whether it was intentional or accident, manslaughter what have you, this was a case where someone died, like someone does have blood on their hands.

This term "blood on their hands" has been something that has been used against Julian repeatedly over the last decade and yet, the people who are saying that are the people who do actually have the blood on their hands.  They were the orchestrators of these illegal wars and the whole basis that WikiLeaks started on was to expose that these wars were illegal.  After other whistleblowers who have done so before previously, in the UK, even like Katharine Gun, that was their basis on which they were publishing documents.

For the same orchestrators to then claim that a journalist who was exposing the blood on their hands, also has blood on his own hands, makes no sense especially given that none of the charges against him have to do with -- in fact one of the biggest points in the hearings was that the US Government did not present evidence of anyone who had come to harm.  They had these claims about people who might have had to flee or so, they didn't mention anyone specifically and they certainly didn't bring any evidence that anyone had come to harm as a result of any of the publications, which should have been eye-opening to people who have believed this claim that someone at WikiLeaks or Julian had blood on their hands this entire time.

Peter McCormack: You raised what the parents of Harry Dunn said and let's be clear, it's not like we agree and believe there should be some form of trade here.  Anna Sacoolas should be extradited to face trial because of the legal grounding of that and Julian should not be extradited for different legal grounding. 

Just so people are aware of the detail again, Janine, can you just talk a little bit about the kind of information that WikiLeaks was releasing?  Specifically, I think with regards to the most famous information we saw was 12 July Baghdad air strike, was it then?  It was specifically the targeting of journalists?  Also, since then, I don't know, you've probably seen it, but we've had a pretty compelling BBC documentary regarding the Iraq war and its nature.  Can you talk about the kind of information that WikiLeaks was making public and why this is so important, especially on a journalistic level?

Janine: Yeah, the video that you're talking about is the famous collateral murder video.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, collateral murder.

Janine: I remember watching that when it came out and still to this day, I think a lot of people say this, but every time I watch it, I get emotional because many of the people that I have -- before I get into that, the other things that were published that concerned the US charges are the US diplomatic cables and then Guantanamo Bay detainee files; which again, very important documents that show what was going on in Guantanamo and the fact that a lot of the people who get sent there are sent there on very shaky ground.  Basically very little, if any evidence that they have been involved in any criminal activity let alone terrorist activity. 

A lot of them have since now died in prison, despite having no trial, despite in some cases even evidence being shown that they were innocent and still they are kept there.  A lot of the time on the basis that, because they have now been treated so horribly in Guantanamo, they are now a threat to the US, because they have justified anger about their treatment, their unfair treatment; that was mostly what the charges were focused on.

The collateral murder video, the US prosecution tried to argue that this wasn't about that and that video is not what he's being prosecuted for and I think a lot of people disagree including the defence.  Many of the people I have talked to who've seen that, whether or not they've seen that video, I think about it a lot because people often say that they can't advocate for Julian or they feel scared to because they have their children to think about.  Every time I watch that video, because it wasn't just journalists, the men who were targeted in that video, two of them were journalists, they ended up getting killed and there was also some people with them.

Peter McCormack: Janine, can you just explain.  Not everyone will have seen the video; I know some will and it is available, and I probably will include it in the show notes, but can you just specifically explain what happened in the video, so people understand the gravity of it.  Specifically, what was happening, because we heard the voice recordings too.

Janine: Yeah, so basically there is a shorter version and there is then an extended version and the video basically shows a US Apache helicopter hovering over some people just walking down the street in Baghdad.  Because there's audio attached to it, you get to hear what these people are saying to their base and in the helicopter, basically deciding or trying to get permission to shoot them.  They want to shoot them on the basis that they think that they have weapons, but the weapons ended up being cameras, in the case of the journalists, and they were not in use at the time; they were just walking down the street.

You hear this conversation about them getting permission to engage, they do; they fire on this group of people.  Most of them are killed, there is at least one survivor that you see in the video and so he is struggling to move and crawling on the ground and the soldiers are laughing and making jokes and applauding each other.  It's like it's a video game, that's what a lot of people say, and I agree, it's like people playing a video game and not realising that these are actual human beings.

Then unfortunately for them, a van drives up and it contains a father and his two children, and he gets out of his van to help this one remaining person who is still alive, probably very badly injured, and then the helicopter gets permission to fire upon the van as well and also kills them.  The children did survive, they were injured, and they actually get taken away by some American soldiers later on, who come up I think with a tank.  Unfortunately, the tank, you see in the video, it's like rolling over bodies.  The children are taken away and the infamous comment from that video was that one of the soldiers says that the guy shouldn’t have brought his children to a war or a battle.

That just makes me sick because for people who often tell me that they don't feel safe to talk about this case because they have children, they have family and they don't want anyone to get hurt, I would say, "Don't you find it disgusting that you can't support an award-winning journalist for releasing material of this magnitude that exposed war crimes?  Don't you think it's disgusting that you can't support someone like that without fearing for your own life and also of your children?  Why should your children be held accountable for anything that you do?"

It just makes me think that this father did take a risk, but I wouldn't be surprised if something that he was thinking and the reason why he did it is because he didn't want his children to grow up in a world where they thought it was okay to leave an injured civilian bleeding on the street alone.  That's what I think for my children is, whatever risk they may take, whatever risks I may take, I want them to fight for a world that doesn't accept that as normal.

Peter McCormack: John, I'm sure you're going to have a very strong response to this, but specifically can you just talk about therefore why it is so important for someone like Julian to be able to release certain information like this and for journalists to be able to report on information like this; not just US and their global world police empire, but also holding all governments to account with regards to what may happen; what they may call national security, but what we may call something that is actually a scandal?

John Shipton: That's a very, very good question.  I start by saying that in the cables release, what they call Cablegate, there was one particular cable from the American Ambassador to the Department of State which describes the situation where American soldiers in 2006 -- a bit of a preamble.  These releases can stop wars, okay.  So to make that really clear to everybody who reads and those who release these state secrets or heinous crimes, they can stop war.

In 2006, a group of American soldiers went to a house and murdered all of the occupants, the mum and dad and the kids and the uncles and grandfathers; all of them.  To disguise their crime, they called in an air strike and obliterated the circumstance of the house and the remains of that family.  This was in the cables and upon the release of those cables, the Iraqi Government that read that and had the courage to declare -- refuse to sign a status of forces agreement with the United States, so the United States had to remove all of its soldiers from Iraq, thus stopping the war.

Similarly, there are other circumstances in the cables where it enabled the Chagos islanders, who had been dispossessed by the United Kingdom, in order for the United Kingdom to give one of the islands to the United States to establish an airbase called Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean; this enabled the Chagos islanders to take a case to the International Court of Justice and the ruling was made on their behalf that the United Kingdom must recompense them and return the island.

These are two profound examples of what the meaning of these releases are and the results that can come from publication of truthful information and holding in a library for future people to research and embark upon court cases to right wrongs.

Peter McCormack: Thank you for that.  Gabriel, just want to go back a touch and get back into a little more in the specifics of the case.  Can you talk to me a little bit about the problems that the Department of Justice had under Obama with the prosecution because of The New York Times problem and where there's another level of hypocrisy in this?

Gabriel Shipton: Under Obama, the independent DoJ found that they couldn't pursue these espionage charges against Julian because of what they called The New York Times problem, which was if they prosecute Julian under the Espionage Act, that they would then have to prosecute The New York Times or The Washington Post or the other media organisations that published the same things that WikiLeaks did.  So, there was The New York Times problem under the DoJ and then at the end of his presidency Obama sent an even clearer message by commuting Chelsea Manning's sentence.

Chelsea Manning was the actual leaker of what Julian has now been charged for under the Espionage Act.

Peter McCormack: We seem to have lost Gabriel, can you carry that on, John?

John Shipton: Yes, the Obama Administration was very reluctant to go ahead with this prosecution, to the extent that two of the senior prosecutors of the Department of Justice resigned when Attorney General William Barr decided to pursue the prosecution.  William Barr was an attorney under the Bush administration, and he was known with the nickname in the Department of Justice as "the Snatcher", because he had a particular capacity to manipulate the laws in order to extradite people to the United States that the United States had taken a dislike to.

The current administration under the new Attorney General Merrick Garland is known as a defender of the First Amendment, so we look to Merrick Garland to again defend the First Amendment against the attacks of William Barr and the remnants of the Trump administration still existing in the Department of Justice.

Peter McCormack: Thank you.  Janine, what is the current situation with the case right now, what are the next important dates, what are we looking forward to next?  I don't mean "looking forward to" with any form of excitement, but you know what I mean.

Janine: Actually, I believe it's today, there is supposed to be a submission -- was it yesterday?  I think it was yesterday.  There's supposed to be a submission by the defence team responding to the appeal by the US Government on why the extradition should be granted, but I think at this point they haven't yet scheduled any further dates in terms of the hearings in the High Court to then make a decision again on those appeal submissions.

So, as far as I'm aware, I don’t know if there are any dates at this point, but the hearings should happen in the next couple of months I suspect, given the case.

John Shipton: Can I add to that a little bit?

Peter McCormack: Yes, of course, please do, John.

John Shipton: The defence was given a week's extension until the 7th to submit their defence submissions.  After that they will be considered and given to the prosecution; and the High Court, sitting as a single judge, will decide whether the defence appeal can be heard, and that'll take some months.

Peter McCormack: If they are not granted the right to appeal, is that the final step and will Julian be released?

John Shipton: No, yes, of course, yes, yes.  They may appeal again to the Supreme Court, though the United States, if they fail in the High Court, then they may appeal to the Supreme Court.

Peter McCormack: I guess we fear back-door leverage and pressure being applied at the top levels of government.  I'm guessing that's because historically, this case has been a pretty poor example of the UK justice system and the influence of politicians.  Is that something you guys are fearing?

John Shipton: With the current executive Prime Minister Johnson, he's clearly unsympathetic to the extradition process and neutral to helpful as far as Julian's concerned.  Whether this can overwhelm the momentum in the foreign and colonial office and the Crown Prosecuting Service, I don't know, but I take the positives where I can get them.

Peter McCormack: Janine, we're going to also discuss a little bit more about the relationship between Bitcoin and WikiLeaks and we want this episode of the show to appeal to bitcoiners to support and help the case, but is there any specific parts of the case itself we've not covered yet that you think still should be raised or that you'd like to discuss?

Janine: There are many parts I would like to discuss but it would probably take up an entire episode, so unless John or Gabriel think that there's something that hasn't been brought up yet?

Peter McCormack: I think Gabriel is about add something in here.

Gabriel Shipton: I just wanted to say appeals are usually heard in these cases, so we expect the appeal to be heard as early as May, but definitely before the summer break.  There is a decision coming up whether to hear the appeal or not and it's likely, and they usually decide to hear appeals to the High Court on extradition cases.

Peter McCormack: We should talk a little bit now about the relationship between WikiLeaks and Bitcoin, so Gabriel do you want to give the background here to when WikiLeaks' sources of funding were essentially censored by all major payment rails and how Bitcoin became essentially a saviour for WikiLeaks' funding.

Gabriel Shipton: It was back in 2010, during the time when all these releases were coming out, the Afghan war logs and the Iraq war logs, that there was a big banking blockade basically put in place under political pressure.  Visa cut off payments, Mastercard cut off payments, PayPal closed its accounts.  Julian even had his personal accounts closed; that's how intense the political pressure was here.  The US Government was trying to financially starve WikiLeaks basically. 

The obvious alternative, at that time, was Bitcoin which was just basically in very early stages and I think there was a lot of chatter on the Bitcoin forums about, "Should WikiLeaks adopt Bitcoin [or] is it too early?"  Even Satoshi himself chimed in, pleading with WikiLeaks not to adopt Bitcoin just yet because it was still in the data stage and it wouldn’t be able to withstand the pressure that was being applied to WikiLeaks.

Julian and WikiLeaks, at that stage, decided to hold off which was in 2010.  They held off adopting WikiLeaks until it had time to mature and then in June 2011, they converted their finances to Bitcoin and started using Bitcoin; it was their currency basically.  Their operating cash was Bitcoin and in using Bitcoin they were able to survive the banking blockade; fight legal fights in jurisdictions all around the world; pay their day-to-day bills, what it kept to take their servers up, publishing etc; and it was the sort of first real use case of Bitcoin as freedom of speech money, it couldn't be shut down by the institutional powers.

Peter McCormack: Janine, whilst this show is going out on my Bitcoin show and there's lots of bitcoiners listening, I'm almost certain that this show will be shared a little bit wider to people who maybe don't listen to the show regularly, because they'd be really interested to hear about the case and hear from John and Gabriel; so shall we just do a very brief explanation of why Bitcoin as a technology was able to solve financing problems for WikiLeaks specifically, but what it is that is unique about Bitcoin that enables that?

Janine: Yeah, and I first want to say actually the reason that I got into Bitcoin was because of the cypherpunks' book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Julian and various other authors, because they actually talk about Bitcoin at that point and how it helped them get through the banking blockade and that's how I first remember.  I think I might have heard about Bitcoin before then, but that is how I remember really getting interested in it; it was once I heard about it through that book.

I mean, I think the reason is because, as you've discussed probably over all of your shows of Bitcoin, it's decentralised and that also helps it be censorship resistant.  That is not something that you find in basically any financial system except for maybe cash.  That's why I became interested in it because at the time, I was already wanting to be a journalist and the idea that my bank account could get shut down in retaliation for me publishing something that someone didn't want me to publish, whether it was the bank, whether it was someone putting pressure on the bank; that always interested me.

I do find it interesting that even though it's been over ten years now since Satoshi -- because, Satoshi actually predicted that WikiLeaks would not stand to get more than pocket change; that's exactly what they said in the Bitcoin talk forum about this.  That ended up being completely false.  In 2017 Julian actually said on Twitter that he actually thanked the US Government for the blockade because that basically instigated them into adopting Bitcoin and I think they said they made a 50,000% return or some absurd gain.  They did really well out of that.

I also think that part of the reason they adopted it is because Bitcoin and WikiLeaks both come from the cypherpunk tradition, at least the thought the processes and values that were fostered there, and so he was interested in it very early on for that reason.  The cypherpunks in general, as you've probably talked about before, have been interested in digital currency for a long time and there have been many attempts and Bitcoin was the most successful attempt; because there have been previous attempts that have been taken down by the US Government and other entities because they were centralised. 

Bitcoin was so far the first example where that hasn't been the case and it has survived, as WikiLeaks has, for over ten years now.  Yet I still get people telling me that they don't want to talk about WikiLeaks or anything as bitcoiners because they think that that will potentially hurt Bitcoin.  I just think, "Bitcoin was so much weaker ten years ago and that didn't happen.  What are you still afraid of?"  I feel if, as bitcoiners, if you care about this case, but you think you can't talk about it, then maybe you don't have as much confidence as Bitcoin as you thought, because this was a real test for it and so far, it's working.

Peter McCormack: That's a very fair point, also thank you Gabriel and John because you have provided us with this unique audio clip of Julian explaining Bitcoin to Eric Schmidt from Google, so that's fantastic.  We're going to share that as part of the audio.

Julian Assange:  "Bitcoin is something that evolved out of the cypherpunks a couple of years ago.  It's an alternative, it's a stateless currency.  There've been innovations along these lines in many different parts of digital currencies, anonymous, untraceable, etc.  People have been experimenting over the past 20 years, but Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives right and that’s why it started to take off.  The different combination is that there are no central nodes, it's all point-to-point, one does not need to trust any central mint.

"The problems with traditional digital currencies on the internet is that you have to trust the mint not to print too much of it.  The incentives for the mint to keep printing are pretty high actually, because it can print free money."

Peter McCormack: Let's talk specifically about how people can actually help.  Gabriel, what is it specifically right now that you want people to do?

Gabriel Shipton: The easiest way a lot of people can help is by donating, basically.  We have a donation address set up; they can donate through the Wau Holland Foundation in Germany.  They can donate Bitcoin; there is a Bitcoin address there that they can send Bitcoin to.  I can read the address out or maybe you can put the address in the show notes.

Peter McCormack: We will do both, we have nothing to lose.

Gabriel Shipton: It's wauland.de/en/donate/moral-courage/#77

Peter McCormack: We will put that in the show notes.

Gabriel Shipton: Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful.

Peter McCormack: I'm guessing that these legal costs are probably running into exorbitant amounts like millions and millions, so as much help as people can give.  Just from my side, to help, I'm not going to run any ads in this show; normally I have ads in my show.  I'm not going to run any ads in this show apart from a specific add to support this.  This show will make a $10,000 contribution to your legal funds, so we've been holding Bitcoins as part of the show.

Gabriel Shipton: Thank you very much.

Peter McCormack: Once the show goes out, I'll get the address and we'll make a donation as well.  I'll push it on Twitter, I will push it on every format we have, and we'll try and help you with the fundraising as best as possible.

Gabriel Shipton: That is fantastic.

Peter McCormack: No worries, is there anything else you want to add before we close out, yourself, Gabe?

Gabriel Shipton: As an interesting way that people can contribute, it is not an NFT option, it's a Bitcoin art option by Pascal Boyart on Scarce.city.  It's a portrait of Julian that’s made out of ripped up US dollars, so it's quite a fun piece of art and you can bid through the Lightning Network with Bitcoin for that.

Peter McCormack: Janine, anything you want to add before we close out?

Janine: I just want to say again to bitcoiners who still have Satoshi's fears, bitcoiners like to talk about their enemies in the financial system globally.  One of them is the IMF and there's actually been quite a lot published in for example the WikiLeaks files and about the role of the IMF as a geopolitical tool and even as a tool of war.  There are a number of parts in the WikiLeaks files on that, that was published in 2015.

In order to have journalism that is sustainable and can resist these kinds of attacks, Bitcoin is very important for that, but we also need to -- it can't just be Bitcoin; we also have to change our own behaviour in who we think of money, how we use money and the kinds of initiatives and organisations that we support.  If they don't support freedom of transaction as they do freedom of speech, then what's the point?

Peter McCormack: John, Gabriel, thank you for coming on.  You have a permanent open free invite to use this podcast, this show, as ever you need it.  Just reach out to myself and you can come on and it's permanently open for you.  Anyone listening, please do check out the full list of show notes, please do make a donation.  If you can, please share this out to everyone else. 

All the best Gabriel, John; hopefully at some point, I will get to see you in London and catch up in person.  Janine, just a big thank you for coming on and supporting me with this.  This level of conversation is beyond my personal journalistic skills, so having you on with your experience and expertise has really made this show infinitely better than it would be with me on my own.  Thank you everyone take care and I'll see you all soon.