December 31, 2018
Donald Trump's lawyer said on Monday that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange
should not be prosecuted and he compared WikiLeaks publications to the
Pentagon Papers.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for President Donald Trump, said Monday that
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange had not done "anything wrong" and should
not go to jail for disseminating stolen information just as major media
does.
"Let's take the Pentagon Papers," Giuliani told Fox News. "The Pentagon
Papers were stolen property, weren't they? It was in The New York Times and
The Washington Post. Nobody went to jail at The New York Times and The
Washington Post."
Giuliani said there were "revelations during the Bush administration" such
as Abu Ghraib. "All of that is stolen property taken from the government,
it's against the law. But once it gets to a media publication, they can
publish it," Giuliani said, "for the purpose of informing people."
"You can't put Assange in a different position," he said. "He was a guy who
communicated."
Giuliani said, "We may not like what [Assange] communicates, but he was a
media facility. He was putting that information out," he said. "Every
newspaper and station grabbed it, and published it."
The U.S. government has admitted that it has indicted Assange for publishing
classified information, but it is battling in court to keep the details of
the indictment secret. As a lawyer and close advisor to Trump, Giuliani
could have influence on the president's and the Justice Department's
thinking on Assange.
Giuliani also said there was no coordination between the Trump campaign and
WikiLeaks. "I was with Donald Trump day in and day out during the last four
months of the campaign," he said. "He was as surprised as I was about the
WikiLeaks disclosures. Sometimes surprised to the extent of 'Oh my god, did
they really say that?' We were wondering if it was true. They [the Clinton
campaign] never denied it."
Giuliani said: "The thing that really got Hillary is not so much that it was
revealed, but they were true. They actually had people as bad as that and
she really was cheating on the debates. She really was getting from Donna
Brazile the questions before hand. She really did completely screw Bernie
Sanders."
"Every bit of that was true," he went on. "Just like the Pentagon Papers
put a different view on Vietnam, this put a different view on Hillary
Clinton."
Giuliani said, "It was not right to hack. People who did it should go to
jail, but no press person or person disseminating that for the purpose of
informing did anything wrong."
Assange has been holed up as a refugee in the Ecuador embassy in London for
the past six years fearing that if he were to leave British authorities
would arrest him and extradite him to the U.S. for prosecution.
You can watch the entire Fox News interview with Giuliani here:
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent
for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and
numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at joelauria@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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