JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn, on another topic, a top House Republican has defended the FBI against a series of attacks by President Trump, who has claimed without evidence that the Bureau planted a spy in his 2016 presidential campaign. Representative Trey Gowdy, chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee, said Tuesday that the FBI was acting properly when it deployed a confidential informant to investigate Russian attempts to interfere in the election. I’m wondering if you could comment on this, because you’ve written about the person planted and his checkered history—Stefan Halper.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. So it is an interesting case because obviously, in 2016, there were claims that there were members of the Trump campaign who were colluding with or had improper relationships with various business and political interests in Russia. And it is completely legitimate, in fact, obligatory, for the FBI to investigate those allegations, and using an informant to do so is an entirely proper way to investigate. They do it all the time. They do it to huge numbers of groups. In fact, on some level, it is one of the least invasive ways, is to have somebody with knowledge speak to the people who are being investigated and then report back to the FBI what it is that they have learned.
So the idea that this is a spy or that this is something improper is ridiculous. At the same time, there are a lot of questions about where these suspicions came from, about who it is who started them, about who was overseeing the investigation, where the dossier came from. And so the question of who this informant was is a matter of legitimate public interest.
And yet the Justice Department and the FBI did what they always do when they want to hide things, which is they claim, that, “Oh, if we learn who the informant is, it will jeopardize lives around the world. It will compromise intelligence assets. It will harm the national security of the United States.” They made it seem like the informant was some kind of covert, undercover CIA or FBI asset, whose name, if it were disclosed, would blow all sorts of secret covert operations.
As it turned out, now that we know the name, Stefan Halper, that turned out to be a total lie. Stefan Halper is a longtime dirty CIA operative who has ties to the Bush family and the Republican Party. He was behind one of the worst CIA scandals, which is in 1980, the Reagan campaign spied on what the Carter administration was doing by having CIA officials report classified information to the Reagan campaign so they knew what the Carter administration was doing, so they could use it against Carter in the 1980 campaign. And the person who oversaw that was Stefan Halper, working with the former CIA director and then vice presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush.
So Halper has been around Washington forever. His name has long been known as a CIA operative and as a Republican operative. And the idea that naming him would somehow jeopardize his life or the lives of other people was an absolute lie, but the Justice Department used it to successfully convince media outlets in the U.S. not to name him for many weeks. And it was only once The New York Times and Washington Post published enough information on purpose for us to learn his identity were we then able to figure out who it was.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, co-founder of The Intercept. Glenn, you wrote that former Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, in an exclusive interview with The Intercept, denounced his country’s current government for blocking Julian Assange from receiving visitors in the embassy in London as a form of torture and a violation of Ecuador’s duties to protect Assange’s safety and well-being. Can you talk about what is happening with Julian Assange? We’re reading reports that the Ecuadoran embassy—that he might be leaving the embassy, which of course would mean he would be arrested by the British government. What do you understand is taking place?
GLENN GREENWALD: There is clearly a danger that the current Ecuadorian government, which has become much more subservient and compliant with the demands of Western governments, including those in the U.S. and the U.K. and in Spain, is willing to trade away the protections that Ecuador, for seven years, has maintained and owes to Julian Assange because of the likelihood that he will be persecuted, not in Sweden, but in the United States. Remember, the case in Sweden for sexual assault, the investigation has been dropped and closed. It is no longer pending.
What the concern is is the Trump Administration, specifically Mike Pompeo who at the time was the director of the CIA and is now the secretary of state, along with Jeff Sessions, has said that arresting Julian Assange and putting him in prison is a priority because of the leaks of documents that WikiLeaks has published. Because of the journalism that they have done, which just this week the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Committee to Protect Journalists have said would pose a grave threat to the First Amendment.
So when I interviewed President Correa, he was saying essentially that the way in which Julian Assange has been silenced by blocking his access to the internet, by denying him visitors from the outside world with the exception of his lawyers and a couple of other people, is a violation of his human rights. He’s an Ecuadorian citizen, he has formal asylum from Ecuador, and they own him an obligation to protect his health and safety.
And at the same time, doctors who have examined him say he has very grave threats to his health and can’t get treatment for it because of the situation in the embassy. So no matter what you think of Julian Assange, there are serious threats to press freedom being posed and to questions of asylum and the sovereignty of the Ecuadoran government by what is taking place.
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