The five and a half hour long hearing on Capitol Hill offered a stunning illustration of the extent of misdeeds by big tech
July 31, 2020 Matt Stoller THE GUARDIAN
https://portside.org/2020-07-31/big-tech-moguls-and-misdeeds-spotlight
"ur founders would not bow before a king, we should not bow before the emperors of the online economy.” That’s how Congressman David Cicilline started the remarkable hearing on Wednesday in the antitrust subcommittee, where four tech CEOs – Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon – finally had to answer questions about how their businesses operated. And the answers they gave weren’t pretty. The word both Republicans and Democrats used to describe their corporations was dominance, and as members unspooled the evidence they had collected in an investigation over the past year, it’s easy to see why.
Almost any moment of the four-hour hearing offered a stunning illustration of the extent of the bad behavior by these corporations. Take Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, often seemed off-balance and unaware of his corporation’s own practices. Congresswoman Lucy McBath played audio of a seller on Amazon tearfully describing how her business and livelihood was arbitrarily destroyed by Amazon restricting sales of their product, for no reason the seller could discern. Bezos acted surprised, as he often did. Representative Jamie Raskin presented an email from Bezos saying about one acquisition that: “We’re buying market position not technology.” Bezos then admitted Amazon buys companies purely because of their “market position”, demonstrating that many of hundreds of acquisitions these tech companies have made were probably illegal.
Mark Zuckerberg had to confront his own emails in which he noted that Facebook’s purchase of Instagram was done to buy out a competitor. His response was that he didn’t remember, but that he imagined he was probably joking when he wrote that. One congresswoman on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist, Val Demings, asked Zuckerberg why he restricted Facebook’s tools for competitors like Pinterest, but not for non-competitors like Netflix. He had no answer. Congressman David Cicilline asked about Facebook promoting incendiary speech and making money off advertising sold next to that speech. Zuckerberg pivoted to free speech talking points, and Cicilline cut him off, “This isn’t a speech issue, it’s about your business model.”
Big tech’s dominance has serious consequences. America has lost thousands of media outlets because of the concentration of ad revenue in the hands of Google and Facebook; two-thirds of American counties now have no daily newspaper. The nation lost 100,000 independent businesses from 2000 to 2015, a drop of 40%, many due to Amazon’s exploitation of legal advantages from the avoidance of sales tax to its apparent violation of antitrust laws in underpricing rivals. Hundreds of thousands of merchants now depend on Amazon’s platform to sell goods, and Amazon has systemically hiked fees on them. Just a few years ago these third-party merchants paid 19% of their revenue to Amazon, now it’s up to 30%, which is, coincidentally, the amount Apple demands from hundreds of thousands of app makers who have to reach iPhone users. It’s no secret why small business formation has collapsed since the last financial crisis; these giant platforms tax innovation.
And then there’s the fear. I have reported on small and medium-sized businesses frightened to come forward with stories of how they are abused by counterfeiting or unfair fees by the goliaths. As one told me about his relationship to Amazon, “I’m a hostage.”
Fortunately, the voices of small businesspeople afraid of retaliation came through their elected leaders. “I pay 20% of my income to Uncle Sam in taxes, and 30% to Apple,” one member of Congress noted she heard from businesspeople. Representative Ken Buck, Republican from Colorado, talked about one of the few courageous businesspeople who testified openly months ago, the founder of PopSockets, who had been forced to pay $2m to Amazon just to get Amazon to stop allowing counterfeits of its items sold on the platform. Another Republican representative, Kelly Armstrong, went into the details of Google’s use of tracking to disadvantage its competitors in advertising, joined by Democrat Pramila Jayapal, who asked Google’s CEO why the corporation kept directing ad revenue to its own network of properties instead of sending ad traffic to the best available result.
Over and over, the CEOs had similar answers. I don’t know. I’ll get back to you. I’m not aware of that. Or long rambling attempts to deflect, followed by members of Congress cutting them off to get answers to crisp questions. I learned two things from the surprisingly wan responses of these powerful men. First, they had not had to deal with being asked for real answers about their business behavior for years, if ever, and so they were not ready to respond. And two, antitrust enforcers for the last 15 years, stretching back to the Bush and Obama administrations, bear massive culpability for the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of these corporations. The emails and information that Congress dug up were available to these enforcers, who nonetheless approved merger after merger, and refused to bring complaints against anti-competitive behavior.
It’s rare to see Congress cover itself in glory, but believe it or not, that’s what happened. While a few Republicans, like ranking member Jim Jordan, spent the hearing yelling about the supposed persecution of conservatives on social media, most of the subcommittee focused on genuine business problems. Even most Republicans focused on anti-conservative bias recognized that the ability to constrain conservative voices originated as a function of market power.
As David Cicilline put it: “These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up, all need to be properly regulated and held accountable.” And then he quoted Louis Brandeis, who said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Saturday, August 1, 2020
Five Key Demands for the New Coronavirus Bill
COVID-19's catastrophic rates of sickness and death, as well as tragic economic consequences, require the boldest remedies this country is capable of mustering. There will be no economic recovery until the virus is contained.
July 31, 2020 Robert Reich
July 31, 2020 Robert Reich
ROBERT REICH BLOG
https://portside.org/2020-07-31/five-key-demands-new-coronavirus-bill
COVID-19 has left the economy in tatters, put millions of people on the brink of financial devastation, and taken the lives of over 145,000 Americans. Congress has just days left to pass legislation that will keep struggling Americans afloat and stave off economic catastrophe.
Here are five key demands for the new bill.
1. Contain COVID-19. Its catastrophic rates of sickness and death, as well as tragic economic consequences, require the boldest remedies this country is capable of mustering. There will be no economic recovery until the virus is contained.
Other nations – among them, Germany, South Korea, and Italy – have contained the pandemic with comprehensive testing, contact tracing, and isolation. The House of Representatives wants to provide $75 billion for these measures in addition to free access to coronavirus treatment and support for hospitals and other providers. This is the absolute minimum of what’s needed.
2. Extend unemployment benefits to help people survive the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Previous coronavirus relief legislation added $600 to weekly unemployment and extended coverage to gig workers and others not normally eligible. But those payments are about to end for roughly 25 million people. If they do, we can expect more human suffering, and more joblessness because the extra purchasing power has helped sustain the economy. The payments should be continued at least through the end of the year, as the House bill provides.
Some say the extra unemployment benefits have discouraged recipients from seeking jobs. That’s highly unlikely. Given the size of the economic collapse, few jobs are available anyway. And normal unemployment benefits typically pay a small fraction of the wages of jobs that were lost.
Even with the extra benefits, working people will have a strong economic incentive to return to work once COVID is contained and these benefits expire. Not to mention it’s good for the economy when people have extra money to spend to sustain remaining economic activity. Finally, it is beneficial to the public’s health that as many people as possible avoid workplaces that pose any risk of infection. Keeping people home to contain the virus is the only way we get the economy back on track.
3. Prevent a potential wave of evictions and foreclosures. 32 percent of households missed their July rent or mortgage payments. The bill must extend the federal eviction moratorium, and provide assistance for renters and homeowners to pay rent, mortgages, utilities, and other related costs. Substantial additional resources for housing assistance is a no-brainer.
4. Shore up state and local budgets. State and local governments are facing huge budget shortfalls over the next three years. Without federal aid, vital public services will be on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – at a time when the public needs them more than ever.
For public schools, the issue isn’t so much whether to reopen but how to do so in a way that doesn’t risk the health of students, teachers, and other school personnel. This will require substantial additional resources. If we could afford to give corporations a $500 billion blank check in the last round of relief legislation, we can surely afford to help struggling state and local governments. The House Bill provides nearly $1 trillion to state and local governments, which is minimally adequate.
5. Don’t compromise what’s needed in the bill out of concern about the national debt. The real issue is the ratio of debt to the size of the economy. The government must spend large sums now to help the economy recover faster – thereby reducing the ratio of debt to the overall economy over the long term. Besides, as we learned during the Great Depression and World War II, large spending to reduce human suffering and promote economic wellbeing is well worth the cost. It’s what almost every other nation is doing.
None of this should be controversial. This bill is perhaps our only chance to get COVID-19 under control, Americans fed, and the economy back up and running.
Call your senators at (202) 224-3121 and demand they fight to protect the American people. The window to act is closing, so raise your voice now.
https://portside.org/2020-07-31/five-key-demands-new-coronavirus-bill
COVID-19 has left the economy in tatters, put millions of people on the brink of financial devastation, and taken the lives of over 145,000 Americans. Congress has just days left to pass legislation that will keep struggling Americans afloat and stave off economic catastrophe.
Here are five key demands for the new bill.
1. Contain COVID-19. Its catastrophic rates of sickness and death, as well as tragic economic consequences, require the boldest remedies this country is capable of mustering. There will be no economic recovery until the virus is contained.
Other nations – among them, Germany, South Korea, and Italy – have contained the pandemic with comprehensive testing, contact tracing, and isolation. The House of Representatives wants to provide $75 billion for these measures in addition to free access to coronavirus treatment and support for hospitals and other providers. This is the absolute minimum of what’s needed.
2. Extend unemployment benefits to help people survive the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Previous coronavirus relief legislation added $600 to weekly unemployment and extended coverage to gig workers and others not normally eligible. But those payments are about to end for roughly 25 million people. If they do, we can expect more human suffering, and more joblessness because the extra purchasing power has helped sustain the economy. The payments should be continued at least through the end of the year, as the House bill provides.
Some say the extra unemployment benefits have discouraged recipients from seeking jobs. That’s highly unlikely. Given the size of the economic collapse, few jobs are available anyway. And normal unemployment benefits typically pay a small fraction of the wages of jobs that were lost.
Even with the extra benefits, working people will have a strong economic incentive to return to work once COVID is contained and these benefits expire. Not to mention it’s good for the economy when people have extra money to spend to sustain remaining economic activity. Finally, it is beneficial to the public’s health that as many people as possible avoid workplaces that pose any risk of infection. Keeping people home to contain the virus is the only way we get the economy back on track.
3. Prevent a potential wave of evictions and foreclosures. 32 percent of households missed their July rent or mortgage payments. The bill must extend the federal eviction moratorium, and provide assistance for renters and homeowners to pay rent, mortgages, utilities, and other related costs. Substantial additional resources for housing assistance is a no-brainer.
4. Shore up state and local budgets. State and local governments are facing huge budget shortfalls over the next three years. Without federal aid, vital public services will be on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – at a time when the public needs them more than ever.
For public schools, the issue isn’t so much whether to reopen but how to do so in a way that doesn’t risk the health of students, teachers, and other school personnel. This will require substantial additional resources. If we could afford to give corporations a $500 billion blank check in the last round of relief legislation, we can surely afford to help struggling state and local governments. The House Bill provides nearly $1 trillion to state and local governments, which is minimally adequate.
5. Don’t compromise what’s needed in the bill out of concern about the national debt. The real issue is the ratio of debt to the size of the economy. The government must spend large sums now to help the economy recover faster – thereby reducing the ratio of debt to the overall economy over the long term. Besides, as we learned during the Great Depression and World War II, large spending to reduce human suffering and promote economic wellbeing is well worth the cost. It’s what almost every other nation is doing.
None of this should be controversial. This bill is perhaps our only chance to get COVID-19 under control, Americans fed, and the economy back up and running.
Call your senators at (202) 224-3121 and demand they fight to protect the American people. The window to act is closing, so raise your voice now.
GDP SHRINKS BY RECORD AMOUNT IN SECOND QUARTER
By Sylvan Lane, The Hill.July 31, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/gdp-shrinks-by-record-amount-in-second-quarter/
The U.S. economy shrunk at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 32.9 percent during the second quarter of 2020 as the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic spurred an economic collapse of record-breaking speed and size, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
Between April and June, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) shrunk at a pace that would have wiped out roughly a third of the value of the economy if extended over 12 months, according to the Commerce Department’s advance estimate of second-quarter growth. It is the largest one-quarter plunge in economic growth since the federal government began reporting quarterly GDP data.
“This was the steepest decline since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008, when output shrank by 8.4%,” wrote Agathe Demarais, global forecasting director at The Economist Intelligence Unit in a Wednesday preview of the report. “The scale of the fall in the first quarter will be dwarfed by that in the second.”
On a non-annualized basis, GDP shrunk roughly 9.5 percent between the first and second quarters of 2020.
The staggering decline in GDP growth was widely expected by economists after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic forced millions of Americans into quarantine and out of work. More than 20 million Americans lost their jobs in March and April as thousands of businesses were forced to close and lay off their workers.
The mass layoffs and business closures derailed consumer spending, sapping a crucial source of strength for the U.S. economy that drives roughly two-thirds of annual growth. Spending on goods and services plunged at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 34.6 percent in the second quarter, another record-breaking plunge.
“Consumption is the biggest component of GDP — almost 70% — so this drop alone will have subtracted some 24 percentage points from headline growth,” wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics in a Thursday research note.
Investments in buildings, equipment and intellectual property — important drivers of U.S. economic production — fell at a yearly rate of 49 percent. Exports also plunged at a yearly rate of 64 percent.
While the economy has since regained roughly 8 million of the jobs lost during the pandemic, a second surge of cases has slowed the burgeoning recovery. Permanent job losses increased in each of the past two monthly jobs reports despite strong net totals and the number of unemployed Americans applying for weekly jobless benefits has remained above 1 million for four months.
The Labor Department reported on Thursday that initial unemployment claims rose for the second week in a row to a seasonally adjusted 1.43 million for the week ending July 25. Another 829,000 jobless workers applied for benefits through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program for contractors and gig workers not typically covered by traditional unemployment insurance.
The Trump administration, Senate Republicans and Democratic congressional leaders are struggling to strike a deal on another economic rescue package to guide the U.S. through the pandemic-driven recession. Lawmakers have already missed a window to come to an agreement before enhanced unemployment benefits effectively lapsed and a federal eviction and foreclosure moratorium expired on July 25.
Economists have warned that the steep decline in fiscal support from Congress and the impact of a second wave of coronavirus infections could cause deep long-term damage to the U.S. economy that could take years to reverse.
“While the initial rebound in monthly activity was stronger than expected, the recent flattening in high-frequency indicators suggests a more gradual pace of recovery from here,” wrote economists at Nomura in a Wednesday research note.
AS COVID-19 SURGES, FARMWORKERS ARE PAYING A HIGH PRICE
By Evelyn Nieves, Inside Climate News.July 31, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/as-covid-19-surges-farmworkers-are-paying-a-high-price/
A Survey Of Workers In 21 Counties Found The Coronavirus Is Devastating Them Directly And Indirectly, With Farm Hubs Having The Highest Infection Rates In The State.
Every day, California farmworkers worry that the pandemic plowing through agricultural hubs will catch them and kill them. They also worry that not working will kill them.
The collapse of food service demands when most businesses and institutions shut down has cut farm jobs statewide by 20 percent, or 100,000. Many farmworkers who are still working have had their hours or days reduced, sometimes without warning. Lockdowns have also cost workers second jobs they needed to make ends meet. They are juggling bills and going hungry.
These are some of the findings in a new survey of 900 farmworkers in 21 farm counties, released on Tuesday. The survey was coordinated by the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS), with a wide group of researchers, farmworker organizations and policy advocates. The Covid-19 Farmworker Study (COFS) reinforces the dire warnings that farmworker advocacy organizations made when the coronavirus lockdowns began: The least protected essential workers in the country, toiling under environmental conditions like excessive heat, pollution and dust, are being devastated by the coronavirus, directly and indirectly.
California has the largest agricultural industry in the country, a $54 billion economy that is the backbone of the fifth largest national economy on the planet. Farmworkers, without whom the industry would collapse, are proving especially vulnerable to contracting Covid-19. The survey coincides with new evidence that farmworkers are contracting the virus at much higher rates than people in any other other occupation. The CIRS has found that in Monterey County, farmworkers are three times more likely to contract the coronavirus than the general population. Farm hubs have the highest rates of Covid-19 in the state, and Latinx patients comprise the majority of cases in those hot spots.
Most counties do not track cases by occupation, a serious detriment to stemming the spread of the disease, said Don Villarejo, CIRS’ founder, who compiled the Monterey County data. “There is a lack of transparency,” he said in a press conference with several farmworker groups that helped conduct the survey, adding that the lack of information makes tracking and containing outbreaks more difficult.
Farmworker advocates say that despite the state’s efforts to help contain the coronavirus among agricultural workers, the attempts thus far have not been working. In Imperial County, the state’s coronavirus epicenter, efforts to inform the farmworker community and preventoutbreaks are failing, said Esther Bejarano of the Comite Civico del Valle (Civic Committee of the Valley).
“There’s no point spending more money on what’s not working,” she said, referring to a new plan by Gov. Gavin Newsom, announced on Monday, to spend $52 million in the center of California’s agricultural region. “We need structural change. We need systemic support.”
Farmworkers, she said, “are in a crisis.”
Recommended protections for farmworkers, like masks, hand sanitizer and social distancing, need to be made mandatory, advocates said, and longstanding conditions that farmworkers have endured, such as crowded buses to and from work, or overcrowded housing, need to be addressed.
Education campaigns to reinforce social distancing or hand-washing are moot at this point. Farmworkers, the survey found, know what they need to do to protect themselves from the disease. They follow the usual protocols at home.
On the job, however, workers lack control of their own safety. Fewer than half of those surveyed said they had received masks from their employers. Even among those who had, they had received them once or a couple of times. (Farmworkers generally wear face coverings to protect themselves from pesticide dust, dirt and the sun. More than 95 percent of those surveyed said they are masked in the fields.)
Social distancing is still an idea, not a reality, for many of those surveyed. In some cases, farmworkers who asked for better protections, such as more distancing in the fields, or hand sanitizer, have faced retaliation. Crew bosses have punished them by cutting their hours or days, advocates said.
Farmworkers would benefit from more testing, advocates said. At this point, few have been tested. For the undocumented (a majority of farmworkers), a lack of health care is not the only issue. Many worry that if they identify themselves to receive even free medical care, they will end up deported.
The farmworker study is ongoing. Ildi Carlisle-Cummins, executive director of the rural studies institute, said the research, which is still preliminary, was being released “because it needs to be out there.”
IT’S NOT ASSANGE WHO SHOULD BE FACING PROSECUTION
By Tom Coburg, The Canary.
July 31, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/its-not-assange-who-should-be-facing-prosecution/
On 27 July two court hearings took place – one in the UK, the other in Spain. Both concerned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. From their proceedings, it became clear that it’s not Assange who should be facing prosecution, but the current office holder of the US presidency and his associates.
Grounds For Dismissal Of Charges?
At the 27 July ‘administrative hearing’ at Westminster magistrates court, Judge Vanessa Baraitser stated that the prosecution had failed to present its latest ‘superseding indictment‘. That superseding indictment was first made public on 24 June, just prior to the last court hearing, though the prosecution failed to submit the document to that hearing too.
Defence lawyer Edward Fitzgerald made it clear to the court that he was concerned the prosecution might still try to present the superseding indictment later, so as to delay the extradition hearings. He argued:
We are concerned about a fresh request being made at this stage with the potential consequence of derailing proceedings and that the US attorney-general is doing this for political reasons.
Indeed, prosecution barrister Joel Smith refused to comply with any timeline to serve the superseding indictment. However, Baraitser told Smith that the deadline to submit the superseding indictment had passed.
Controversially, the superseding indictment provided testimony from known (but unnamed) FBI informants, both of whom have criminal convictions and were engaged in entrapment operations. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the prosecution did not formally present a copy of the superseding indictment to the court. What the judge did not address, however, is that by publishing the superseding indictment on the internet, the US department of justice may have prejudiced the case against Assange – and that could be grounds for dismissal of all charges.
“Illegal Operations”
Meanwhile in Spain, the prosecution of David Morales, who is charged with organising the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, proceeds, with testimony from former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who is representing Assange.
Morales, via his company UC Global, is also accused of providing that surveillance to US intelligence services. This video includes examples of the alleged surveillance in the embassy:
Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson commented that the surveillance constituted a “serious crime in European law”.
Also monitored were meetings between Assange and some of his other lawyers, including Melinda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson, and Garzón. Surveillance also included logging of visitors, such as Gareth Peirce, another of Assange’s lawyers, as well as a seven-hour session between Assange and his legal team on 19 June 2016.
Robinson subsequently commented that the surveillance was: “a huge and a serious breach of [Assange’s] right to a defence and a serious breach of [Assange’s] fair trial rights”. Indeed, client-lawyer confidentiality remains a cornerstone of the English legal system.
In this respect, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson commented:
The case should be thrown out immediately. Not only is it illegal on the face of the [extradition] treaty, the U.S. has conducted illegal operations against Assange and his lawyers, which are the subject of a major investigation in Spain.
Black Bag Ops
At the Monday hearing in Spain, the court noted allegations that the intelligence gathered by UC Global was provided to Zohar Lahav, described as a “security officer at Las Vegas Sands Corp”. A Grayzone article by Max Blumenthal reveals that witnesses alleged Morales had proposed kidnapping or poisoning Assange and breaking into the office of Garzón.
The Grayzone has seen court documents claiming that Lahav, who is described as Adelson’s bodyguard and vice president for executive protection at Las Vegas Sands, worked with Morales for three years.
Lahav reported to Sands’ director of global security Brian Nagel, of whom Blumenthal states:
During his lengthy career in the US Secret Service, Nagel worked at the nexus of federal law enforcement and US intelligence. In the 1990s, Nagel not only served on the personal protection detail of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; he was assigned to “work with two foreign protective services after the assassination and attempted assassination of their respective heads of state,” he said in sworn testimony in a US District Court in 2011. …
As the deputy director of the Secret Service, he [Nagel] appeared alongside then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft at a November 2003 press conference on combating cybercrime, and testified before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee in March 2007.
Nagel’s boss, Sheldon Adelson was a top donor to Donald Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign. It’s also understood that Adelson will contribute $100m to the 2020 election campaign for Trump and republicans.
Meanwhile, lawyers acting for Assange have requested that Adelson and Nagel be summoned as witnesses. But that request was denied.
Trump Centre Stage
At Monday’s court hearing in London, defence lawyer Fitzgerald commented that the delays relating to the superseding indictment may have something to do with the upcoming US presidential elections. He added: “I’m not sure if there’s been some manipulation there”. Moreover, it’s been shown how Trump is financially close to the head of the very corporation that’s allegedly implicated in the surveillance on Assange.
Indeed, at the heart of the Assange extradition process is Trump and perhaps it is he and his associates, not Assange, who should be placed under the spotlight.
The full extradition hearing is now scheduled for the Old Bailey for three weeks, commencing 7 September. And it would be most surprising if during the extradition hearings there aren’t plenty more revelations.
https://popularresistance.org/its-not-assange-who-should-be-facing-prosecution/
On 27 July two court hearings took place – one in the UK, the other in Spain. Both concerned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. From their proceedings, it became clear that it’s not Assange who should be facing prosecution, but the current office holder of the US presidency and his associates.
Grounds For Dismissal Of Charges?
At the 27 July ‘administrative hearing’ at Westminster magistrates court, Judge Vanessa Baraitser stated that the prosecution had failed to present its latest ‘superseding indictment‘. That superseding indictment was first made public on 24 June, just prior to the last court hearing, though the prosecution failed to submit the document to that hearing too.
Defence lawyer Edward Fitzgerald made it clear to the court that he was concerned the prosecution might still try to present the superseding indictment later, so as to delay the extradition hearings. He argued:
We are concerned about a fresh request being made at this stage with the potential consequence of derailing proceedings and that the US attorney-general is doing this for political reasons.
Indeed, prosecution barrister Joel Smith refused to comply with any timeline to serve the superseding indictment. However, Baraitser told Smith that the deadline to submit the superseding indictment had passed.
Controversially, the superseding indictment provided testimony from known (but unnamed) FBI informants, both of whom have criminal convictions and were engaged in entrapment operations. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the prosecution did not formally present a copy of the superseding indictment to the court. What the judge did not address, however, is that by publishing the superseding indictment on the internet, the US department of justice may have prejudiced the case against Assange – and that could be grounds for dismissal of all charges.
“Illegal Operations”
Meanwhile in Spain, the prosecution of David Morales, who is charged with organising the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, proceeds, with testimony from former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who is representing Assange.
Morales, via his company UC Global, is also accused of providing that surveillance to US intelligence services. This video includes examples of the alleged surveillance in the embassy:
Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson commented that the surveillance constituted a “serious crime in European law”.
Also monitored were meetings between Assange and some of his other lawyers, including Melinda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson, and Garzón. Surveillance also included logging of visitors, such as Gareth Peirce, another of Assange’s lawyers, as well as a seven-hour session between Assange and his legal team on 19 June 2016.
Robinson subsequently commented that the surveillance was: “a huge and a serious breach of [Assange’s] right to a defence and a serious breach of [Assange’s] fair trial rights”. Indeed, client-lawyer confidentiality remains a cornerstone of the English legal system.
In this respect, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson commented:
The case should be thrown out immediately. Not only is it illegal on the face of the [extradition] treaty, the U.S. has conducted illegal operations against Assange and his lawyers, which are the subject of a major investigation in Spain.
Black Bag Ops
At the Monday hearing in Spain, the court noted allegations that the intelligence gathered by UC Global was provided to Zohar Lahav, described as a “security officer at Las Vegas Sands Corp”. A Grayzone article by Max Blumenthal reveals that witnesses alleged Morales had proposed kidnapping or poisoning Assange and breaking into the office of Garzón.
The Grayzone has seen court documents claiming that Lahav, who is described as Adelson’s bodyguard and vice president for executive protection at Las Vegas Sands, worked with Morales for three years.
Lahav reported to Sands’ director of global security Brian Nagel, of whom Blumenthal states:
During his lengthy career in the US Secret Service, Nagel worked at the nexus of federal law enforcement and US intelligence. In the 1990s, Nagel not only served on the personal protection detail of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; he was assigned to “work with two foreign protective services after the assassination and attempted assassination of their respective heads of state,” he said in sworn testimony in a US District Court in 2011. …
As the deputy director of the Secret Service, he [Nagel] appeared alongside then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft at a November 2003 press conference on combating cybercrime, and testified before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee in March 2007.
Nagel’s boss, Sheldon Adelson was a top donor to Donald Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign. It’s also understood that Adelson will contribute $100m to the 2020 election campaign for Trump and republicans.
Meanwhile, lawyers acting for Assange have requested that Adelson and Nagel be summoned as witnesses. But that request was denied.
Trump Centre Stage
At Monday’s court hearing in London, defence lawyer Fitzgerald commented that the delays relating to the superseding indictment may have something to do with the upcoming US presidential elections. He added: “I’m not sure if there’s been some manipulation there”. Moreover, it’s been shown how Trump is financially close to the head of the very corporation that’s allegedly implicated in the surveillance on Assange.
Indeed, at the heart of the Assange extradition process is Trump and perhaps it is he and his associates, not Assange, who should be placed under the spotlight.
The full extradition hearing is now scheduled for the Old Bailey for three weeks, commencing 7 September. And it would be most surprising if during the extradition hearings there aren’t plenty more revelations.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)