(The cursed lying letter full of carrots and sticks below):
Click to access 6-27-18%20RM%20letter%20to%20Pence%20Ecuador.pdf
This was pinned at the top of the account, and directly related:
From thehill.com, June 25: ‘How Comey intervened to kill WikiLeaks’ immunity deal’, some excerpts:
“One of the more devastating intelligence leaks in American history — the unmasking of the CIA’s arsenal of cyber warfare weapons last year — has an untold prelude worthy of a spy novel.
Some of the characters are household names, thanks to the Russia scandal: James Comey, fired FBI director. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr. Julian Assange, grand master of WikiLeaks. And American attorney Adam Waldman, who has a Forrest Gump-like penchant for showing up in major cases of intrigue.
Each played a role in the early days of the Trump administration to try to get Assange to agree to “risk mitigation” — essentially, limiting some classified CIA information he might release in the future.
The effort resulted in the drafting of a limited immunity deal that might have temporarily freed the WikiLeaks founder from a London embassy where he has been exiled for years, according to interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators. Read the draft immunity deal proffer that the Justice Department was considering for Assange here.
But an unexpected intervention by Comey — relayed through Warner — soured the negotiations, multiple sources tell me. Assange eventually unleashed a series of leaks that U.S. officials say damaged their cyber warfare capabilities for a long time to come.”
“Assange made clear through the lawyer that he would never compromise his sources, or stop publishing information, but was willing to consider concessions like redactions.”
“Laufman played to Assange’s belief that he was a publisher, the documents show; he put an offer on the table from the intelligence community to help Assange assess how some hostile foreign powers might be infiltrating or harming WikiLeaks staff.” wtf? and OMG! No, that wasn’t gonna happen, was it?
just in:
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Ah, james cogan at wsws has some of the text, and good on him:
“The letter declares that the Democratic senators are “extremely concerned” that Ecuador still provides asylum to Assange. It states they are “alarmed” that the read-out of Pence’s visit to Ecuador did not mention the WikiLeaks editor.
The letter declares: “[I]t is imperative that you raise US concerns with President Moreno about Ecuador’s continued support for Mr. Assange at a time when WikiLeaks continues its efforts to undermine democratic processes globally.”
By “democratic processes,” the Democratic senators mean the ability of US imperialism to wage illegal wars of aggression, to use the most criminal and predatory means to shore up the fortunes of a tiny layer of billionaire oligarchs, to intrigue and manipulate the political affairs of other countries, and to treat the American and international working class as nothing more than fodder for exploitation.
The Democrats repeat the slanderous accusation that has been levelled against Assange to pave the way for his extradition to the United States and trial on charges of espionage: that WikiLeaks was a partner in purported Russian intelligence “interference” in the 2016 US presidential election.
“The letter of the Democratic senators relies exclusively on a report issued by the US intelligence agencies to vilify Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. A declassified version of the report was published on January 6, 2017.”
“The claims of Pompeo and the DNC have only one motive. They are intended to establish a political atmosphere in which Julian Assange can be forced from the embassy in London and detained on allegations of being essentially a foreign spy or a form of a non-state “unlawful enemy combatant”—the charge laid against alleged members of the Al Qaeda terrorist organisation. Such charges are designed to block any defence based on constitutional and legal rights and protections of freedom of speech.”
there’s a lot more, of course, but i’d add that they’d said that pence could build on the new relationship with lenin moreno, whereas (with rafael correa) it was very strained, and that moreno had signed two ‘agreements’ with the Empire…and really one was a military one, remember? under some other guise.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/28/assa-j28.html
I wonder if the sands are shifting (but of course, I’m always hopeful.) Just was skimming the UK Parliamentary Report on rendition after 9/11, linked at MofA. It’s long but there is a summary of findings that long story short presents the UK as a culpable ‘junior partner’ to the US and asserts that the current Prime Minister has denied access to witnesses and material that would allow a more complete report.
It doesn’t at all reference the ensuing Iraq mess and Assange’s involvement in reporting on that, but it is all linked, and the report makes no bones about identifying the ‘senior partner’ in the renditions that followed the attack on 9/11. So, the record, the official one that is, is beginning to expand.
I guess the signees to the letter you mention, wendye, are putting themselves on the record as well. Take your place on the great mandala…
ah, miz glass 2/3 full; methinks your hope are quite in vain. over yonder the conversation veered a lot, but i’d been trying to discover if attorney jen robinson, john pilcher, or craig murray knew anything. but while i was at craig murray’s site, this is what he was paying lose attention to, partially due to his personal involvement.
‘Prosecute Blair govt officials at ICC after torture report – ex-diplomat Craig Murray (VIDEO)’, 29 Jun, 2018 RT
https://www.rt.com/uk/431270-torture-rendition-jack-straw/
but w/ lenin moreno’s miltary agreements w/ the empire, pence was to offer him carrots and thwacks, of course. at the same time pence tweeted hellish things about dictator maduro, quoting the bible, of course, and ‘democracy one day returning to the people’. so now colombia is in nato, ports and bases to kick over maduro, evo morales, and rendite assange to gitmo, i assume.
it looks very bad for julian. woner what he knows at this point, or even if he’s still alive since he’s totally incommunicado. can his lawyers even get in?
but oh, that great mandela song. i’m tempted to bring it or listen, but i always weep… and weep hard. and i can’t afford scratchy eyes right now.
nice to see you, ww. one of the wildfires here has blown up again, and just behind the la platas is an enormous pro-cumulous plume.
Sorry about your fire situation, wendye. I hope promised rain next week will travel north. We have heat, but the near mountains still haven’t revegitated since our big fires back aways, so that’s a plus I guess, though they do look naked.
The one thing that was good about the Report, it seems to me, was the focus it gave to early aspects of the Assange period which dealt with far more serious issues than are currently being hyped concerning Hillary computers and such. Might be one reason the report is not getting a lot of play in the press. They’d much rather distract with political stuff till eyes glaze over as if that were all he was about.
I guess if I listened to Pence I’d be draining my glass for sure.
hmmm; ‘The one thing that was good about the Report, it seems to me, was the focus it gave to early aspects of the Assange period which dealt with far more serious issues than are currently being hyped concerning Hillary computers and such.’
i’m likely missing something but i reckon i’ll need to bring the (silenced) report as my next diary. ay yi yi pence, and i brought some of his tweets over yonder, but w/ only your sole comment here, i’d failed to bring them.
there’s a bit of grim humor in listening to such a craven piece of walking dung beetle poop as Mark Warner cheer his own virtue & the righteousness of the law in order to prosecute, illegally, someone exposing the limitless criminality of the US bourgeoisie. well done, good & faithful servant. having had to endure this well-coiffed over-educated turd from Langley while living in Virginia for far too long….”…if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats…” Melville. here’s lookin’ at you Markie.
wish you could be the pied piper, j. the whole list of libtards is full of abominables. i got to wonder who they asked to sign, but chose not to.
nice to see you, i’ll look at your other comment in the mornin’. time for me to shut down, and i won’t bring the great mandela, i promise. sleep well.
John Roberts’ bowing to executive power: Supreme Court Gives Any President a Blank Check to Detain American Citizens, Mint Press, June 29
[…]
The way that the Trump administration raises this particular problem is to make a very strong assertion about the non-justiciability of the issue. What they effectively say is that no court has the ability to second-guess the president when he exercises his authority over foreign affairs or national security. This of a piece of the very aggressive arguments made by executive branch lawyers in both the Bush and Obama administrations’ “War on Terror” cases.
Roberts is exceptionally cagey. The way he deals with this argument is by not deciding if he has the power to address the allegedly non-justiciable issues. Essentially, he is allowing this to remain undecided so it can be asserted again in the future. Roberts has left the door open for future assertions of this nature. He essentially allows the administration an emergency exit if there arises a stronger legal challenge in the future by holding in reserve the argument that, regardless of whether or not the opponents of an executive order have a good case, this is not the kind of issue the Supreme Court could address.
In this ruling, the majority opinion authored by Roberts has given the executive branch an instruction manual for surviving constitutional challenges to controversial measures such as indefinite arbitrary detention. First, the president needs to invoke some sort of interest the Supreme Court considers legitimate, like national security or the effective use of executive war powers, for example. As long as the president doesn’t explicitly mention a discriminatory purpose in the order itself, regardless of whether he tweets about it ad nauseam, the Court has shown it will now take the president at his word. Second, the president should connect his power to a grant of authority from Congress.
Ugh. Meant to post this a few posts down… (torturing latin immigrant children: a growth industry)
RIP Toys R Us, we got a new theme song for an America made great again:
I don’t want to wake up
I’m an Eye See Eee kid
they got a million kids like me
in a cage for all to see.
now excuse me while I go throw up all over Geoffrey the giraffe. the people who will trap a child in the soul crushing world of Toys R the US consumerism are the same people herding children into cages. and reintroducing slavery to Libya and elsewhere.
i appreciate the cliffs notes, grayson, esp. as i’d clicked into the OP first, and argggh, so long it is, so i backed out. an awesome executive power over three presidencies, isn’t it? and good on sotomayor. herr Hair says he’ll appoint someone to fill kennedy’s seat on july 9 (iirc). ‘someone brilliant like antonin scalia’ he’d said.
on edit: it’s fine you put it here…, noot many comments anyway. 50 over yonder, that was a good thing in the main. ;-)
they drape themselves in the fig leaves of the law so quickly, don’t they? as long as they don’t say why they disappear someone, Roberts will find it not legally actionable? silentium est consentium, as Roberts well knows. think that ICE will find immediate use for this (non?) ruling? those ICE 40 kids gone missing from NYC social services? just for starters?
and when will any of these virtue warriors, Sanders, Warren, or many another, just up & frickin’ resign from the government already? the way they talk about themselves they are all ready to storm Leningrad to save the children from Vlad “the impaler of Crimea” Putin but they know that resigning in protest will be the death of their careers, the absolute death, not even to be resurrected by employment by the likes of the ACLU. but yeah & amen, even harsh language is too much to be expected. “get out the vote” is about as penetrating a strategy as we can expect from the Sanders’ wing of that chicken ranch.
but we already know this. “The Senate is controlled by a Sith lord!” to quote Count Doodoo from one them awful Lucas death star films. the House, too, Doodoo. the House too.