In part two of our exclusive interview, Amy Goodman goes inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London to speak with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Assange has been living in the embassy for more than two years under political asylum. He faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States, where a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing a trove of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as State Department cables. Assange responds to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent comments that National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden should return home to face trial. “It’s the advice of all our lawyers that he should not return to the United States. He’d be extremely foolish to do so,” Assange says. “It’s not possible to have a fair trial, because the U.S. government has a precedent of applying state secret privilege to prevent the defense from using material that is classified in their favor.”
Click here to watch part one of this interview.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the second part of ourDemocracy Now! TV/radio broadcast exclusive. We went inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London last weekend to interview WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange. He has just entered his third year inside the embassy, where he has political asylum. Assange faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. Here in the U.S., a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing a trove of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as State Department cables. In Sweden, he’s wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed. Let’s go to that interview.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where Julian Assange has actually lived for more than two years. He has political asylum in Ecuador but can’t make it there because he is concerned if he steps outside to get on a plane to Ecuador, the British government will arrest him and extradite him to Sweden. And he’s concerned, in Sweden, he would be extradited to the United States to face charges around his organization, WikiLeaks, which he publishes.
So, Julian, I’d like you to respond to Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, could be running for president, her comments on Edward Snowden. She was interviewed byThe Guardian, which first released the revelations based on the documents of Edward Snowden. And if you could just hit the first comment.
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I would say, first of all, that Edward Snowden broke our laws, and that cannot be ignored or brushed aside.
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