Thread by @ggreenwald

Great and very important report by three @YahooNews journalist on how CIA spent years plotting against WikiLeaks, including with plans to kidnap or even kill Assange. Mike Pompeo was the key driver. He has snowed many MAGA people: he's pure Deep State.

news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-ass…

The reporting also uncovers a CIA plot under Obama -- during the height of the Snowden reporting -- to classify myself, Laura Poitras and Assange as "information brokers" rather than journalists to justify surveillance of us and even imprisonment, rejected by the Obama DOJ.

Note that the theory the CIA at the highest levels invoked to justify spying on and even prosecuting Laura Poitras, myself and Assange -- we're something other than "journalists" -- is the one Brazil used to try to imprison me in 2020 and Biden DOJ is using against Assange now.

Just two weeks before we began our Brazil reporting that freed Lula, I wrote a WashPost op-ed warning that the US indictment against Assange could be used to criminalize any journalist. 8 months later, Brazil used this theory to try to prosecute me:

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…

What I did not know at the time - what I only learned with this great new reporting of @zachsdorfman, @SeanDNaylor & @Isikoff - is that CIA was trying to spy on and imprison all of us during the NSA reporting, and then succeeded with Assange. Please read:

news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-ass…

As I've said before, behavior like this from CIA and now from the Biden DOJ is what *real press freedom attacks* look like.

I've had mean tweets posted about me by many people, including Bolsonaro. I know the difference. I hope some day the US media will learn it, too.

If you're a working journalist who ever does any reporting adversarial to the US intelligence community or ever intends to, the attempt by the Biden DOJ to keep Assange imprisoned is by far the greatest threat to your press freedoms.

Utterly shameful how much silence there is.

The last time the @ACLU tweeted about or even mentioned WikiLeaks or Assange was in 2019, when it warned that the US attempt to imprison him posed a grave danger to press freedom. Not a peep from its account since the Biden DOJ pursued it as aggressively:

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1131687941238083584

The ACLU did quietly sign onto a letter in February, 2021 that virtually every other civil liberties & press freedom group signed that urged the Biden DOJ to stop prosecuting Assange and warned of the dangers to press freedom. But Biden has ignored them:

nytimes.com/2021/02/08/us/…

There was one journalist on television who - both under Trump & Biden - relentlessly advocated for Assange's pardon or release and highlighting what a grave abuse of power it is to keep in imprisoned: Tucker Carlson. He put everyone he could find on:

There's an easy litmus test in the US for knowing whether someone's professed belief in press freedoms is real or just a virtue-signaling branding pretense.

It's whether they say this:

https://twitter.com/FreedomofPress/status/1442103137075175432

We heard in 2013 during the NSA reporting that CIA and NSA were advocating for our arrest, as @YahooNews confirmed today. Clapper & his journalists were publicly threatening it. That's why we stayed away from the US for a year. This is how liberals like @JoshTPM "covered" it.