Greenwald on Trump indictment: ‘Every day far more serious leaks happen’ and ‘no one cares’
Glenn Greenwald said Monday that despite the Justice Department bringing federal charges against former President Donald Trump for (allegedly) mishandling classified documents, government officials ‘play with classified information, top secret documents, every single day this way.’
Greenwald made his remarks in an interview with Sirius/XM’s Megyn Kelly.
“I don’t know if you saw, you probably did see this weekend, Megyn, that very short lived coup in Russia,” Greenwald told the host, referring to what was reported as an attempted insurrection against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government.
But Greenwald didn’t want to discuss what happened in Russia - he wanted to point out how anyone would know in the first place
And from what sources?
“All week long in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times,” he said. “There are all kinds of reports about how US intelligence agencies knew about what was happening, about what they knew in advance.”
“Every single instance where you see an article like that is an instance of somebody leaking top secret information to newspapers in a way that is unauthorized and therefore illegal under the law,” Greenwald said.
“No one cares,” he added. “No one is interested in finding the source of this. These people play with classified information, top secret documents, every single day this way.”
https://twitter.com/a_newsman/status/1673507783583363072
Greenwald has more experience than most journalists on this issue. When Wikileaks published classified documents in 2006 that revealed a fuller - and uglier - side to U.S. foreign policy, founder Julian Assange became a top enemy of the Obama administration. To this day, Greenwald has been integral in covering the Wikileaks controversy and Assange’s many challenges. Assange remains in the UK, where he is in poor health, but is still wanted by the US government.
In 2013, when Edward Snowden shared classified documents with Greenwald indicating that the U.S. government was illegally spying on Americans, the whistleblower was hounded by the Obama administration, particularly then Vice President Joe Biden, before finally finding exile in Russia.
Both Assange and Snowden have both been charged under the Espionage Act.
So has Donald Trump. In his interview with Kelly, Greenwald compared the widespread carelessness about secret documents in other sectors to what he calls the feigned concern over the classified documents reportedly in Trump’s possession.
“Now you have Donald Trump, who isn’t accused of leaking this information to anybody as part of the indictment,” he said. “He was just accused of taking it even though he could’ve declassified it had he wanted to. I guess now the allegation is he just failed to do so.”
“And all the same people who every day spill top secret information on the pages of the newspapers, or who, inside of government, pass it to reporters, are feigning this indignation over how Donald Trump treated our secret classified documents by keeping it recklessly, or negligently, inside Mar-a-Lago, to the point that he’s being indicted - when every day, far more serious leaks happen and they don’t even charge the person at all,” Greenwald insisted.
“They don’t even care to pretend that they’re angry about it,” he added.
He said the DOJ has become a political weapon the Biden administration is deploying against Trump.
“This is how you see the politicization of the Justice Department on the other end,” he said, “where they’re clearly abusing the justice system.
Greenwald finished, “They want to charge Donald Trump.”
Various Republicans have criticized the “weaponization” of law enforcement in the wake of the Trump charges.
On Monday, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy floated the idea of impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland for allegedly weaponizing the Justice Department in how the agency has handled questions about possible tax crimes committed by President Joe Biden’s controversial son, Hunter Biden.
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