In a holiday special, we feature an exclusive Democracy Now! interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In July, Amy Goodman spoke to Assange after he had just entered his third year inside Ecuadors embassy in London, where he has political asylum. He faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. In the United States, 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 is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed. During his interview, Assange talked about his new book, which at that time had not yet been released, titled, \"When Google Met Wikileaks.\" The book was later published in September. <\/p>\n
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. <\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: In this holiday special, we begin with an exclusive Democracy Now! interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In July, I interviewed Julian Assange after he just entered his third year inside Ecuadors Embassy in London, where he has political asylum. He faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. 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, hes wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have ever been filed. <\/p>\n
During his interview, Julian Assange talked about his new book, which had not yet been released when I was in the embassy with him. Its called When Google Met WikiLeaks. The book was published in September. I began by asking Julian Assange to explain the books title. <\/p>\n
JULIAN ASSANGE: The title of the book is When Google Met WikiLeaks. And so, thats the interesting thing: Did Google ever meet WikiLeaks? OK, bothlots of people have heard of both of these institutions, and in some ways they seem very different, in some ways they seem quite similar. Both are involved in, it seems, spreading information around the world, across borders, and also collecting information. <\/p>\n
Eric Schmidt, the now chairman of Google, came to visit me under house arrest, secretly, in 2011. And the <\/p>\n
AMY GOODMAN: When you were under house arrest in Britain? <\/p>\n
JULIAN ASSANGE: When I was under house arrest in the U.K., in fact, rural U.K., quite isolated, our location. And he had a party of three other people that came with him. Now, the reason or pretext for that visit was that Eric Schmidt was working on a book, and the book was called The New Digital Age. In fact that book was eventually published last year. It wasntand is an interesting book to read to sort of understand where Google wants to position itself in terms of the Washington establishment. To sum it up, The New Digital Age, that book by Eric Schmidt, is Googles call to Washington to represent itself as Americas geopolitical visionary. So, as far as geopolitics is concerned and where its going and its integration with technology and the Internet as a global structure, Google has the answers, and Google can explain how to get there. Now, that was the outcome. <\/p>\n
Who else came to the party back in 2011? It wasnt just Eric Schmidt who came to see me. He had a retinue of three people. And those were Jared Cohen, Lisa Shields and Scott Malcomson. Now, I didnt really think about that visit and the other people who came to see me for this interview until much later, until we were publishing State Department cables and, in fact, were going to publish a lot of State Department cables back in September 2011. And for various legal reasons, we needed to document that I had tried to make a telephone call to Hillary Clinton. And so, having been at this game for a while as a journalist, this is how you get to someone whos in an influential position of power. You say, \"Theres a person-to-person call from Julian Assange to Hillary Clinton.\" You get one of your people to do it, say, \"I am Julian Assanges PA,\" and gradually you rise up the levels of the bureaucracy. And so, we did that with Hillary, went in through the front door, and after, you know, some minutes, I got up to her senior legal adviser, who said that she was in a meeting and that they would call back. <\/p>\n
And then we did get a call back, but it wasnt by Hillary Clinton. It wasnt by, at least initially, by anyone from the State Department. It was by Lisa Shields, the person who had come with Eric Schmidt, who was, in fact, at that time, Eric Schmidts girlfriend. So, Lisa Shields was used as a back channel by Hillary Clinton to check that it really was me that was trying to communicate with her. And that back channel turnaround happened in half an hour. So, at that moment, we came to understand that the chairman of Google was in fact very close to the State Department. In fact, he was literally sharing the bed, in some way, with the State Department. <\/p>\n
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