How Cassandra Fairbanks Exposed Trump's Political Extradition and Persecution of Julian Assange
The hell raising shit-storm Cassandra Fairbanks unleashed on the Empire made its way into the public eye when the ardent Assange supporter tweeted out an audio recording captioned "The phone call" on Feb. 25th, essentially proving that Trump has personally ordered Grenell, who was then the US ambassador to Germany, to make a deal with Ecuador so that Assange could be taken from the Embassy with their permission. Brett McDonald would describe the phone call as "Arthur Schwartz begging for his life..."
A targeted citizen journalist who is seeking asylum after exposing corruption within the intelligence community, Suzie Dawson, who helped cofound #Unity4J, highlighted the importance of this event, tweeting out:
I've been biting my tongue on this so long but I can't hold back any longer.@CassandraRules is a brave woman, a good journo, and she may well be what saves Julian Assange's life.
Suzie Dawson (@Suzi3D) February 25, 2020
This means a LOT of people are going to be eating a slice of humble pie.https://t.co/7u6s91ryJe
Before getting into the phone call, some important contextual background information should be given so the reader does not have to reverse engineer the happening.
The day before Cassandra uploaded the phone call's audio to twitter, Politico had published an article that read, "Assange fight draws in Trump's new intel chief" with the subtitle reading "Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder plan to use newly obtained recordings and screenshots to argue that Assange's prosecution is political in nature".
These recordings and screenshots mentioned belong to Cassandra Fairbanks who had not publicly released them at the time. Cassandra had distributed the materials with some people "in case anything happened to" her, including Property of the People, who then leaked them to Politico. Politico would report:
Attorneys for Julian Assange ... plan to introduce evidence in the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition hearing involving President Donald Trump’s new intel chief Richard Grenell.
Gareth Peirce, a lawyer representing Assange in his extradition proceedings in London, plans to argue this week that the process to try to extradite her client was abused from early on. Representatives for Assange’s defense team say they expect to introduce recordings and screenshots of communications of a close Grenell associate [Arthur Schwartz], including a secondhand claim that Grenell was acting on the president’s orders.
Politico would acknowledge that "Grenell’s sudden embroilment in Assange’s extradition fight comes at an inconvenient time" as Grenell, one of Trump's closest "loyalists", has faced much partisan criticism over his recent appointment by Trump as the acting director of national intelligence.
Politico's article would also note that revelations from Cassandra's phone call "threatens to spotlight his close relationship with President Trump, feeding the widespread perception that the president is politicizing intelligence work for partisan ends."
At the heart of the Assange team’s argument is an ABC News report from last April alleging that, while serving as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Grenell told Assange’s Ecuadorean hosts that the U.S. government would not pursue the death penalty for Assange if Ecuador allowed British officials to enter its embassy in London and arrest him.
This ABC news report is the subject of the phone call between Cassandra and Schwart'z phone call, which took place in September of 2019. Schwartz, a "fixer" for Donald Jr. , called Cassandra over a deleted tweet from September 10th , because Cassandra had tweeted information from that ABC news report. The information she propagated was the fact that Richard Grenell, who was serving as a US ambassador to Germany at the time, “was the one who worked out the deal for Julian Assange’s arrest.”
Assange’s legal team will claim that Grenell’s role was more extensive than previously known, and that it corrupted the extradition process early on. The suggestion will be that the U.S. was so desperate to get Assange in its custody that American officials, via Grenell, agreed in advance to take a particular sentence off the table before even allowing a trial and sentencing to play out.
The WikiLeaks founder’s attorneys are also expected to present evidence that they believe shows Trump explicitly tasked Grenell with making the offer, thereby politicizing the process. One of Assange’s lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald, hinted at this argument in his opening statement on Monday, when he said that Assange’s prosecution was “not motivated by genuine concerns for criminal justice but politics.
These remarks are relying on information from the leaked calls and screenshots by Cassandra. Being that Fairbanks had content from her recordings and screenshots already published by Politico, she would tweet the Politico-featured phone call's audio to the public which was followed with a tweet that would read:
I shared the calls (there’s more than this one) and timeline of events with some people in case anything happened to me because he was so frantic. They have been sharing it all over the place and leaking it against my requests. So, figured I’ll do it myself.
Cassandra Fairbanks 🕊⏳ (@CassandraRules) February 25, 2020
Although the written word cannot give justice to the inflection and tones of voice heard in the audio, and listening to the audio on her twitter is advised, here is a rough transcript of the phone call:
Schwartz: You're posting classified information on twitter. You cant do that.
Cassandra: What- I'm not posting classified information.
Schwartz: *incoherent stumbling over words* Yeah, that's classified, you can't do that.
Cassandra: ABC News already reported it, that's where I saw it.
Schwartz: Yeah, but, yeah but that is wrong. You are - You are posting things that are classified *inaudible* things that have not been reported.
Cassandra: That was reported by ABC news.
Schwartz *Angrily* : Yeah, I know what was reported, I see what you are tweeting. What you are tweeting is not what was reported. Someone is going to go to jail. You need to stop this.
Cassandra: Yeah, Julian is in jail right now, because of this... Well, I mean, I'll delete my tweet only because you are saying you will get in trouble -
Schwartz interrupts: - I don't want to go to jail. Please. I'm begging you. -
Cassandra: All right, I will delete it, I was just referring to the ABC news report
Schwartz: Okay, but like, they look at you, they see that we speak, like that's bad.
Cassandra: I mean the reason I -
Schwartz(aggressively) : - He is taking orders from the President
Okay? So you are gonna punish me because he took orders from the president? -
Cassandra: I wasn't punishing you, I was tweeting from an ABC news report.
Schwartz: Ok.
Cassandra: Remember, I called you about it.
Schwartz: I am begging you, I am begging you, please.
Cassandra: Alright. I will delete the tweets.
Schwartz: Thank you .
*Line disconnects*
One of the event's spectators would ask Cassandra to clarify,
So he leaked classified info to you. Freaked out because you tweeted about an ABC report in which he thought was the classified info he had leaked to you?
Do I have that straight?
To which she would reply:
He told me a deal was made to arrest Assange in October 2018. I just put the pieces together — which is what made him freak out. https://t.co/TzrZjV4yNJ
Cassandra Fairbanks 🕊⏳ (@CassandraRules) February 26, 2020
She would also tweet:
It all started because of this interview I did with Julian’s mother.https://t.co/vMAT5cCmmm
Cassandra Fairbanks 🕊⏳ (@CassandraRules) February 26, 2020
Her interview with Mrs. Assange from the eve of Halloween of 2018 that she is referring to would have Mrs. Assange pleading Trump to follow through on his promise to "drain the swamp", urging the president to issue a preemptive pardon. Julian's mother would be quoted to say:
“Both [Assange and Trump] have been ruthlessly smeared and attacked by deep state players in the intelligence agencies, media and entertainment industry. I believe that if President Trump was to give Julian a preemptive pardon and save his life from the brutal political persecution and torture that he has endured for years at the hands of corrupt deep state ‘swamp’ elites, it would send a clear message to all that he is man of his word, a courageous leader who stands up for the American Constitution — a man worthy of the office of President.”
The implication Cassandra was making when she said it began with that interview was that when Fairbanks had started to hold Trump accountable to his rhetoric, expecting him to follow through on his promises to "drain the swamp" and help fight "the deep state" after supporting him as the anti-establishment candidate, she began to be a thorn in the Trump administration. God forbid someone expect the president to follow through on the anti-establishment platform they campaigned on.
Months after her interview with Mrs. Assange, she would take shots at Trump in a tweet with a Pro-Assange graphic that read:
Free Julian Assange. He’s spent his life fighting the same deep state you claim to stand against (but keep hiring) pic.twitter.com/oYJQeAdZ6L
Cassandra Fairbanks 🕊⏳ (@CassandraRules) May 24, 2019
Waiting until her child went to bed, Fairbanks would follow up with a periscope to explain what happened - although it had to be split into two streams because someone signal called her, bypassing do not disturb and interrupting the stream, as acknowledged in the beginning of the 2nd video.
The first periscope began, "Hi friends, and Feds from various different intelligence agencies. I just wanted to explain that phone call, the context behind it..."
She would then move on to discussing the aforementioned interview Cassandra had conducted with Assange's mother on October 30th, 2018, which gave Mrs. Assange a platform to call for a pardon for her son. Fairbanks then proceeded to explain that at the time that she was in a group chat with "a whole bunch of people from the [Trump] campaign, and other journalists, social media influencers."
"Ambassador Rick Grenell was in it, and Arthur Schwartz, who works with people like Don [Trump] Junior, Rick Grenell, Lee Zeldin I think, he works with a bunch of people. Well connected guy. And I had always been friendly with him until this point. So, a little bit after I published this article, I posted it in the DM group hoping that somebody would see it and maybe they would feel bad or be moved to share it with people who can make a difference. It was pretty innocuous, people share stuff in this group all the time. They share articles, they share ideas, it just didn't seem like a big deal.
So I sent it to the group and about 10 minutes later, I got this insane phone call. And it was Arthur Schwartz and he was completely *sighs* erratic. And he was saying that I needed to stop trying, and that a deal had already been made to arrest Julian, that they were going to go into the embassy to get him. And he was saying that people, that I was involved with the Trump kind of social world and that I worked for a pro-Trump outlet and all all this stuff and that people had to understand that I had been supporting Wikileaks before I knew that Julian was a "bad guy" but that they wouldn't be very understanding when all these bad things came out about him. He was saying that Julian got people killed, that people were tortured.
By this point she is sounding audibly distressed, with a shaky voice, as recollecting the phone call had clearly brought some fear with it. But Cassandra is brave, and bravery is not the absence of fear - it is overcoming of fear. Fairbanks would continue.
He brought up my child who was 8 at the time, he was talking about somebody who got tortured and he was like, "How would you feel if your daughter got tortured. How old is your daughter? How would you feel about this?" - And I took it as very threatening, the whole thing.
As Fairbanks reaffirms later in the second video, this perceived threat is why she began recording future calls.
He was threatening my reputation - some of it I perceived as even more sinister than that. And so, I was pretty shaken up by it. He was just repeating that a deal had already been made, and that there was nothing I could do, and that even Grenell and Don Jr. had supported Wikileaks before they knew that they got people killed. He claimed that there were photos of people who were killed. And as we saw - the prosecution in the extradition case said that nobody was killed by this, at least that they know of. The Pentagon also testified during the Manning trial that nobody got killed.
And so I brought this up, "but they said nobody was killed" and he was like "Well, you know its classified, and everybody's changed their minds now that they know. And you're gonna be a pretty bad guy if you knew that he got American patriots killed and you are still supporting him." And he was saying all these crazy things, right.
So, in January I went and visited Julian in the Ecuadorian embassy. And I told him these things and we used notes and we used radio that had the white noise - like it was tuned to a station that didn't come in so that there would be white noise and muffle our voices because obviously the whole place was surveilled. *Takes deep breath*
And I was just trying to be like, you know, "why do these people say this, like why are they saying that you got people killed, like this is crazy" and we were just talking about it and that was pretty much that. I said that they told me that they were going to go into the embassy. He had told me it wasn't going to be before Christmas I think, but he didn't give me a real time frame. So that was that...
The thing is during that phone call he kept warning me, he kept being like "What are people going to think of you. How is this going to look. They would understand if you stop supporting him now". So I took it as him trying to get me to stop writing positive stories about Wikileaks and to stop supporting Julian. And that he was kind of trying to intimidate me out of it and kind of implied that I would be in better graces with the people in the like inner circle if I stopped. Which obviously I didn't do.
Cassandra (appropriately) supported Bernie during the 2016 nomination process before understandably endorsing Trump when it came down to Clinton™ V. Trump. Bernie was the anti-establishment candidate, but with him out of the race, it was clearly Trump. As she put it, "Trump's mean words are insignificant compared to Clinton's deadly actions." Although she did consider voting for Jill Stein, but decided Stein was to far out there to gather mass appeal.
Not only did Trump have a clean record at the time when it came to warmongering and helping overthrow foreign governments, but he was anti-neoliberal free trade, with an economic platform that would encourage domestic production rather than allowing the continuity of the trend of outsourcing domestic manufacturing. Both foreign policy and trade policy were also important to her (again, rightfully so). Say what you will about Cassandra, but her choosing Assange over remaining in good graces with the President of the United State's inner circle shows that she is a woman who stands by her convictions. Judging by her actions, truth means more to her than political connections - after all, she is a journalist, not a politician. She would continue
I also said that going into a foreign nation's embassy would be an act of war, and he said that, "Not if they let us". And he just kept saying a deal had already been made. And I didn't know at this point that Grenell had made a deal with Ecuador in October, the same month this happened. So I was just like, "Why does Arthur know this, what is he talking about".
She would explain how she found this weird so she had brought it up to Julian during her visit, naturally. She would explain that roughly two weeks before Julian's arrest, Wikileaks had begun to "sound the alarm that they were going to be kicked out, that the government was getting sick of them"
On March 27th, I believe, I visited Julian in the embassy again, but the Ecuadorian government locked me in a room and they wouldn't let Julian come in. They said he couldn't come in unless he went through a full body search, and that our meeting had to be in this conference room that was filled with bugs and video cameras. We didn't want to speak in there because he wanted to tell me things privately. And he wanted to bring that radio in again, to muffle our voices...
They wanted to do this full-body search, they didn't want the radio to come in, instead they locked me in a room for almost the entire visit. I got to speak to him for eight minutes because they still kicked me out after the allotted two hours. And it was just a nightmare. Julian got into a big screaming match with the ambassador, he was saying that he was acting as an agent of the US government. I wrote about it...
So when I got back, since Arthur *video distortion had seen *distortion* whats going on *distortion* to the white house and everything, I messaged him "Do you know why they are doing this to me" because they had never done this any visitor of Julian Assange, ever before this.* ... on March 29th, he called me and he told me that he knew I had told Assange, and that there was a State department investigation into who leaked me that information.
I had told Julian this in person, *nervous laugh* so obviously people had access to my visit with him, and they were talking about it. He said he understood why I did it, but that because I told him, I couldn't be trusted. And the call ended - and I thought that was that. But I recorded that call and I will play that right now, and then I will finish this story.
She proceeds to navigate to her voice recording app on her computer where she recorded the call to show the audience that the audio was clearly not edited, and proceeds to play it.
Schwartz: "Okay, uh, listen I told you some things that I told you were not to be repeated to anyone, and you repeated it to him, okay? I get that it's emotional for you or whatever, but I can't tell you anything else. I can't trust you. Not that I can't trust you as a person. it's just too emotional for you, so I can't tell you anything.
Cassandra: I mean I didn't tell him much , I just told him that *inaudible Cross-talk\ the Chelsea stuff* -
Schwartz: - I know, I know, I know, but there is like an investigation now with people at State because of that.
Cassandra would then pause the video explain how she forgot to mention that Schwartz had told her that "They weren't going to go after Julian for the DNC stuff, or for Vault 7, and that it was going to be the Manning release... And I did tell Chelsea that I thought they were going to go after her, and I told Julian in that meeting obviously, what I had heard. Because it was weird." She would then resume the video:
Cassandra: Fuck, I'm sorry.
Schwartz: Very good, dear, life-long friends of mine are under a microscope now. So, I can't talk to you about this.
Cassandra: Well I'm sorry, I only told him the stuff about -
Schwartz: - Listen, I totally get it. I'm not mad, because I think you are doing it, what you did, what you said, whatever it was - you did it with a good heart, and good intentions, so I'll never blame anyone or hold something against them when they do something for the right reasons, but I gotta protect my guys.
Cassandra: Yeah I'm sorry
Schwartz: No it's okay, I get it, I get it, you were being a good person. You are a good person.
She then pauses the video to say, "I also wanna note that his tone changes significantly in later calls so I am happy that I recorded this even though he seems nice here."She then resumes the call for the rest of the first video which can be found here. The stream would get interrupted before the call is finished.
After the call was finished in the 2nd video, Cassandra would put it into context:
Ok so there was that ... it was friendly, like normal, it was much different than the October call and so I was like alright, whatever, didn't think much of it, at the time.
So, On April 11th, Julian was arrested. I was really upset, obviously. I again asked Arthur if he knew anything. He responded with a barrage of text messages about how Julian Assange deserves a lethal injection, how both him and Manning should die in prison, how I wasn't gonna feel bad anymore when all this stuff comes out that he knew which he told me got people killed.
And this is not what the government has said. Either in the trial, or previously, during the Manning trial. But he just adamantly kept saying he got people killed, he deserves a lethal injection, all this stuff... completely different to what he was saying before when he was like "You know I know it's fine he didn't hurt people on purpose" and then I had pointed out that, you know what I'll just keep going *glancing at her notes*
She presumably was going to say she pointed out that there was no evidence what so ever of Wikileaks causing harm from the Manning release, as admitted by the Pentagon.
So soon after that, ABC news reported that Grenell had been involved in the deal to arrest Julian.
Continuing bravely with a shaky voice at times, she would describe how she put the puzzle pieces together:
Back in October ... I got the first call from the person who works for Grenell [Schwartz]...I saw... a line way down in this ABC article, and nobody had really mentioned it. I was like, "Isn't that some shit", because he called me in October and told me all this stuff, and it turns out it was fucking Grenell - who was in the group chat and who Arthur [Schwartz] works for - who made the deal in the first place.
So obviously like this makes sense now. So I sent a screenshot of the report to Arthur and I was like, "Is this how you knew everything that you told me" and he sent like a shrug emoji. Then he sent me another barrage of messages about how Julian deserves the death penalty, how everyone involved with Wikileaks deserves the death penalty.
I noted that the article said that Grenell only got a verbal agreement that there wouldn't be a death penalty, because the UN has been warning that the US might be doing a "bait and switch" and tell him that he's not going to get the death penalty, and then add more charges when they have him here. And Arthur sent another shrug emoji and just continued ranting about how Julian deserves the death penalty.
So at this point, I am boggled as to why the German ambassador is even involved in the first place in making a negotiation between Ecuador and the US and the UK. And so I tweeted it, I was like "why is the German ambassador involved in this deal it doesn't make any sense". Grenell then contacted my employer and asked them to take it down and was being weird about it. And I didn't, I refused to take it down.
So fast forward to September 10th, President Trump announced he had fired his national security adviser, John Bolton. I was celebrating ... But then, Grenell's name was being floated everywhere to take over the position, including by people who supported Wikileaks...and I was like "what the fuck guys, NO". And so I tweeted again that Grenell was involved in Julian Assange's arrest and that like [he] kind of went after my job for tweeting about it even though it was publicly reported about by ABC news and I just happened to highlight it a little bit more.
So within hours, I get another phone call from Arthur, which is the one you guys have heard, this time he was frantic, he was ranting and raving about how he could go to jail, how I was tweeting classified information, and he said that Grenell was acting under direct orders of president Trump to secure a deal to arrest Assange. Now whether that means he gave them an IMF loan - which is what alot of people think - or he had just promised the death penalty would be off the table, I don't know. But I do know that after the audio and my timeline leaked to politico, she [Politico's Bertrand] reached out to the ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and within minutes, Arthur had already heard about it and was threatening to sue me. She hadn't even reached out to Arthur yet, so obviously he is getting information and it seems to always be correct.
She would go on to play the initial recording, straight from the voice recorder in front of the phone camera to prove that it wasn't doctored as well, as people were accusing her of editing it. But before doing doing so she would say
I just want to also note that people are saying I cooked up this scheme with Julian but I haven't talked to Julian since he went to prison. I wrote him a letter but I don't think he even got it because the prison told me I could include international postage stamps so he could write back, but then I later found out that you can't include stamps. So I don't even think he got my letters... and they weren't about Grenell or anything.... This was an unsolicited phone call I couldn't have possible have orchestrated. The only reason I was recording him is because that phone call in October was threatening.
*Voice starts to shake*
"If you are going to bring up my daughter in the same sentence as torture, I am gonna record your calls from then on."
She would then play the initial call with Schwartz begging for his life, which was transcribed first in this article. After concluding its playback, she would say:
As you can see the date on there is Sept. 10th, Julian was in prison I had not talked to him and he called me. All I had done was tweeted out was like "Don't make this guy in charge of the NSA because he worked out the deal to arrest Assange" and I was offended that my friends were supporting him. So, that's all I did...I could not have possible orchestrated this. Um, yeah, so I guess that's all...Sorry that the stream got chopped in half, I'm pretty sure that was on purpose because it was someone who had been saying that they were gonna release them[the phone call's and screenshots] even though I asked him not to..so that's all.. Bye.
Following the stream, a twitter user would ask Fairbanks if she is scared. She would answer , "Of course I am"
Craig Murray, a human rights activist as well as a historian and former British ambassador who acquired one of the 16 seats open to members of the public in Julian's case, has been blogging about the extradition case. On the first day, he would report that
International jurisprudence had accepted for a century or more that you did not extradite political offenders. No political extradition was in the European Convention on Extradition, the Model United Nations Extradition Treaty and the Interpol Convention on Extradition. It was in every single one of the United States’ extradition treaties with other countries, and had been for over a century, at the insistence of the United States. For both the UK and US Governments to say it did not apply was astonishing and would set a terrible precedent that would endanger dissidents and potential political prisoners from China, Russia and regimes all over the world who had escaped to third countries.
Fitzgerald stated that all major authorities agreed there were two types of political offence. The pure political offence and the relative political offence ... The overriding accusation that Assange was seeking to harm the political and military interests of the United States was in the very definition of a political offence in all the authorities.
America needs to realize that our democratic process relies on the Freedom of Press - Citizens cannot make informed decisions in the polling booth if the state gets to decide what media is allowed to print and publish about the government. Assange's extradition case is a giant leap towards an unopposed state-run media, in which information that makes the ruling regime look bad is not allowed to be published, a system where voters not allowed to be informed.
Wouldn't you like to know if your taxes were funding war-crimes and regime-change operations motivated by corporate interests? Cognitive dissonance is the only reason one could desire to be shielded from the reality of this. But Democracy can not afford forced cognitive dissonance. Truth can not afford the government's allowed interpretation of it, it cannot afford censorship. Democracy cannot survive without truth. Democracy cannot survive without political dissidents.
Cassandra's recordings may very well save Assange's life, and even our very democracy.
I often trip on how @CassandraRules is this cute, fragile-looking Bambi-eyed insomniac whose voice sounds like she's on the verge of tears and all the lefties scorn, but she routinely launches these massive, hydrogen bomb haymakers right at the jaw of the empire like no one else. https://t.co/4ATbxkTU4I
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) February 26, 2020
DISCLOSURE NOTE: This reporter worked with Cassandra Fairbanks at @WeAreChange in 2016, she was my former editor.
To support my work:
Eth — 0xB0B06D55C2fb4BBf4AA9B86F772807346ff7F181
BTC — bc1qu5jkdcnpj0sng73tqd9x5yrdh6yax8j04ve9l0