Dr. Jordan Peterson has just posted a fascinating interview with Stella Assange, Julian Assange’s attorney who recently married Assange after a long relationship. I hope you can find time to watch this — it’s almost two hours long — but we’ll summarize and comment. Here’s Part 1.

In 2010, the co-founder of WikiLeaks generated outrage by publishing material leaked by Chelsea Manning, including around 750,000 classified and unclassified-but-sensitive documents. The FBI launched a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, and the Swedish government pursued Assange for alleged sexual misconduct, though charges were never filed. The U.K. government was going to extradite him to Sweden, but Assange jumped bail and took refuge inside the Ecuadorean Embassy, living within those walls until his arrest in 2019. He’s still in prison in London, much of that time in solitary confinement.

He faces possible extradition to the U.S. for prosecution on a variety of espionage-related charges. Conviction on all of this could carry a sentence of 170 years.

‘A Critic, A Dissident, and Also An Innovator’

His wife Stella, who’s maintained privacy until now, explains that Julian is on the autism spectrum (diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome) and, like others similarly affected, “doesn’t score high on the agreeableness scale.” He had “wanted to shed light on unacceptable corruption in times of war,” she said, to be a source of truthful information. “Julian doesn’t like people who are deceitful,” she says. Julian and Stella consider themselves to be “freedom of information champions.”

After so much seclusion and prison, one might think Julian has faced enough punishment and that the legal justification for his sentencing has expired. Stella believes that, in time, he might come to be seen as “the foremost political prisoner of the West.” He is “a critic, a dissident, and also an innovator.” With his background in cybersecurity, she explains, and his understanding of “the architecture” of internet communication, he saw how easily sources could be identified and that “any meaningful journalism would be over.”

Seeking to ‘Have a Much Greater Impact’

So he did something on a large scale, she says, “to have a much greater impact.” He also did it in a collaborative way with other journalists, which was new. She claims he didn’t just publish the material; he carefully redacted information that might hurt individuals or likely cause media outlets to be sued.

Dr. Peterson looks at the argument on both sides for secrecy, weighing Julian’s desire for candidness with the “more limited state interest side,” which says there are circumstances that make strategic limits on complete openness ethically necessary. He sees traditional media — the way it used to function — as better equipped than today’s media to discern this, asking if it’s even possible, when releasing hundreds of thousands of pages, to use due diligence?

Good question, reminiscent of the monster bills Congress passes these days without exercising their due diligence to even read them first. But Stella cites examples of information published by WikiLeaks that was even more redacted than what some news outlets were publishing.

Disregarding the Presumption of Innocence

Dr. Peterson brings up the typical public reaction of, “Someone in so much trouble must have done SOMETHING wrong.” Our vulnerability is that everyone has done “something” wrong. Given that, it means “we can be called out on it arbitrarily and with force when that’s in the interest of people whose interests we’ve opposed.” Also, “people who are inclined to take you out for whatever reason have an easy pathway to doing it.”

Obviously, Dr. Peterson has just described the problem with the weaponization of our “Justice” Department, which now operates according to the Stalinist directive “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Disregarding the presumption of innocence, he says, “allows anyone who is devious or psychopathic to use the entire weight of the legal system as a weapon,” he says, “which is happening so often now that it’s almost beyond comprehension.”

‘A Bit Too Convenient’

As for the sexual misconduct allegations made against Assange by Sweden, it was “a bit too convenient,” he says, “…that these charges emerged just at the time that was most appropriate in some real pragmatic sense for the authorities in the U.K. and the U.S.”

He asks her point-blank, “Why are you on his side?…Why aren’t you just being played?” Why did she choose to complicate her life with this man, to stake her life on him, and why doesn’t she believe the media portrayal of Julian as “a narcissistic troublemaker with a proclivity for sexual impropriety”?

“The man I married wouldn’t do those things,” she says, adding that the man being described is “the exact opposite of who he is.” She started her association with him in a professional capacity stemming from the sexual allegations, she says, reminding Dr. Peterson that he was never charged. Watch the interview for details of the timing of those allegations against him (about 30 minutes in), and you’ll see that it does look fishy, considering WikiLeaks had just published some of the material and that before he even went to Sweden, the Daily Beast reported that the U.S. State Department was telling our allies to “find a way to stop Julian in his tracks…find a way to prosecute him.”

Making Enemies: ‘The CIA Was Livid’

Stella says “new rules” were created for Julian which were then “normalized,” pointing out that in 2010, PayPal, Bank of America, VISA, and MasterCard “for the very first time” created a banking blockade against WikiLeaks, something we increasingly see happening. Dr. Peterson calls this abuse “an unbelievably dire threat.” This “collusion of corporate enterprise and government” is “appallingly fascist.”

He sees Assange as a sort of “test case,” as he dispersed information on a scale never seen before, internationally, and says the danger for him is that “when you’re uncovering everyone’s secrets, you can make an awful lot of enemies, and the probability that at least one set of those enemies is going to successfully take you out, especially given that they’re operating with immense resources, is extremely high.”

In 2013, the Obama administration decided not to charge him over the Manning leaks — at this point, he had already been in the Ecuadorean Embassy for a year — because, they said, there was no way to differentiate between what WikiLeaks had done and what other news outlets had done. Spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “He’s not a hacker; he’s a publisher.” All the evidence relating to Julian had been presented at the Chelsea Manning court martial. (At the end of his term, Obama also commuted Manning’s sentence.)

But Stella describes “a complete obsession by the CIA into Julian and WikiLeaks” after Trump became President. (Editorial aside: Yes, they were obsessed with getting Trump, too.) The U.S. filed the first charges against him in 2018. WikiLeaks had published handbooks containing specifics about the CIA’s exploitation of vulnerabilities in phones and computers in order to hack them, and also about their ability to control cars and create “undetectable assassinations.”

“The CIA was livid,” she says, and that’s when events took a turn and they got much more aggressive. This seems like a good place to leave the interview for now, with Part 2 to follow.

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN.

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.