A lawyer for Julian Assange said Wednesday that the WikiLeaks founder plans to claim during his extradition hearing that he was offered a pardon by the Trump administration if he agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 U.S. election campaign.Assange is fighting extradition to the United States on spying charges, and his full court hearing is due to begin next week.At a preliminary hearing, lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said that in August 2017, then-Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.Wikileaks founder Julian Assange leaves in a prison van after appearing at Westminster Magistrates Court for an administrative hearing in London, Jan. 13, 2020.Fitzgerald said a statement from another Assange lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, recounted “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr. Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr. Assange … said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Emails embarrassing for the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked before being published by WikiLeaks in 2016.District Judge Vanessa Baraitser said the evidence was admissible in the extradition case.Assange appeared at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday by video-link from Belmarsh prison, where he is being held as he awaits his extradition hearing.U.S. prosecutors have charged the 48-year-old Australian computer hacker with espionage over WikiLeaks’ hacking of hundreds of thousands of confidential government documents. If found guilty, he faces up to 175 years in jail.He argues he was acting as a journalist entitled to First Amendment protection.Assange spent seven years in Ecuador’s embassy after holing up there in 2012 to avoid questioning in Sweden over unrelated sexual assault allegations.Assange was evicted from the embassy in April 2019 and was arrested by British police for jumping bail in 2012. In November, Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigation because so much time had elapsed.There is no quick end in sight to Assange’s long legal saga. His full extradition hearing is due to begin with a week of legal argument starting Monday. It will resume in May, and a ruling is not expected for several months, with the losing side likely to appeal.
…

In the space of just three years, the Trump administration has helped usher in a major reversal in how the Republican Party views the relationship between the federal government and U.S. businesses. Ten years after the Tea Party movement sent a wave of Republican legislators to Washington with a mandate to disassemble the regulatory state and slash “corporate welfare,” the GOP is backing a president with a dramatically different vision of the relationship between the federal government and the free market.A party wary of government interference in the free market has come to support Trump’s use of punitive tariffs to protect specific U.S. industries, like steel and automobiles. It also backs him on the use of the Export-Import Bank to have the federal government finance competition with China in multiple sectors, and barely batted an eye early this month, when Attorney General William Barr suggested that the U.S. government take an ownership stake in telecommunication firms that compete with Chinese 5G giant Huawei.It’s a stark departure from the years, early in the Barack Obama administration, when the Tea Party movement held an iron grip on Republican policymaking. Tea Party activists and their allies in Congress demanded less government involvement in the economy, not more, and rode to power protesting government efforts to aid struggling financial firms through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and the stimulus package contained in the the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.“The Tea Party narrative about economic statecraft is going out the window in favor of something a lot more Trumpian,” said Todd N. Tucker, a political scientist and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank in New York.“One of the things that shifted in the Republican Party over the last few years is Trump, showing through his successful campaign and winning office, that you can talk about using the government to do things for people to shape the economy, and that that doesn’t have to be antithetical to a traditional pro-business Republican message,” Tucker said.The message from Trump may have been easier for Republican lawmakers to digest because it has usually been tied to economic growth, job creation, and national security — three areas on which the GOP has traditionally focused. But the change is profound nonetheless.“Donald Trump is overseeing the explicit shaping of corporate behavior by the state, which is a stark break from the libertarian framework that has guided U.S. policy since the 1990s,” writes Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and the author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy”.To be sure, the idea that the federal government ought to take a more active role in stimulating the development of certain market sectors did not spring fully-formed from the Trump White House. An influential train of thought in modern economics, championed by outspoken proponents like Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at University College of London and the author of “The Entrepreneurial State”, holds that targeted government investment and subsidies are essential to strong growth.“An entrepreneurial society needs an entrepreneurial state, one that through visionary and strategic public investments, distributed across the innovation chain, can create animal spirits in private businesses,” Mazzucato writes in the Harvard Business Review. “Entrepreneurs then see growth opportunities, and business investment follows.”That line of thinking has strong support among some Republican members of Congress, like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who says targeted government support of certain industries is vital to national security.Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., walks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 3, 2020.In a speech in December at the National Defense University, Rubio made the case for what he referred to as a “21st-century pro-American industrial policy.”“What I am calling for us to do is remember that from World War II to the Space Race and beyond, a capitalist America has always relied on public-private collaboration to further our national security,” he said. “And from the internet to GPS, many of the innovations that have made America a technological superpower originated from national defense-oriented, public-private partnerships.”He added, “This kind of collaboration is not a rejection of capitalism. It is a call to encourage and harness the dynamism of our economy’s most productive private industries to further our national security and ultimately our national economic development.”Rubio, like Trump, focuses much of his attention on China, which unabashedly uses the power of the state to create favorable conditions for its domestic industries, though outright subsidies, low-cost loans, and economic protectionism.In December, the GOP-led Senate approved the passage of a seven-year reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. The Ex-Im Bank, as it is commonly known, helps U.S. manufacturers and service providers sell to clients overseas. Its assistance usually takes the form of loan guarantees that help the buyers of U.S. made goods secure affordable financing for large purchases.This is particularly remarkable, because only five years ago, the Republican-led Congress allowed the Ex-Im Bank’s charter to expire, and came close to shutting it down entirely.“This is one of the most jarring pivots of many pivots we’ve seen in the Republican Party discourse on economic policy,” said the Roosevelt Institute’s Tucker. “Going from seeing this as a form of corporate welfare to seeing it as one of our best tools for tackling the competitive threat from China.”The bill included a provision that directs the bank to use 20% of its resources to the new “Program on China and Transformational Exports.”The new program was created specifically to help U.S. firms that compete with Chinese companies in the markets for artificial intelligence, biotechnology, 5G technology, quantum computing, renewable energy, and more.Stoller, of the Open Markets Institute, argues that the change in the federal government’s stance toward the free market is not something that will end with the Trump administration. Writing in his newsletter, “Big”, which explores the effects of business monopolies, he argues that future administrations may target different areas of the economy, with Democrats perhaps focused on environmental issues while Republicans focus on defense and national security.“Regardless of what happens, the libertarian era is over,” Stoller concludes. “Going forward, U.S. government policymakers are beginning to think of themselves once again as key actors in structuring industrial outcomes.”
…

A week after Attorney General William Barr overturned the Justice Department’s recommendation for a stiff prison sentence for U.S. President Donald Trump’s friend Roger Stone, the public uproar over political meddling in the U.S. system of justice rages.A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Stone will be sentenced Thursday while she decides whether to grant the presidential friend’s request for a new trial. Stone’s motion for a retrial came after Trump accused the jury forewoman in the case of “significant bias.”He was convicted last November of seven counts, including lying to Congress about his role in Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and tampering with a witness.Whether or not Stone is given a new trial, the decision to sentence him rests with Judge Amy Berman Jackson. Trump has railed at Jackson for subjecting another former associate to solitary confinement. The likelihood that she will send Stone to prison has heightened speculation that Trump could respond with a pardon for a friend he thinks has been unjustly prosecuted.FILE – This courtroom sketch shows Roger Stone talking from the witness stand as Judge Amy Berman Jackson listens during a court hearing at the U.S. District Courthouse in Washington, Feb. 21, 2019.Trump has not ruled out pardoning Stone. While he has the power to pardon anyone convicted of a federal crime for any reason other than impeachment, shielding a friend convicted of serious crimes from prison could raise new questions about the independence of the system of justice under his administration.If Trump were to pardon Stone, it would “turn this into a very, very big political event,” said David Axelrod, a former Justice Department prosecutor.”It would further undermine faith in law enforcement in this country and show normal people that if you’re a friend of the president or those in power, you may not be treated the same as average Americans,” Axelrod said.Pardoning powerHans von Spakovsky, another Justice Department official now with the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, said the president’s pardon power is near absolute and that it would not be out of the ordinary for a president to pardon a convicted friend.”He’s got the ability to do that and it can’t be questioned,” von Spakovsky said. “Neither Congress nor anyone else can overrule or somehow prevent a pardon issued by the president.”In 2001, just hours before leaving office, then-President Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive trader Marc Rich in one of the most controversial presidential pardons. Rich’s wife had pledged large sums of money to Clinton’s presidential library.FILE – Denise Rich, left, ex-wife of Marc Rich, presents U.S. President Bill Clinton with a saxophone as first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton applauds at the G&P Foundation gala in New York City, Nov. 30, 2000.”It was very clearly done for political reasons and not because this individual Marc Rich had somehow acknowledged wrongdoing or anything else,” von Spakovsky said.Trump and Stone have been friends for decades. In the 1980s, Stone, a self-described “political trickster” who has an image of the disgraced former President Richard Nixon tattooed on his back, encouraged Trump, then an up-and-coming New York real estate developer, to run for president.Last November, a jury found Stone guilty of obstruction of justice, witness tampering and lying to Congress about his efforts during the 2016 presidential election to obtain stolen emails of Hillary Clinton from the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.The controversy over Stone’s sentencing erupted last week when Barr and other top Justice Department officials overturned four career prosecutors’ recommendation that Stone receive seven to nine years in prison, in line with federal sentencing guidelines.Barr’s decision came shortly after Trump tweeted that the recommended sentence was “a miscarriage of justice” that could not be allowed to move forward, fueling concerns that Barr was carrying out the president’s wishes. The four prosecutors withdrew from the case in protest.Although both Trump and Barr later said they had never discussed the Stone case, the fury did not subside amid new reports that Barr had brought in outside prosecutors to oversee politically sensitive investigations and review a number of criminal cases, including the case of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.In an open letter issued Sunday, more than 2,000 former Justice Department officials called on Barr to resign. A national association of federal judges called an emergency meeting to address the controversy.”It is really a wake-up call to the country to make sure that we’re paying attention to the importance of having an independent Justice Department,” said Derek Cohen, a former senior Justice Department official who signed the letter.Trump’s pardonsWhether Trump will pardon Stone remains uncertain. But Trump has the authority to pardon him. The U.S. Constitution empowers the president “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” A presidential pardon restores a convict’s civil rights, such as the right to vote.Since taking office, Trump has pardoned 18 convicted felons, including several well-connected figures in conservative circles. In 2017, he pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio a month after Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a judge’s order to stop arresting immigrants on suspicion that they were undocumented.FILE – Financier Michael Milken leads a discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., April 30, 2018.On Tuesday, Trump issued full pardons to several prominent individuals, including Michael Milken, a former Wall Street financier, and Bernard Kerik, a former New York City Commissioner and business partner of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.Trump has previously expressed openness to pardoning his former associates, saying it was unfair that former campaign manager Paul Manafort got a stiff sentence while former FBI Director James Comey walked free. More recently, however, Trump batted away questions about an immediate pardon. Last week, he told radio talk show host Geraldo Rivera that he didn’t “want to talk about pardons right now.”The implications of pardoning Stone “are not good for our country and the independence of our judiciary moving forward,” said Cohen, the former Justice official. “In past administrations and past history, if presidents were to go out of their way and abuse or appear to abuse the pardon system to benefit their friends, that would be the sort of thing that one would expect either the voters or the Congress would have a problem with.”
…