Media AdvisoryWhen: Friday, April 28 at 10 a.m.
Where: U.S. Department of Justice Building between 9th and 10th Streets NW (Constitution Avenue entrance)
CIA Director Mike Pompeo recently called WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently stated that Julian Assange’s arrest is a “priority” of the Trump administration. This has caused numerous individuals — with differing perspectives on WikiLeaks — to warn of a growing threat to press freedom.
The following will address U.S. government policy toward WikiLeaks and whistleblowers:
* Ann Wright is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, and a 29-year veteran of the Army and Army Reserves. As a U.S. diplomat, Wright served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Krygyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia and helped re-open the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan in 2001. In March of 2003, she resigned in protest over the invasion of Iraq. She is co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
* Jesselyn Radack is National Security and Human Rights Director of WHISPeR — Whistleblower and Source Protection Program — at ExposeFacts. Her clients have included NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. She’s also a whistleblower herself. While at the Justice Department, she disclosed that the FBI committed an ethics violation in their interrogation of John Walker Lindh.
* Ray McGovern, a former Army officer and CIA analyst who prepared the President’s Daily Brief (under the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations), is co-founder of Sam Adams Associates for Integrity (see: samadamsaward.ch), which gave Julian Assange its annual award in 2010. Sam Adams Associates strongly opposes any attempt to deny Julian Assange the protections that are his as a journalist.
Contact at ExposeFacts (a project of the Institute for Public Accuracy):
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, sam [at] accuracy dot org.
