I attended a panel discussion at the National Press Club on Monday about the fate of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. The event happened to be at the National Press Club, but it was actually sponsored by the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University.
Hayden, the notorious former director of both the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., who oversaw the C.I.A.’s torture program during part of the George W. Bush administration, was front and center at the event.
The panel, moderated by Sasha Ingber, a national security correspondent in Newsy’s Washington, D.C., bureau, included Assange’s U.S. lawyer Barry Pollack, one of the finest criminal defense attorneys in America; Gabe Rottman, a senior attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; the notorious Mark Zaid, who bills himself as a “whistleblower attorney,” but who has probably done more damage to legitimate whistleblowers than any other person in Washington; and Holden Triplett, a former F.B.I. agent and former director for counterintelligence at President Donald Trump’s National Security Council.
While acknowledging my own biases (Pollack is a genius and Zaid is a scoundrel), the one thing that surprised me was how utterly clueless Holden Triplett was. This is a guy who
— source scheerpost.com | John Kiriakou | Dec 9, 2022