Tulsi Gabbard: I'd Drop Charges Against Julian Assange and Edward Snowden | Joe Rogan

What is your take on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange? What happened with his arrest and all this stuff that just went down, I think poses a great threat to our freedom of the press and to our freedom of speech. We look at what happened under the previous administration, under Obama. They were trying to find ways to go after Assange and WikiLeaks, but ultimately they chose not to seek to extradite him or charge him because they recognized what a slippery slope that begins when you have a government in a position to levy criminal charges and consequences against someone who's publishing information or saying things that the government doesn't want you to say. The government doesn't want you to share. The fact that the Trump administration has chosen to ignore that fact, to ignore how important it is that we uphold our freedoms, the freedom of the press and freedom of speech and go after him, it has a very chilling effect on both journalists and publishers. You can look to both those in the traditional media, but also those in new media and also on every one of us as Americans. It was a warning call saying, look what happened to this guy. It could happen to you. It could happen to any one of us. It's very transparent too because there's no real compelling crime for them to be going after him the way they are. There's not one thing that stands out and the latest one is hacking. It's not even hacking. It's conspiracy, conspiracy charges. It doesn't make any sense that they would spend that much time going after that guy for those charges. That's obvious and very transparent that there's another ulterior motive. That ulterior motive is that he leaked a bunch of things that were incredibly embarrassing. That's right. Not only that, but I think it was Secretary Pompeo, Secretary of State, who said that they wanted to designate WikiLeaks and Assange as a foreign intelligence agency. Once you do that, then you're talking about a whole different category. They're pushing out information once again that the government didn't want pushed out. If the government then says, oh, well, now we're going to reclassify you as a foreign intelligence agency, then there's a whole different set of rules of engagement that apply there. Then you're no longer protected under the freedoms that we hold dear, the freedom of the press. It's just such a disgusting way of framing things. You know he's not a foreign intelligence agent. He's a guy that got information and released it to the general public that the government wanted to keep private. It's really that simple. Edward Snowden. Yeah. Similar situation. Similar situation. Similar situation. I don't think we ... I remember the very day that I woke up in DC, looked at my phone, started looking through the headlines and saw those headlines about how the NSA was mass surveilling all of us in collecting our phone records, collecting our cell phone records and Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile. I was shocked. That was something that Snowden uncovered and released, something that I don't know that even has members of Congress who would have been aware of. Now that we were aware of it, then hey, we can take action to close those loopholes, to change those policies, to protect our civil liberties, to protect our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights as Americans. Was the NSA going to disclose that information voluntarily on their own? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No, we would have had no idea. No. We would have suspicions, but then again, we'd have tinfoil hats on. There was a gentleman who left the NSA very early on, Hill, was that his last name? He was one of the first ones to discuss this. This was post-9-11 when they first started doing it, but Snowden was the guy that really made it abundantly clear to everybody that not only are they doing that, but they're also lying about it. Even Obama was talking, oh, we're just collecting metadata, metadata. No, you're not. Reading messages. You could do anything. Exactly. It was not an accurate assessment of what was going on. No. It was outrageous to people. You had, I think he was the director of the Department of National Intelligence at that time, James Clapper, who sat before a committee in the United States Senate and blatantly lied. He was asked very directly, are you collecting this information? He said no. Are you collecting this information on American citizens? He said no. He's somebody who you see on TV almost every day as an expert in this country without any consequence lying to the American people. I think that if you polled the American people and you asked us to vote on it, I think it would be a gigantic landslide victory for Edward Snowden to be exonerated and brought back to the United States. They've got this guy, he's in Russia now hiding. It's crazy that he lives over there and he can't leave. Even if he does come over here, they're immediately going to lock him up. What would you do as president? One thing that I think, I want to answer your question, but one thing that I think speaks to the dangerous nature of this culture that we're living in now. The Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had done an interview on, I don't know, one of the major networks. I think he was talking about Trump when he said, be careful. You don't want to challenge the intelligence agencies. Basically putting out that threat. I don't know if you can pull that exact quote up, but I was shocked when I heard him say that because it basically makes out that these intelligence agencies are their own separate branch of government and that if any one of us as Americans or elected leaders in this country dares to challenge or exercise oversight over them, then we will suffer the consequences. As president, I would change that culture of leadership. That leadership starts at the top. When you have people in positions of leadership who continue to perpetuate that culture of unaccountability, of complete disrespect and disregard for the Constitution, of not understanding that yes, we need to keep our country safe, we also need to protect our constitutional rights. This is not a choice between the two, which is so often how it's framed. Well, if you want to protect us against terrorists, you've got to give up all of your rights as Americans and your civil liberties and your privacy and just let these intelligence agencies run free and run roughshod over us. That's the kind of change in leadership that I'll bring. There's a whole host of policies that we can look at. For example, with the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act is up for reauthorization in Congress this year. There have been different sections of it that we have worked to try to change and reform to make it so that agencies like the NSA cannot collect our private information as Americans without a warrant, but there is far more that has to be done to undo the damage that we've already seen, the abuse of our rights and privacies that we've already seen. Did you ever listen to that Kennedy speech about secret societies? Kennedy had a fantastic speech before he was assassinated where he was discussing this very thing. He apparently had notions of disbanding the CIA. He was very concerned with the power of people like J. Edgar Hoover. This was all happening while he was president and he felt like there were people that were involved in these secret societies and these secret meetings and that there was a lot of conspiracy going on. He thought that the very idea was repugnant. It's a fantastic speech. Interesting. It's called the President and the Press is what it's like, it's got a title. It's a fantastic speech. I'll check it out. This has always been the real concern that people have that when you give someone the ability to surveil the general population, they're going to use some of that information to aid in their allies and to work against their enemies. That is a valid concern. This is what unfortunately we've already seen. This is what has been revealed by some of that information that was released by Snowden and how, for example, the FISA court as we have it now is a secret court that has been abused for that purpose, allowing for that surveillance of Americans violating our civil liberties and privacy. That's something that we've got to fix that whole FISA court from top to bottom and how the different judges are appointed. It's basically a secret court that was appointed, I believe, or created back in the 70s with the initial objective of providing oversight over the executive branch mass surveillance that was happening at that time or illegal surveillance that was happening at that time. Unfortunately, especially since 9-11, now you have this FISA court that is both used to approve surveillance and surveillance programs on foreign targets, but also on Americans as well. One of the many problems with this is it's a secret court where you have a judge and you have someone representing the government, whether it be one of the intel agencies or the DOD or whatever, coming before this court and making their case to try to get this warrant approved by the judge. There is no advocate there for the people. There is no civil liberties or privacy advocate there. It's a one-sided conversation. The information being provided by the government is the only information that's being given to the judge. This is one of the big problems there. We've seen over decades now, and especially since after 9-11, that there have been very, very, very few applications for these surveillance warrants that have been rejected by the judges. A rubber stamping of these applications for warrants is really what appears to be happening. There's a few different ways that we're looking at trying to fix this. There are some who are arguing to take away the FISA court completely. One of the concerns about that is that if we do that, then there has to be some other entity in place to exercise oversight over the executive branch and not allow them to conduct this surveillance willy-nilly as they please. It's figuring out exactly what are the best reforms to meet that objective of providing that oversight, making it so that those warrants are given as needed, and making sure that all the information is being presented. Again, that FISA court was initially put in place to get warrants to conduct surveillance on foreign targets, not Americans. That's been one of the biggest problems here with a lot of this mass surveillance is it's collecting our information as Americans illegally and unconstitutionally because you can't do that unless you go through this process and you actually get a warrant based on evidence. What would you do about Julian Assange? What would you do about Edward Snowden? As far as undoing, dropping the charges. If you're president of the world right now, what do you do? Dropping the charges. You drop the charges, but they're still going after him for something from Sweden in Julian Assange's case. Edward Snowden would be the only one that you would be able to ... Right, because unless you would influence ... Well, the charges that the Trump administration is ... Putting on Julian Assange. Right, exactly. There's that, but ... It remains to be seen whether or not they will push for extradition. There's another charge that was, I think it was today, Sweden decided to go after him again for some sexual thing that they had decided to go after many, many years ago. Edward Snowden, what he's doing right now is essentially living day to day, holed up in Russia, in hiding. The charges against him stem from, again, this illegal operation that he ... In many ways he's very patriotic. He let us know, and at great cost. You would give him pardon. Yeah. I think address ... We've got to address why he did the things the way that he did them. You hear the same thing from Chelsea Manning, how there is not an actual channel for whistleblowers like them to bring forward information that exposes egregious abuses of our constitutional rights and liberties, period. There was not a channel for that to happen in a real way, and that's why they ended up taking the path that they did, and suffering the consequences.