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Pentagon Papers Attorney: U.S. Prosecution of Julian Assange Would "Criminalize News Gathering"

1,569 views · Published 17 May 2013 · 1:29 · Indexed 1 November 2026

Channel: Democracy Now! · 2013 · News & Politics

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Watch the full interview with James Goodale on Democracy Now! at http://owl.li/l8IRD. Goodale is a leading legal expert on the First Amendment and has just published a new book, "Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles." James Goodale, the was general counsel at The New York Times during the Pentagon Papers crackdown.

JAMES GOODALE: "He's quite right about talking about the threat to journalism with respect to the way Obama is going about prosecuting him. What lawyers like to say is that if in fact the prosecution goes forward, as Julian Assange has said, it criminalizes news gathering, because I talk to you and ask you to give me a secret, or anything, but in fact that anything may be classified; we're all both going to go off to the hoosegow. And, you know, Obama has classified, I think, seven million—in one year, classified seven million documents. Everything is classified. So that would give the government the ability to control all its information on the theory that it's classified. And if anybody asks for it and gets it, they're complicit, and they're going to go to jail. So that criminalizes the process, and it means that the dissemination of information, which is inevitable, out of the classified sources of that information will be stopped. It's very dangerous. That's why I'm — I get excited when I talk about it."

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