Daniel Ellsberg on Biden and Whistleblowers

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

In his first press conference as president, Joe Biden decided not to address his decision to continue to seek the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the United Kingdom. The outcome of the Assange case could set a major new precedent on press freedom, yet the press largely seems uninterested in it. Ryan Grim talks to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and to Billie Winner Davis, mother of Reality Winner, who was prosecuted and imprisoned for leaking confidential documents in 2017.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Ryan Grimm, welcome to Deconstructed.
0:09.2	Joe Biden held the first full press conference of his presidency on Thursday, and what we
0:12.7	heard was a president determined not to let Republican obstruction get in the way of his
0:16.9	agenda.
0:18.4	The contrast with President Obama couldn't have been more stark.
0:22.1	As Obama spent most of his first term contorting himself to try to strike deals with a party
0:26.1	that was hell bent on nothing but his destruction.
0:29.0	Axios reported this week that Biden is loving the narrative that he's so far been a bolder
0:33.2	president than Obama.
0:35.2	People forget that as early as 2013, team Obama was sending signals that it was support
0:39.1	Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 whether Joe ran or not.
0:43.6	Biden was routinely snickered at meetings by aides who had rolled their eyes at his stem
0:47.3	widening interruptions.
0:49.1	Obama himself, when he was a senator on Biden's committee, would roll his eyes as Biden went
0:53.5	on and on.
0:55.4	Obama even gently discouraged Biden from running this time, worried he'd embarrass himself
0:59.5	and undo the legacy he'd built.
1:01.7	How sweet it must be for Biden not just to have won, but to be delivering in bigger ways
1:06.2	than Obama did, with party leaders explicitly making the comparison to 2009 and blaming
1:12.0	Obama's push for bipartisanship.
1:14.6	We made a big mistake in 2009 and 10.
1:17.2	Susan Collins was part of that mistake.
	...

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