Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate. As the Biden administration continues to seek the extradition of Julian Assange, new details have emerged about the Trump administration's secret war against Assange and his organization Wikileaks. The story comes from Yahoo News.

It's called kidnapping assassination and a London shootout inside the CIA's secret war plans against

WikiLeaks.

Joining me now is one of the three reporters who broke this story, Michael Isikoff, the chief

investigative correspondent for

Yahoo News. Michael, thank you for joining me. Hey, good to be with you. So congratulations on the

story and thank you for writing it. I think it's one of the most important stories of this year.

You have in your story, for the first time, confirmation from the U.S. side on this sprawling CIA

operation against Assange and WikiLeaks. Some of the details came out in the Spanish press

from El Pais, and it was also reported by my gray zone colleague Max Blumenthal in May 2020.

But you have a series of U.S. officials confirming the

CIA's role and offering new details of what this operation entailed. And I want to start with

Mike Pompeo because he emerges in your story as really the key figure here. He comes in as

Trump's first director of the CIA.

He immediately declares in April 2017 that WikiLeaks is a non-state hostile intelligence

service.

It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is.

A non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. We have to recognize that we can no longer allow assogene

his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with

misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great constitution stands for. It ends now.

He vows to use the CIA to be more vicious.

And so we've now laid out a strategy for how we're going to execute our mission with incredible vigor.

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