The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Stefania Maurizi

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have carried out the most important investigative journalism of our generation, revealing to the public the inner workings of power through the release of voluminous leaked documents. No other news organization has come close. This information has exposed the crimes, lies and fraud of the powerful, sparking the judicial lynching of Assange who awaits extradition to the US in a high security prison in London. It has allowed people across the globe to understand what their governments are doing behind their backs. In this show we will speak with the Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, author of Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies, about some of the most important information provided to the public by WikiLeaks. These include the U.S. war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables and 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs along with the 2007  “Collateral Murder” video, in which U.S. helicopter pilots banter as they gun down civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. They include the 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman that exposed the sleezy and corrupt world of the Clintons, including the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe and her dishonesty, telling the public she would work for financial reform while privately assuring Wall Street she would protect their interests. The cache of leaked emails showed that the Clinton campaign interfered in the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, assuming he would be the easiest candidate to defeat. They exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate and her role as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Joining me to discuss these and other revelations, and their importance, is Stefania Maurizi who is an investigative journalist for Il Fatto Quotidiano. She is the only international reporter who has worked on the entirety of the WikiLeaks secret trove of leaked documents.