[Peace-discuss] Fwd: WBAI's Randy Credico subpoenaed in Russia Investigation

[stuartnlevy]

Article from Max Blumenthal.   An activist and comedian, Randy Credico, is to be subpoenaed by the House Intelligence cmte for the investigation of Russian influence.
Credico suspects the purpose is to gain information about Julian Arrange - whom Credico knows - and discredit Arrange and Wikileaks.
 -- Stuart
-------- Original message --------From: Mitchel Cohen <mitchelcohen at mindspring.com> Date: 11/28/17  07:27  (GMT-06:00) To: actiongreens at yahoogroups.com Subject: [ufpj-activist] WBAI's Randy Credico subpoenaed in Russia	Investigation 

Grayzone Project



House Intel Committee to Subpoena Leftist Comedian and Civil
Rights Activist Randy Credico in Russia Investigation The
renowned activist says he is under suspicion for his contacts with
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. 

By
Max
Blumenthal / AlterNet 

November 27, 2017, 7:32 AM GMT 



143 COMMENTS




The House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation has taken an
unexpected turn, with investigators homing in on a New York City-based
comedian, radio host and renowned civil rights activist named Randy
Credico.


Credico received a letter this month from the Committee ranking Democrat,
Rep. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Michael Conaway, the Republican leading the
investigation. The lawmakers requested that Credico "participate in
a voluntary, transcribed interview at the Committee's offices"
during the first half of December.


Credico informed the House committee through his legal counsel that he
would not submit to the voluntary interview. Soon after, his lawyer told
him that the committee planned to issue a subpoena.


Credico is among the unlikeliest characters to have surfaced as a player
in the ongoing Russiagate drama. For over two decades, he split time as a
comedy professional while waging a tireless crusade against the war on
drugs. The former host of a radio show on the Pacifica affiliate WBAI,
Credico came into the company of high profile dissidents. Today his
friends include the transparency activist targeted for arrest and
prosecution by the US government: Julian Assange.


The Wikileaks founder was recently

accused by CIA Director Mike Pompeo of overseeing a "a non-state
hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like
Russia." Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has suggested without evidence
that Wikileaks

collaborated with the Russian government to subvert the 2016
presidential election in Donald Trump's favor.


This year, the Trump administration

expanded the federal grand jury seeking the arrest of Assange to
cover the Wikileaks release of thousands of documents on CIA hacking
tools. However, there is no claim so far that grand jury covered the
release by Wikileaks of the Democratic National Commitee's emails in
2016. A United Nations working group

ruled that Assange was being arbitrarily detained. It has been seven
years since he lost his freedom, and has been confined to a series of
small rooms ever since. 


According to Credico, he and Assange held "three meetings that were
two to three hours each" at the Ecuadoran embassy in London where
the online activist has received diplomatic asylum. They took place on
September 6, and the 13th and 16th of November of this year. Credico said
he traveled to London this November to attend the hearing of Stefania
Maurizi, a correspondent from Italy's La Repubblica who had filed a
Freedom of Information request

demanding the press's right to access documents regarding his case.
(He showed me a photograph of himself with Maurizi in London to prove his
point).


"I was just there to support [Assange] as a wing man," Credico
commented to me. "I don't agree with him on everything — it's the
fact that he's a journalist and a publisher and has not put anything out
that's false. I don't know anything about technology and he didn't give
me any secrets."


The letter Credico received from the House Intelligence Committee did not
specify what it suspected him of doing, stating only that his interview
could cover anything within the parameters of "Russian
cyber-activities against the 2016 US election, potential links between
Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns, the US
government's response to these Russian active measures, and related leaks
of classified information."


However, Credico is convinced that he is being used to undermine Assange.
"This is about chilling Wikileaks and that starts with intimidating
anyone who has met with Julian [Assange]," he stated.


Satirist and civil rights crusader


Credico first appeared in the national spotlight in 1984 when he
trashed Reagan's Central American proxy wars during a comedy set on the
Tonight Show. A look of severe discomfort could be seen on Johnny
Carson's face when Credico likened Reagan's neoconservative UN ambassador
Jeanne Kirkpatrick to Eva Braun. Though he was never invited back on the
show, the comic's uncanny impersonations and incendiary political satire
won him the admiration of peers like Larry David, Barry Crimmins and Jack
Black.


During the 1990s, Credico became outraged about the disproportionate toll
the war on drugs was taking on the poor and people of color. He launched
a furious crusade against New York State's draconian Rockefeller Laws,
howling outside courthouses across the city about the evils of mass
incarceration, cops he branded "slave catchers" and proceedings
he denounced as "modern-day slave auctions." When he wasn't
screaming in the streets, he was behind prison walls, befriending inmates
and working the phones to get reporters interested in their
cases.


The New Yorker's Jennifer Gonnerman estimated that Credico had
"generated more than a hundred news stories, largely by inviting
reporters to his events and introducing them to the families of
inmates."

Crediting him for helping force the New York legislature to rewrite
the Rockefeller drug laws in 2004, Gonnerman branded Credico, "The
Man Who Screamed So Loud the Drug Laws Changed."


Credico's efforts to expose the drug war's injustices culminated in
Tulia, Texas, where a corrupt undercover narcotics officer had

railroaded some 10 percent of the town's African American population
into lengthy jail sentences for drug crimes they did not commit.
Credico's agitation resulted in a wave of national

media attention and in 2003, the full acquittal of the 38 prisoners
with sentences up to 90 years. His efforts were honored by the NAACP and
became the subject of several documentaries, including
"60 Spins
Around the Sun," an award winning biographical chronicle
financed by Jack Black.


In 2009, Credico quit his job as the director of the William Moses
Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice and launched a long-shot senate campaign
against Chuck Schumer, slamming the omnipotent Democratic senator for his
role in mandatory minimum sentencing and pro-death penalty legislation.
"You have to take a look at his record," Credico

said of Schumer at the time. "And that's a really racist
position as far as I am concerned. Yes, it is about race."


In the end, Credico won one percent of the vote. But he soldiered on,
running for mayor in 2013, then the governor's office a year later. All
along, he was dogged by drug and alcohol addiction, which he has been
public about. His penchant for drunken late-night tirades began to
alienate his allies and even led him to contemplate suicide. An
intervention in 2014 by his friend, the comedian Crimmins, pulled Credico
back from from the brink and helped him kick his self-destructive
habits.


Meetings with Assange, conspiratorial rumors


Credico's sobriety coincided with intensive advocacy for the
community of national security whistleblowers that emerged after 9/11 to
expose secret government torture, assassination and mass surveillance
programs. In August 2015, he hosted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for
an interview on "Live on the Fly," his former show at the
Pacifica radio affiliate, WBAI. Several interviews followed over the
coming months, including a series,
"
Assange: Countdown to Freedom," that featured high-profile
whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Jesslyn Raddack advocating for
Assange’s release.


"I had to build an audience at a moribund station and I got 65
percent of the traffic," Credico remarked. "I had a popular
international show because it was tweeted out by Wikileaks and Anonymous
Scandinavia and I got a huge international following."


The relationship with Assange eventually developed into a series of
meetings at the Ecuadoran embassy in London. These encounters fueled

online rumors accusing Credico of serving as a courier between the
notoriously Machiavellian former Trump campaign advisor, Roger Stone, and
Assange.


This September, Stone testified before the House Intelligence Committee,
which sought to scrutinize his claim to have communicated with the hacker
known as Guccifer 2.0, his contacts with Wikileaks, and a tweet that
seemed to suggest he had advance knowledge of the release of the emails
of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. Before the
committee, Stone angrily denied having colluded with the Russian
government and

claimed that all of his contacts with Assange were conducted through
"an intermediary."


For his part, Credico freely acknowledged that Stone had been a guest on
his WBAI show and the two had cooperated on a few oddball political
initiatives over the years. But he contended that "Roger Stone is
just a whipping post for the committee but the one they're after is
Assange because they want to quiet him."


"They're looking for a way to do in Assange," Credico
emphasized, "and I'm the only American in the press that has visited
him outside of a reporter from the New Yorker, and he's not going to talk
to anyone else."


Credico also insisted that despite his well-known dislike for Hillary
Clinton, he would not have lifted a finger to help the Trump campaign:
"I hate Trump. He's got ethnic cleansing going on with the
deportation of Haitians and Latin Americans and [Attorney General Jeff]
Sessions is the worst nightmare I've ever seen."


Asked if he would comply with the House Intelligence Committee, Credico
sounded a defiant tone. "I'm a journalist with a radio show and
there's nothing [the committee] can elicit out of me because I'm covered
by the First Amendment. And everything I've talked to Assange about has
been on the show, and everything else is in my fucking notes. Would any
journalist give them their notes?"


With his "interview" just days away, Credico exuded confidence.
"I've worked strip joints in Florida filled with Marines that wanted
to kill me for attacking their war in Grenada," the former comedian
remarked. "Congress is no problem. I've worked much tougher rooms
than that."


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