After Jesselyn Radack advised against the FBI interview with Lindh, she continued to share her advice with John De Pue, which she has subsequently lied about to maintain both her reputation and cover within the whistleblower community. De Pue initially expressed his displeasure over the possibility of the case proceeding in the Ninth Circuit (“ugh!”), but went on to say that if they waited until Lindh arrived back in the U.S., the venue would be wherever the “plane lands first.”
As if Radack didn’t understand or had simply glossed over his email, she suggested essentially what he had just said: Make the venue somewhere more favorable to the government, such as the Eastern District of Virginia, because at no point did she have a problem with setting up a defendant for trial in front of a biased jury. In fact, she suggested the government do just that. After Radack’s suggestion, De Pue repeated himself, “We could do that if we waited to indict until he arrived there,” as if to say, “Yes, I know, I just said that.”
Then she stated that Lindh was guilty of treason, “He committed the crime of treason while he was overseas,” because even as a federal attorney working in the ethics department, the presumption of innocence eluded her. De Pue corrected her, “At present we have no knowledge he did anything other than join the Taliban,” and in the end, Lindh was never charged with treason, let alone convicted of it.
Her statement was so egregious, or perhaps De Pue’s was so on point, that Lindh’s father used the latter in a presentation he gave to the First Presbyterian Church in San Anselmo, California, on May 13, 2013:
There’s this other email that was released from the Justice Department that really sums the whole case up, ‘At present, we have no knowledge that he did anything other than join the Taliban.’ They knew that. The government knew that. They knew this kid was not a terrorist.
Not only did he mention the very email where De Pue corrected Radack’s overzealous prosecution of his son, but not once did he mention her throughout the entire presentation, including her wildly false claims about single-handedly bringing down the government’s case. He didn’t even mention that she was the one who leaked the email.
Despite her obvious lack of principles, she had the gall to accuse others of prematurely condemning Lindh during a presentation she gave at the Chaos Computer Club because every accusation is a confession:
[A]s we see with Julian Assange…top people in Congress and the president pronounced [Lindh] guilty before ever being tried or ever being charged.3
And during a talk she gave at a 2008 Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF) conference, she stated:
When Lindh was first captured, it was the sentiment of ‘Let’s hang him high. How can we try him for treason because it carries the death penalty?’4
Naturally, she forgot to tell the audience that she was the first and only ethics attorney at the Department of Justice who found Lindh guilty of treason before he ever set foot back on U.S. soil. Her rabid dishonesty continued:
When Lindh was first captured, it was the sentiment of ‘How can we get him tried in the Fourth Circuit?’ which is very conservative compared to the Ninth Circuit, which tends to be more liberal and would have been more logical because he was from California, but they tried him in the Fourth, which was a mile away from the Pentagon.
Her duplicity and lies are staggering. Again, on December 7, 2001, she stated—in writing, no less— that the DOJ should indict Lindh in the Eastern District of Virginia, or the Southern District of New York, because it would be more favorable to the government than California’s Ninth Circuit:
[W]hy not make the venue of indictment the Eastern District of Virginia or the Southern District of New York? It seems the Fourth Circuit and the Second Circuit would be more favorable than the Ninth.
If anyone was trying to steer the case to a more favorable, mile-away-from-the-Pentagon venue, it was her. She flat-out told him that the Fourth Circuit would be more advantageous than the Ninth, and now, seven years later, here she was, in front of an FFF audience, talking about it as if she had played no role in what she herself had recommended.
While we’re on the topic of her FFF appearance, she also told the audience that Lindh was initially facing three death penalty counts. This will become pertinent down the road because years later, she used this as an excuse for leaking her emails:
What’s so deranged about all of this is that Lindh never faced the death penalty on any count, let alone three. Unless she’s an imbecile, legitimately mentally ill, or a paid political operative, none of which are too far-fetched to believe at this point, she should have known this because it was all over the media in January 2002, when he was first charged:
NPR, the same news outlet she was listening to when they interviewed Michael Isikoff sometime in June 2002, which supposedly prompted her to leak her emails to him, ran an entire story about Lindh and the DOJ’s charges against him, none of which included the death penalty, on January 16, 2002. For those of you who enjoy math, that’s six months before she leaked her attorney-client privileged emails and seven years before her unhinged performance in front of an FFF audience.
Clearly, reality didn’t fit her own whistleblower story, nor was she willing to tell the truth for whatever sinister reason, because it would tarnish her image within the whistleblower community, so she made up whatever story she wanted. Unbelievably, not a single journalist, media outlet, or organization pushed back or investigated any of this until now, despite this information being publicly available for decades. If anything, the D.C. Bar should be held accountable for allowing this woman to keep her law license.
Remarkably, she later described herself as someone “loyal to the Constitution” in the foreword to Beatrice Edwards’ 2014 book, “The Rise of the American Corporate Security State.”
In different ways, through different means, our government accused my clients and me of betraying the country. But the opposite was true. We remained loyal to the Constitution, while our government betrayed it.
Radack is no guardian of the Constitution, and her conduct is a stain on U.S. history, the Department of Justice, whistleblowing, and the very document that protects the rights of the accused.
Sources:
- www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna3067190; https://archive.is/DjifM
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=q75Ijxv0QFo
- https://media.ccc.de/v/29c3-5338-en-enemies_of_the_state_h264
- https://youtube.com/watch?v=yBlFuUIILmw&list=PL8098DDCFDF68A64D&index=4
- https://www.npr.org/2002/01/16/1136441/john-walker-lindh
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