British authorities threatened WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with arrest on a bond-jumping charge last week after their Swedish counterparts gave up trying to investigate Assange on what appears to have been a dubious series of sex claims that have been pending against him for nearly seven years since his 2010 speaking trip to Stockholm.

The British effort, if pursued aggressively with threatened punishment beyond the norm, would further compound a travesty of justice that has already disgraced the Swedish and British legal systems.

The Swedes have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money for the probe, as have the British in the latter's around-the-clock surveillance of Assange for years cost millions of pounds. The evidence suggest that both nations have undertaken such extraordinary actions to thwart WikiLeaks and not to investigate claims arising out of consensual sex with two Swedish women who invited Assange to sleep with them separately before complaints arose. 

Assange is shown in a graphic by the European human rights magazine The Indicter. Designated by a United Nations body 15 months ago as the victim of unlawful detention stemming from a political prosecution, Assange has lived since 2012 in Ecuador's London embassy.

Ecuador granted Assange political asylum from Sweden's demand, affirmed by Britain's courts, for Assange's extradition to face renewed questioning. Sweden has never charged the WikiLeaks founder with an offense but has instead insisted until recently that he must return to Sweden for questions about sexual activities, even though the initial prosecutor questioning him found no basis for charging him before her supervisors dismissed her from the case.

Assange has argued that Western intelligence, court and media operatives had orchestrated the entire sex smear as a pretext to arrange his extradition to the United States so he could be prosecuted on more serious charges arising from secret proceedings against WikiLeaks.

The transparency organization's disclosures have embarrassed and infuriated top officials of several Western nations, most recently because of WikiLeaks disclosures that seriously embarrassed Democrats in the 2016 election campaign.

Right from the start in 2010, independent observers described the Swedish probe as highly irregular in ways that tainted authorities, their witnesses, and the merit of their claims.

The Justice Department's top two officials have helped enable longstanding, deeply hidden Justice Department deceit and obstruction of justice in major cases, thereby paving the way for President Trump’s shocking firing of FBI Director James Comey on May 9.

Many Americans reacted with outrage at President Trump's suggestion on May 12 that he may have secretly taped Comey while Comey sought retention as the FBI probed potential criminal Russian influence over Trump's team and the 2016 elections.

But relatively few people even in government or the media know the vast abuses that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has long enabled as a U.S. senator in Alabama beginning in 1996 and previously as a U.S. Attorney and attorney general in that state since 1981.

That's because he's a master of the dark arts of political intrigue, including dark money, political prosecutions of enemies, blackmail and other repeated abuses of the justice system — each of them tactics that are most effective when obscured by rhetoric about conservative principles, national security, family values and "rule of law." Sessions, shown in a photo, was Trump's first major supporter among elected officials during the 2016 presidential campaign. 

Update

The Justice Department has appointed Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director (shown at left), to serve as a special counsel to oversee its investigation into Russian meddling in the election, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein (shown at right below) announced on Wednesday.

The appointment of Mr. Mueller dramatically raises the stakes for President Trump in the multiple investigations into his campaign’s ties to the Russians, as reported by the New York Times in Russia Investigation Gets Special Counsel and elsewhere.

Among other updates, CNN's Jim Acosta and Pamela Brown reported that Rosenstein notified neither the White House nor Sessions until Mueller had been appointed, thereby illustrating that the Justice Department's deputy attorney general appeared to have sought to avoid political considerations and to have rapidly reversed his recent statement that no special prosecutor was needed. This is the first U.S. special counsel in more than a decade.

Alabama Precedents

As another update, Alabama blogger Roger Shuler extensively excerpted in our column in his James Comey firing was an "assault on constitutional values," and Jeff Sessions, with his long history of abusive tactics in Alabama, was in the middle of it. Shuler integrating our reporting it with his own expertise drawn from hundreds of columns in recent years about Deep South corruption and intrigue by Sessions and his confederates.

"Jeff Sessions is a racist," Alabama opposition researcher and political activist Dana Jill Simpson told the Justice Integrity Project in an exclusive interview on May 12. "He has been on the far, far, far right even by the standards of Alabama conservatives."

Simpson is an Alabama attorney and former GOP political operative who courageously stepped forward in 2007 to describe the DOJ's frame-up on corruption charges of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, her state's leading Democrat. She is shown in a 2008 photo from a CBS "60 Minutes" exposé on the Siegelman case featuring her as a whistleblower along with others claiming a political prosecution. 

She has also helped this editor and other investigative reporters document many scandals. These include involvement by Sessions and his cronies in mind-boggling national and international intrigues. Among them have been secret dealings with Russia, suspicious awards of defense contracts involving tens of billions of dollars in one instance, and a sinister role in the 2007 U.S. attorney firing scandal that Simpson helped expose and document.

Roger Shuler, an Alabama blogger who has written hundreds of columns about irregularities in the Siegelman case alone, wrote another last week headlined, No one should be surprised at Jeff Sessions' role in Trump's firing of James Comey; Sessions has a history of using such underhanded tactics in Alabama. Shuler is shown in a mug shot after he was beaten at his home by deputies as they arrested him on a civil contempt charge that kept him jailed without bond in a trumped-up proceeding arising from his blog claims of sex scandals involving prominent GOP political and legal figures.

In March, the Guardian published a similar analysis headlined 'Gun for hire': how Jeff Sessions used his prosecuting power to target Democrats by reporters Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland, with this sub-headline: As the Justice Department’s man in Alabama, Trump’s attorney general indicted political opponents in remarkably thin cases, court filings show. “Jeff Sessions is was one of the most corrupt public servants in Alabama history, running a political hit squad for organized crime.”

Simpson describes Sessions as "the national ringleader of partisan abuses of the legal system, first in Alabama and then via his leadership of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where he was in a position to help appoint prosecutors, judges and other officials to accuse some people unfairly and let others off, and otherwise reward his patrons and confederates."  

Sessions, forced to recuse himself in March from involvement in the FBI's probe of Russia because he falsely told fellow senators during his confirmation hearing that he had had no recent contacts with Russian officials, is also deeply implicated in secret business deals with Russia to benefit his vast networks of cronies, according to our years of reporting.

Trump (shown in a portrait by Gage Skidmore) appears to be also deeply enmeshed in dark money from dubious sources obscured by intermediaries, according to many investigative reports that are not contradicted by the half-truths of his press releases claiming innocence. In this environment, only the power of subpoena by independent investigators can protect the public from the kind of kleptocracy that Sessions has helped inflict on Alabama and which Trump appears determined to replicate throughout America.

President Trump said today that he had planned to fire FBI Director James Comey this week no matter what others said. That contradicted the initial explanations of Vice President Pence and White House staff and raised the the possibility obstruction of justice into the ongoing criminal probe of Russian influence on his campaign.

On the morning "Today" show on May 11, Trump told NBC TV's Lester Holt that Comey was a "showboat" whom he planned to fire "regardless" of what Justice Department officials might want.

The explanation thereby contradicted what Pence (shown below left) and the White House communications staff had been telling the public about the reasons for Comey's sudden firing May 9 as he led the FBI's probe into Russian influence peddling with the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, including interference with the elections.

Trump said also that Comey wanted to stay in the job and told the president during a dinner and then in two phone calls that Trump was not under investigation.

White House news correspondents tried to question Trump's deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during the afternoon White House press briefing conference about the administration's initial claim that Comey was fired on the basis of a recommendation by the newly appointed Deputy Attorney Gen. Rod Rosenstein.

Another line of questions was whether Trump and Comey violated Justice Department policy (and possible criminal law) by discussing the president's potential liability for crimes, particularly when the president had the ability to make a deal by rewarding the probe's leader by continuing him in office.

Sanders, the deputy press secretary, organized much of the press briefing on other topics. She falsely told the media that she would answer "all" their questions and denied that any significant discrepancy existed between the original White House explanation of Comey's firing and Trump's explanation.

Huckabee said the Comey firing was part of the White House attempt to end the FBI's probe of Russian influence as soon as possible "with integrity." Whether she knew it or not, her admission that the firing was tied to Comey's probe, and not that Comey had been too mean to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, could draw a dangerous link to obstruction of justice, as reported here: Sarah Huckabee Sanders admits Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice by firing James Comey.

Huckabee abruptly ended the conference by walking away from the podium while ignoring a barrage of shouted questions from reporters she had failed to call upon. 

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) responded by describing Comey as "one of the most ethical, upright, straightforward" FBI officials he had ever had the pleasure of working with. Burr (shown in an official photo) further contradicted Sanders by saying that he believed that Comey enjoyed the confidence of fellow FBI personnel before Trump fired the director March 9 while Comey was traveling and just four years into Comey's 10-year-term.

At a hearing today before the committee, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe also contradicted the president by saying that he holds Comey "in the highest regard," that the vast majority of FBI enjoyed a deep connection with Flynn and that such support continues to "today."

No previous president has ever fired an FBI director except for President Bill Clinton's non-controversial dismissal of a director, William Sessions, who had been placed under investigation for ethics violations by a previous Republican boss, Attorney Gen. William Barr, and Justice Department internal investigators.

Other commentators exploded after NBC interview with allegations (or at least pointed questions) that Trump's actions presented conflict of interest on multiple grounds because the probe involved major financial, election, counter-espionage and disclosure scandals involving close advisors to Trump, including former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

A House of Cards producer and an exonerated ex-convict discussed justice reform during an innovative and compelling forum last week at the National Press Club.

John Mankiewicz, an executive producer and screenwriter for the hit television series House of Cards about a ruthless U.S. president, described why he became fascinated with ordeal of Jerry Miller, a Chicago man exonerated by DNA evidence from a kidnap-rape conviction in 2007. Miller had spent nearly 25 years in prison. Miller's 1982 sentence was for a 1981 crime committed by another man whom Miller did not know.

Against the current background of a real-life president whose new administration is cracking down on defendants' rights and other civil liberties, Miller underscored the challenges he experienced even after release and exoneration.

Miller said that authorities needlessly shamed and scarred him on parole as a "sex offender" and otherwise. It was so bad, he said, that he felt even after his release to his welcoming family, “This is harder than being in jail.”

Miller and Mankiewicz (shown at far left and left, respectively in the photo below) spoke on March 1 at the press club to discuss their collaboration on a new book, Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted. Editors for the anthology paired 14 victims (as established by post-conviction evidence) each with a well-known thriller or mystery author.

Speaking also on the panel was the book’s co-editor Laura Caldwell, a best-selling novelist, attorney and the founder/director of the Life After Innocence project at the Loyola University School of Law in Chicago. The moderator was Press Club President Jeffrey Ballou. He is shown with Caldwell at the right of the adjoining photo, which was taken at the panel by the Justice Integrity Project. The collection was co-edited by novelist Leslie Klinger.

The anthology includes a previously unpublished essay by the late playwright Arthur Miller. He led a campaign in Connecticut nearly four decades ago to free Peter Reilly, who had been coerced by state police when he was teenager into falsely confessing that he had murdered his mother. That controversy provoked bitter struggles within the law enforcement community and at one point pitted a reform-minded chief state's attorney against the politically powerful state police union, some of whose members had extracted the teenager's confession and wanted him kept imprisoned.

Those problems are widespread and still with us, as illustrated by the other case studies. One focused on a California law student, Gloria Killian, who served 17 years on a murder conspiracy charge before discovery that the murderer had bargained for a reduced sentence from authorities by falsely claiming that she was the murder mastermind.

As a reminder also of the high stakes nationally, the Trump Administration's new attorney general, Jeff Sessions (shown in an official photo) last month ordered the Justice Department to shut down its forensic science committee. That closure, reported by the Washington Post here, prompted concern by last week's forum panelists. So did such other Sessions initiatives as his order for the department to resume use of private prisons, cut 95% of funding for the department's office of drug control, and staff the justice department with those who have fought against its use of civil rights law to monitor abuses in states and localities.

Yet careful collection of evidence can remedy at least some problems, as shown by Anatomy of Innocence. The anthology uses the talents of well-known authors to showcase injustices in a U.S. penal system that currently incarcerates some 2.2 million persons. That is more than any other major country's total or as measured by the percentage of population.

How many of these might be held for bogus reasons? That's a timely question, especially as the new Trump administration ramps up efforts to implement its law-and-order campaign rhetoric. The analysis below provides both conventional analysis to that question, and also provides tools to understand corruption and cover-up at high levels of the justice system.

Many independent experts on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy dispute the key claims in a new Time Magazine feature story published on April 25 that puffs up History channel's launch that evening of a new series purporting to shed new light on the killing.

Instead, Time's coverage of the six-part series "JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald" continues the magazine's shameful tradition of misleading its readers regarding a pivotal event in the nation's history.

History channel, despite its name and its past under different ownership featuring historical documentaries, now focuses on "reality" shows. That means scripted fakery for purely entertainment purposes and likely, in this instance, for propaganda purposes.

So, the notion that a "reality show" should be taken seriously by a major publication like Time even if a series is mislabeled as "history" is preposterous on its face unless the enterprise were part of larger public relations scheme, as this seems to be.

The specifics here are worth examining because they help illustrate how Time, its corporate affiliates like CNN, and most other mainstream media deliberately confuse the public on the most vital public affairs issues in collaboration with intelligence agencies even as they claim to oppose "fake news" and alternative media.

In JFK Declassified: Fallback to the Original Phase One Cover Story, longtime JFK researcher William Kelly provided this review: "The much-ballyhooed History channel six-part “documentary," JFK Declassified, is a slick but unconvincing piece of propaganda, a classic case of disinformation that mixes some truth with total falsehoods to promote the original Phase One cover-story for the Dealey Plaza Operation: that the Cuban Castro Communists were behind it."

More generally, the Kennedy assassination provides a Rosetta Stone to understanding media coverage of more recent sensitive events involving intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Young people, especially those who might be inclined to regard the 196Os deaths of JFK and numerous witnesses as a pointless obsession by old-timers and complainers, should reflect on the continuing importance: Few can see documentary evidence of what's really happening in Middle East wars or investigations of Russian influence on U.S. public officials, advisors and elections, for example. For the most part, we know only what reporters and government experts choose to tell us. But, largely ignored by the media, courageous eye-witnesses have told their JFK murder stories and dedicated researchers have mined some four million pages of declassified JFK documents and found compelling evidence disproving the official story still foisted upon the public by the corporate-controlled media. 

Shaping the JFK Narrative

Kennedy's 100th birthday is on May 29. So the History channel's six-week series helps shape public attention for an iconic presidency that ended with his slaying in broad daylight in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Almost immediately after JFK's death, authorities pronounced the case as solved when JFK's accused slayer Lee Harvey Oswald (shown on a 1964 Time cover) was killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby on live television in a Dallas police station two days later.

Then as now, the corporate-controlled news media typified by Time worked closely with authorities to deliver a mixture of news and public relations to a shocked nation. The public received little in-depth reporting about the murder; instead, it got blanket coverage of the ceremonies and transition to the administration of a successor president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Although the American public has been repeatedly deceived by top officials and their media allies about basic facts regarding Kennedy's death, the official account is so incredible for so many reasons that public opinion polls for decades have shown that large majorities do not believe the central finding of the Warren Commission: The blue-ribbon panel led by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and including former CIA Director Allen Dulles found that Oswald killed Kennedy while acting alone.

Wild Goose Chase?

Coverage this week by Time magazine (and apparently History channel) appears to accept the Commission's findings as core truth. The TV series apparently goes on to distract the public with essentially a wild goose chase speculating about the meaning of Oswald's activities. Thus, the video series first segment on April 25, Former CIA Operative Argues Lee Harvey Oswald's Cuba Connections Went Deep, explored a long-discredited thesis that Oswald's travels help suggest potential sympathy for him from Cuban and Soviet Communist leaders, thus potentially linking them to his death.

This diverts public attention from compelling evidence that Oswald, a former Marine trusted with involvement in the ultra-secret U-2 spy plane operation, had been acting as a low-level U.S. government asset with ties to the CIA, FBI and military intelligence before the assassination. Compare Oswald's Marine photo at left with Time's portrayal to get a sense of the propaganda techniques in play. Which photo looks more like an anti-American deranged killer?

By this interpretation, Oswald's ostensibly suspicious activities were his cover to ingratiate himself with Communists to help his U.S. superiors advance their anti-Communist agendas — and all of his work could be conveniently  transformed into making Oswald into a patsy, or fall guy, for assassination if needed.

A declassified transcript of a 1964 Warren Commission executive committee meeting shows Dulles (shown in a file photo) urging his fellow commissioners to help squelch public reports at the time that Oswald had been a government agent.

Outraged over the CIA's Bay of Pigs debacle and other out-of-control activities, JFK had forced the resignation of Dulles in 1962 along with the director's two top aides. One was Gen. Charles Cabell (shown below left), whose brother Earle Cabell was the mayor of Dallas during the killing. Those are not the kind of connections Time Magazine and its peers like to pursue.

But we shall, with an in-depth look below at Time's close historical connection with the nation's propaganda apparatus at the highest levels.

Fast forward to the present: The History channel show's host is Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who purports to act as an independent expert. But Baer's conclusions appear to parrot the 1964 Warren Commission report and obscure questions about the CIA's apparent multiple roles in the JFK death and investigation. Those ties run extremely deep, according to some four million pages of documents pertaining to the assassination that have been declassified since the commission's report was published, with many of the most revealing documents published in recent years because of public pressure through Congress and litigation.

Experience has shown that financial and other career rewards tend to be far richer for JFK assassination researchers like Baer who endorse the official findings rather than interview the many dissenters, who publish books that are rarely reviewed and convene at packed-to-capacity conferences that rarely include a reporter from a mainstream news organization.

This editor attends such conferences and knows that people are still living who knew Oswald as a friend, including as a fellow U.S. Marine — and who doubt his intention or ability to kill Kennedy. Even if one discounts such personal testimonials, compelling scientific evidence suggests that Oswald could not have killed Kennedy from the rear because the fatal shot came from the president's right front.

Two cable news stars broadcast a repulsive but revealing display of self-promotion Aug. 10 when MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell credited fellow anchor Rachel Maddow for coverage prompting the resignation of Alabama's scandal-ridden governor earlier in the day. "You alone," he told her, covered the scandal.

But credit belongs not to the heavily promoted Maddow (shown in a file photo) but to the courageous Alabama blogger Roger Shuler. He has been financially ruined, beaten and jailed for his relentless investigations of top state officials, including the just-departed GOP Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley.

Shuler broke the story of the scandals arising from Bentley's affair with a highly paid state aide, Rebekah Caldwell Masonl (shown with Bentley below). Shuler began with a column Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley engaged in extramarital affair that prompted First Lady's divorce complaint on Aug. 31, 2015. He followed with two more such columns over the next two days. The updates keep coming, as in his report that Mason apparently faces no sanction:  Finding of "no probable cause" against Rebekah Mason suggests ethics commission is part of scheme to oust Bentley but keep greater wrongdoing under cover.

The story of his scoop is particularly apt now because of the awful price that Shuler and his wife Carol have paid for such work. Also, the mainstream media are waging a heavy-handed public relations campaign against bloggers, alternative media and those falling under the smear of "fake news" and "conspiracy theory."

This is the first of several columns we plan about those developments, which are prominent this week in part because of the annual announcement of Pulitzer Prizes. The Pulitzers were dominated as usual by winners from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal in major categories. It's fine that they were able to achieve recognition, and in that spirit we cite winners here and below.

But there's much more to journalism than the big outlets. Grassroots practitioners like Shuler across the country do not and cannot spend their scarce income much on application fees to compete in such contests, even in the unlikely event their work would receive serious consideration from the corporate-controlled media that control such recognition.

So, we focus for now on the brave and largely unreported tale of how Shuler, an impoverished blogger in flight with his wife from autocratic Alabama judges managed to bring down his state's governor in the kind of mind-boggling sex, legal and financial scandal whose revelation has become commonplace recently in that state.

The Tips and Tape That Torpedoed a Governor

Bentley's resignation means the leadership of all three branches of Alabama's state government has been ousted in less than a year because of scandal, including Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore (permanently suspended for refusing to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedent on gay rights that conflict with his understanding of The Bible) and House Speaker Mike Hubbard, arguably the most powerful state official and convicted last June of 12 felonies involving massive graft.

Shuler is shown puffy-faced in a county jail mug shot taken after he was arrested at his home, beaten, and jailed for six months on a contempt of court charge in October 2014 arising from his coverage of what he regarded as other sex scandals involving prominent Alabama lawyers.

The irony is that Shuler gets virtually nothing for it — hardly any money and very little recognition, and probably many more legal hassles to come — whereas the MSNBC anchors are reported to receive multi-million-dollar annual salaries.

Neither Maddow nor O'Donnell (shown in screenshots) did original reporting that broke this case as Shuler did. Nor do they risk anything by their commentary to a largely liberal audience, except the possibility of one day being phased out for new faces. The Shulers, by contrast, have long lived in Red State country, where threats of violence against liberals are a frequent occurrence, especially for them.

What's most important about this, however, is not who gets the credit for this particular story. The vital point instead should be greater public awareness that a healthy society depends on the different strengths that independent blogging and mainstream news bring to civic awareness.

Here's the inside story of the Alabama scandals that we developed from Justice Integrity Project sources in Alabama fostered in part over many years of following that state's courageous bloggers like Shuler and their dwindling core whistleblower sources who dare fight entrenched corruption in a state where drastic reprisals against dissidents are not uncommon.