As Redstate’s very own Bonchie reported this morning, Project Veritas founder, James O’Keefe, just announced he’ll be releasing audio of a conversation Julian Assange once had with officials in Hillary Clinton’s state department tomorrow.

Veritas has obtained never before heard audio recordings between the State Department & Julian Assange.

A fascinating look into the relationship between the US Government & @wikileaks.

We publish tomorrow, on the heels of Assange’s request of a Pardon from @realDonaldTrump. pic.twitter.com/zHsvClgWbF

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) December 15, 2020

A confab between WikiLeaks’ infamous founder and U.S. state department officials working for his arch-nemesis Hillary Clinton would be big news on any day. But a meeting of such adamantly opposed minds is even more noteworthy this week given that Assange has officially asked President Trump for a pardon.

Video of a conversation that sounds a lot like the one O’Keefe describes has, however, been publicly available for a while now.

It turns out that Julian Assange once made an “emergency phone call” to try and reach Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state that a 2017 ShowTime documentary played on tape for all the world to see:

In case you’re fuzzy on the background here (which, given everything else momentous going on at present you’d almost have to be) Assange was indicted by the United States Department of Justice (or a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia to be technical) in March of 2018. But the public remained in the dark until over a year later, when the indictment was unsealed in April 2019.

And he’s been locked up in a British jail since September of that year awaiting the results of his extradition hearing.

Assange has actually been behind bars for a bit longer, though—since he was first hauled out of Ecuador’s London embassy by British authorities in April of last year, on the same day the U.S. indictment against him was unsealed. But the Brits immediately charged him with violating the bail conditions they’d imposed during another extradition hearing way back in 2012, when Swedish authorities claimed they wanted him for sexual assault.

Sweden’s charges were later all dropped—with Assange insisting the whole thing was a setup, the ultimate goal of which was letting U.S. authorities get their hands on him. So, to avoid their tender mercies, he accepted asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy in June of 2012.

And there he remained, till Ecuador finally withdrew their hospitality on April 11 2019 and let British authorities come inside and haul Julian Assange away for violating those bail conditions they’d imposed back before Sweden dropped all charges.

When his sentence for violating bail ended in September 2019, however, Assange remained behind bars, where he sits today, as his lawyers fight the U.S. Department of Justice’s extradition efforts.

Most people are at least dimly aware of the above. But a surprising number have wound up falsely thinking that the U.S. charges against Assange somehow involve the 2016 election.

On the contrary, however, Assange was indicted for alleged activities relating to the material WikiLeak’s acquired from Chelsea Manning way back in 2010.

Indeed, as Andrew McCarthy noted when the indictment against Assange was first unsealed, its authors had to make an extra effort to get around the statute of limitations:

The five-year statute of limitations that applies to most federal crimes is prescribed for both conspiracy and computer fraud.

So how is the Justice Department able to prosecute Assange on an indictment filed three years after the prescribed limitations period?

It appears that the Justice Department is relying on an exception, in Section 2332b of the penal code, that extends the statute of limitations to eight years for “acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries.”

Moreover, they made it just down to the wire, indicting Assange just the day before the extended 8-year statute of limitations would have also expired.

Despite any misapprehension to the contrary, however, it’s not at all surprising that the charges against Assange have absolutely nothing to do with the alleged Russian hack of the DNC that we’re supposed to think netted him the DNC emails WikiLeaks published.

As everyone knows since Trump mentioned it in his now-famous phone call to Ukrainian president Zelensky, operatives from the DNC’s tech firm CrowdStrike were the only ones ever allowed to examine any of the DNC’s supposedly hacked machines.

And our collective faith that the Russians really did hack the DNC was based solely on CrowdStrike’s word about what they’d found.

Thanks to acting Director of National Security, Richard Grenell, however, in May Adam Schiff was finally forced to release testimony that CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry gave to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017.

And boy was it a bombshell.

Henry admitted that the claim of which we’ve been relentlessly assured for four years now that his firm had discovered absolute proof that the Russians had stolen files from the DNC was – not to put too fine a point on it – a baldfaced lie.

There was never even any evidence, let alone proof.

Henry testified that CrowdStrike only found evidence that files were “staged for exfiltration” but explicitly admitted that “[t]here’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated” at least five separate times.

But, if there was any truth to the story CrowdStrike has been peddling these past four years, there ought to have been not just evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC but irrefutable proof.

You see, both Henry and CrowdStrike’s founder and then-Chief Technology Officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, have repeatedly claimed that they first detected the Russian Malware on the DNC servers when they were called in by the DNC in early May of 2016. Henry and Alperovitch both say CrowdStrike monitored the Russian presence in the DNC system for around six weeks, until finally kicking the intruders out around June 10. Apart from this story appearing in several media accounts, Henry testified to it as well.

Rober Mueller’s report, however, says the DNC emails WikiLeaks published were stolen between May 25 and June 1. And, independent analysis has confirmed Mueller’s assessment to be within a couple of days of when the files were first copied by whoever the culprit was in whatever way he managed to acquire them.

Indeed, more than half of WikiLeaks’ DNC emails were dated after CrowdStrike installed their premiere monitoring software Falcon on the DNC’s system, and, hence, didn’t even exist for anyone to exfiltrate before the firm was on the case.

So how could the Russians have stolen over 44,000 emails with almost 18,000 attached files while CrowdStrike was monitoring their presence on the DNC network?

How could anyone have stolen that much data over the internet from a remote location without CrowdStrike having any record of the files exiting the DNC’s system given that they were monitoring both it, in general, and the alleged Russian malware they claimed they found there, in particular, the whole time?

Makes you wonder if maybe Julian Assange might have been telling the truth when he said the DNC emails didn’t come from the Russians or any other state-affiliated actors.

And, likewise, when his friend former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray insisted he’d been the middleman between Assange and the true source—a disgruntled DNC insider.

Or why Mueller made no attempt to question either Murray or Assange, given that one claimed to have direct knowledge about the source of the DNC emails while the other is the only person in the world we know with 100% certainty did.

Seems like sort of a big omission for someone investigating a crime to not even bother trying to contact the only known witnesses.

In any event, the fact that WikiLeaks’ DNC emails were stolen while CrowdStrike was monitoring the DNC system pretty much rules out that the Russians or anyone else hacked them and means that it must have been an inside job, as Assange has claimed all along.

[Note: Many believe that an analysis of transfer speeds by a researcher known as Forensicator frequently highlighted by Bill Binney has shown that WikiLeaks’ DNC emails were copied too fast to have occurred over the internet. However, the files Forensicator analyzed were NOT released by WikiLeaks nor, as he explicitly notes, can an earlier transfer than the one he was able to analyze be ruled out. So, the ubiquitous misapprehension notwithstanding, the famous transfer speed analysis is completely irrelevant to anything WikiLeaks released. For more details, see here.]

So it’s not at all surprising that the DOJ bent over backward to find something else to charge Assange with while allowing the public to assume—as so many quite naturally have—that he’s being indicted for his involvement in the Russian hack of the DNC since it’s pretty obvious there never was any such hack.

Given that the DOJ had to claim not only that Assange helped Manning crack a password but also that those alleged actions constituted “acts of terrorism” in order to get around the statute of limitations, however, that “emergency phone call” featured in the Showtime documentary isn’t entirely irrelevant.

In the clip, Assange has just learned that someone else is about to post unredacted U.S. State Department cables on the internet and tries his best to get then secretary of state Hillary Clinton or someone else at the state department with enough clout to handle the situation on the phone to warn them.

It’s not in any way conclusive, of course. But it’s sort of hard to believe that someone who’s bent on committing acts of terrorism against the U.S. would go to so much trouble to try and alert the higher-ups at the state department about a damaging leak that was about to occur.

Even more so when the Secretary of State can hardly be said to be an admirer.

In any event, it will be interesting to see whether O’Keefe has anything new to add to what we already know.