Judge threatens to expose Starmer’s role in state persecution of Assange

Court order exposes nonsense of Crown Prosecution Service cover-up

A judge at the London First-Tier Tribunal has shone an unflattering light on the the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that threatens to expose the Establishment’s serial cover-ups of Keir Starmer’s involvement in controversial and outright appalling decisions, journalist Jonathan Cook has reported. Judge Penrose Foss has ordered the CPS to provide a concrete and evidenced explanation for its destruction, in breach of its own procedures, of key files detailing Keir Starmer’s involvement in its persecution of Australian journalist Julian Assange, which led to Assange’s years-long imprisonment for doing journalism that embarrassed the US.

After years of the US seeking his extradition for exposing its war crimes and of public protests demanding his release, Assange was finally freed from high-security prison last June in a plea deal that made him technically guilty of a crime despite committing none, but allowed him to return to his family and his native Australia. But the CPS claims to have destroyed – supposedly a standard housekeeping measure, though seemingly not really – most of its files, many of them likely involving Starmer, relating to the UK and US’s initial attempt to extradite Assange to Sweden as a staging post to the US

The few CPS files from the time that were not destroyed have already shown that the CPS was the organisation pushing Swedish prosecutors to pursue Assange, even telling them not to ‘dare get cold feet’ in what was clearly a political manoeuvre not a legally-sound one. Eventually, Sweden dropped the case – which Assange’s supposed victims there didn’t want to pursue to begin with – but destroyed most of the same correspondence records that the Starmer-led CPS also says it destroyed.

The Assange case is not the only one in which the CPS destroyed records behind major decisions – the refusal to prosecute serial child-rapist Jimmy Savile, who before his death was closely connected to politicians and British royalty, being one – that seem likely to have had Starmer’s fingerprints all over them as head of the organisation, particularly his promise as head of the CPS to extradite hacker Gary McKinnon to the US and his furious flight to Washington when then-PM Theresa May blocked the extradition.

Foss’s ruling requires a complete and concretely-evidenced explanation from the CPS about how and why it destroyed its records – and orders it to provide them by 21 February unless it can demonstrate that there is no possible way to retrieve them.

The UK and the US are also trying to avoid Freedom of Information requests from Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi about their communications during the US attempt to extradite Assange for supposed espionage – and the decision to fight to prevent Assange’s release even after the US case collapsed when its prosecution main witness admitted he had been lying the whole time.

The Starmer government and its agents are not going to simply roll over and expose the likely ways in which it has protected, shepherded and used Starmer, the ‘long-time servant of the security state‘, throughout his career, but the Foss decision certainly represents a threat they will be desperate to avoid.

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