Raymond McGovern is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer turned political activist. McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and in the 1980s chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief. He received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement, returning it in 2006 to protest the CIA's involvement in torture. McGovern's post-retirement work includes commenting for Russian Government-funded RT and Sputnik News, among other outlets, on intelligence and foreign policy issues. In 2003 he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
RT is a Russian state-controlled international news television network funded by the Russian government. It operates pay television and free-to-air channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing Internet content in Russian, English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic.
WikiLeaks is a publisher and media organisation founded in 2006. It operates as a non-profit and is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist, who is currently challenging extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses. WikiLeaks' most recent publication was in 2021 and its most recent publication of original documents was in 2019. Beginning in November 2022, many of the documents could not be accessed.
Peter John Lavelle is an American journalist and host of CrossTalk, a political talk show on the English-language TV channel RT, which is controlled by the Russian state. He is the co-founder and co-host, with George Szamuely, of the political commentary show, TheGaggle, on Locals. Lavelle, originally from Tustin, California is now based in Moscow.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to wide international attention in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning: footage of an airstrike in Baghdad, military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and US diplomatic cables.
Alyona Leonidovna Minkovski is a Russian American journalist, television host and commentator. In 2011, she was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 media list.
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama. A trans woman, Manning stated in 2013 that she had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning.
WikiLeaks began publishing the United States diplomatic cables leak on 28 November 2010. The documents included classified cables that had been sent to the U.S. State Department by its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions around the world. The cables were dated between December 1966 and February 2010, and contained assessments of host countries and their officials. The publication of the cables produced varying responses around the world.
The WikiLeaks whistleblowing website founded by Julian Assange has received praise as well as criticism from the public, hacktivists, journalist organisations and government officials. The organisation has revealed human rights abuses and was the target of an alleged "cyber war". Allegations have been made that Wikileaks worked with or was exploited by the Russian government and acted in a partisan manner during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Assange v Swedish Prosecution Authority were the set of legal proceedings in the United Kingdom concerning the requested extradition of Julian Assange to Sweden for a "preliminary investigation" into accusations of sexual offences allegedly made in August 2010. Assange left Sweden in September 2010 and was arrested in his absence the same day. He was suspected of rape of a lesser degree, unlawful coercion and multiple cases of sexual molestation. In June 2012, Assange breached bail and sought refuge at Ecuador's Embassy in London and was granted asylum.
RT America was a U.S.-based news channel headquartered in Washington, D.C. Owned by TV Novosti and operated by production company T&R Productions, it was a part of the RT network, a global multilingual television news network based in Moscow and funded by the Russian government. The channel said it reached an audience of 85 million people in the United States, but this figure is disputed. It was distributed through select cable providers, over-the-top services, a live stream through its website, and three low-power digital subchannels. Since the channel's closure, viewers who tune into the cable channel or their live stream are being shown a live feed of an RT International broadcast instead.
Margarita Simonovna Simonyan is a Russian propagandist. She is the editor-in-chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT, as well as the state-owned media group Rossiya Segodnya.
Krista Branch is an American singer whose 2010 song "I Am America" has been called the anthem of the Tea Party movement. Branch produced "I Am America" with her husband, who wrote the song, to protest the treatment of the Tea Party by Democrats. After being uploaded to YouTube, the song was aired on Glenn Beck's radio show and it quickly grew in popularity. It was subsequently performed on Fox News and at events across the country. A former American Idol contestant, Branch was eliminated early in the process.
World Tomorrow, or The Julian Assange Show, is a 2012 television program series of 26-minute political interviews hosted by WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange. Twelve episodes were shot prior to the program's premiere. It first aired on 17 April 2012, the 500th day of the "financial blockade" of WikiLeaks, on RT.
Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born American journalist. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is the Washington correspondent for the website Puck.
Abigail Suzanne Martin is an American journalist, TV presenter, and activist. She helped found the citizen journalism website Media Roots and serves on the board of directors for the Media Freedom Foundation which manages Project Censored. Martin appeared in the documentary film Project Censored The Movie: Ending the Reign of Junk Food News (2013), and co-directed 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film (2013).
Juice Rap News is an internet based satirical news show, created in Melbourne by The Juice Media. The show was the creation of a duo, Hugo Farrant and Giordano Nanni, based in Australia and consists of a rapped "news report" with social commentary using comical rap lyrics. The show is known for using satire and rap rhyming to analyse important topics of the day in a humorous, yet philosophical fashion. Juice Rap News is distributed via YouTube. Some episodes were licensed to the international television news channel RT for rebroadcast. The audience of Juice Rap News is international and episodes have been translated into more than 20 languages. 35 episodes were produced in total, plus a video announcing that the 35th episode was the final they would produce. However, in September 2016, due to audience demand, Giordano Nanni produced a special episode for that year's United States presidential election, and announced that the series would continue to produce content from time to time, with a new crew.
Liz Wahl is an American journalist. She was a correspondent for the Russian government-sponsored RT television network from 2011 to 2014 but left the network following a harshly critical on-air resignation that went viral.
Risk is a 2016 American documentary film written and directed by Laura Poitras about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. It was screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Originally titled "Asylum", the film becomes a journey into Poitras's disillusionment with Assange. In the 2016 version of the film, Poitras presents a more sympathetic position towards Assange. The 2017 re-cut version focuses more on a critique of Assange as a flawed character, including his alleged sexual assaults and his "troubling" statements about women and responses to accusations against him.
In 2012, while on bail Julian Assange was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he sought to avoid extradition to Sweden, and what his supporters said was the possibility of subsequent extradition to the US. On 11 April 2019, Ecuador revoked his asylum, he was arrested for failing to appear in court, and carried out of the Embassy by members of the London Metropolitan Police. Following his arrest, the US revealed a previously sealed 2018 US indictment in which Assange was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion related to his involvement with Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.
