Julian Assange in 2017: The Number One Project of the CIA Has Been the Overthrow of the Government of Bashar Al-Assad

TRANSCRIPT:

ASSANGE: "Be aware that there is a serious conflict between, say, Donald Trump, one of his strategic advisors, Steve Bannon, and other people around them, and the Central Intelligence Agency and some of the other U.S. security agencies. Quite a serious conflict where they are pushing to preserve their power and make the president not change their policies that they want to keep. What’s a prime example of that? I think it is the leading cause of this conflict. It is a policy on Syria. So, the budgetary spend, the number one project of the CIA has been overthrow of the government to Bashar al-Assad, measured by the amount of their budget that they’re spending. So, they spend more of their budget on that than anything else. So, Trump has electoral, you know, during his campaign, a policy of not overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, although I don’t think he put it explicitly like that, but cooperating with Assad and the Russians to attack ISIS, which essentially means not over throwing Bashar al-Assed. So that’s creating enormous problems for this CIA, because not only do they have people that have specialized in doing that and have risen to positions of power with Central Intelligence Agency for doing that, but they’ve made extensive connections and alliances with Saudi Arabia, with Qatar, with Turkey, etc., in order to overthrow that government and to support the forces internal and external that are trying to achieve that."