By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell Book
Books - Guardian - Honduras - ESPN NY Mag
LITERARY SDNY, July 1 – After Josh Schulte established, at length, that the cooperator against him Carlos Betances had sold drugs in the Bronx and was testifying not only to shorten his sentence but also to try to get an S visa to stay in the United States, things moved to FBI Agent Evan Schlessinger.
He had led a team of 50, yes Five-Oh, agents into the MCC jail in 2018 to search for Schulte's cell phone that Chirping Carlos had smuggled in then told the prosecutors and FBI, through his lawyer, about.
That the phone was also used by Omar Amanat, the first cousin of Huma Abadeen, didn't matter to him he said. They knew what they were looking for. And what they were not looking for.
But they also found Josh Schulte's journals and now they were being read out in court. "I will bring down embassies and end occupations," Schulte had written.
Why hadn't this made him like a Snowden or Daniel Hale, a principled whistleblower (at least to some) instead of a troll? Well, there was also the reference to fifty billion dollars, and about anger on telephone calls with his parents when his jail house essays like Malware of the Mind were mispublished on Facebook, followed by being apologetic.
Was it fair or seemly to use a person's diaries against them? They had gotten a warrant. In jail, unless you get a contraband cell phone, you can't speak without being recorded; Schulte couldn't take notes into a hidden virtual machine on a computer. So he kept handwritten journals and now here they were.
He'd written, "Give me a phone and a blog and I'll change the world." He hadn't.
But had Collateral Murder, Manning magnum opus, stopped the war on Afghanistan? Or hadn't that some more than a decade later, a shameful pullout with translators rounded up and slaughtered, UN local staff left to die, Big Tony laughing all the way to Lisbon? More on Patreon here.
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