By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell Book
BBC - Guardian UK - Honduras - ESPN
UN GATE / SDNY, March 22 -- In the video as if in a bad dream Claudia Drury was confessing to keeping the money from her work in prostitution.
Larry Ray was off-camera telling her to repeat it, again and again, and asking, Why. Kurt Wheelock downloaded the clip, a Government Exhibit in Ray's halting trial, and put it on his Twitter feed. There were a slew of Likes but no complaints.
And so when the next night he got another exhibit, an e-mail from Drury to Ray's co-defendant Isabella Pollok, Kurt did the same. He uploaded, this time to DocumentCloud, then put a link on Twitter. But the this time the reaction was different.
On his way into the SDNY courthouse Kurt stopped as he did and shot a two-minute vlog. He sometimes called them a vLAWg, since they concerned the law, and trials, including two United Nations corruption trials he'd reported on before coming to cover the courts each day, and more recent and relatedly China spying cases, also involving the UN.
In this vlog Kurt mentioned the list he had uploaded, calling it a list of Claudia Drury's clients because that's what she'd said in the e-mail now exhibit. Kurt uploaded the video, which devoted its second half to the worsening war in Ukraine (which UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had initially ordered his officials to not call a war or even an invasion).
Then Kurt returned to the trial, with Claudia Drury still on direct examination, sitting in the plastic witness box with a humming HEPPA filter on top, law in the time of COVID.
Just before 10 am another e-mail went out to Kurt and others who cover the court, to immediately take down the exhibit, it had been made available in error. It rubbed Kurt the wrong way.
At the UN he had been ordered to take down photographs leaked to him by a whistleblower victim in the UN's kargaroo court. He was told if he did not provide proof he had destroyed the evidence he would be further banned for life. He did not take it down, and remained banned to this day despite a decision by the UN's equally kangaroo appeals court that a life ban was contrary to the UN Charter. And so it went.
Still, because he liked covering the SDNY court from the inside, Kurt deleted the file from DocumentCloud. People quickly asked him about it and his feelings were confused. But it was all put off when Larry Ray had a seizure, his second of the trial, and was wheeled out onto Worth Street and into an ambulance, his tongue sticking out of his mouth.
Kurt filmed Ray's exit with his phone and put that video on Twitter. Some quickly said that Ray must be faking, with that stuck-out tongue. Others said that Ray should just die quickly, or continue the trial by Zoom. But there is of course the U.S. Constitution.
But doesn't that also have a First Amendment, UNlike the UN?
Next keep a more direct request, to to take down the tweet. Not the ghoulish video of Larry Ray and his tongue but the tweet from the previous night linking to the now-deleted file on DocumentCloud. Somehow an image of the first page of the e-mail remained online blow the tweet. The requester called it a screen shot but that's not what it was.
Kurt had sent an e-mail himself, to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which had done a little but not a lot when he had been thrown out of the UN. He asked them what were his rights as a reporter in this instance. Kurt was a lawyer, too, but these guy were supposed to be the experts, weren't they? But they did not respond, at least not in time.
Kurt deleted the tweet.
Now the responses picked up and grew more shrill. First it was, Why was the John list gone? Then it was, Release the list, don't be part of the cover-up. Finally, the tweet referred to him and his feed, call it Inner City Press, as sell-outs cow-towing to the Department of Justice or the New York pedophile cabal.
It was ironic: Kurt had been the one pushing to get another judge, soon to be elevated, to retain a public listen-only call-in line for the Ghislaine Maxwell trial so people could hear the evidence about THAT global pedophile cabal.
Still, even back when he was a kid, Kurt found it hard not to respond to a challenge. If someone dared him, or he dared himself, to walk along the narrow top of a tall brick wall, he'd find himself doing it, then the rush when he reached the other side and jumped down.
And do it might be here, if only in slow motion. The Daily Mail had reported that the John list was on a twitter feed - his, @InnerCityPress - and taking it from there had mentioned the employers but not the names of some of the clients. It wouldn't be hard to link the two, if only on another platform. And so it began: #JohnListGone? More - first in a series - on Patreon here.
[It, like a song about Lev Parnas was also covered, behind a paywall, by New York Magazine which had this to say about Inner City Press' covered in late 2021 of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, book here via one of the companies with an executive on the John list.]
When Inner City Press for investigative reporting was roughed up and thrown out onto First Avenue from covering the United Nations of/by UNSG Antonio Guterres, many did nothing. But as we've previously noted, the First Amendment stops at First Avenue. We'll have more on this, here and on other platforms.
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