A former U.S. Defense and State Department official is speaking out and urging progressives to vote for Democratic presidential Joe Biden due to President Donald Trump’s threat to the Constitution.
Daniel Ellsberg published an op-ed in the Detroit Metro Times asking the American public to back Biden in the upcoming presidential election. Ellsberg, who identifies as a progressive voter who initially supported Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) presidential campaign, admitted that Biden was not his first candidate of choice.
While Ellsberg expressed concern about Trump’s repeated dismissals of climate change warnings, he also stressed how important it is to combat the growing threat to the United States’ democracy.
“More urgently, we’re facing an authoritarian threat to our democratic system of a kind we’ve never seen before,” Ellsberg said. “Right now he is even casting unwarranted doubt on the validity of mail-in ballots, and in other ways as well putting in question for the first time in our history whether he would peacefully leave office after a full-accounting of votes cast by Election Day gave the majority in the Electoral College to his opponent.” Continue reading.
As the Justice Department charges WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, we speak to Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. In 1971, he was charged with violating the Espionage Act for leaking a top-secret report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam to The New York Times and other publications. At the time, Ellsberg faced over 100 years in prison. He tells Democracy Now!, “There hasn’t actually been such a significant attack on the freedom of the press … since my case in 1971.”