July 20, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  In the endless brain fart cyclone that is the Trump era, CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta has made a name for himself posing as a martyr of the free press. While US mass media have made a theatrical WWE performance of Trump’s occasional mean words toward Acosta under the banner of defending press freedoms, it has been pathetically sympathetic to this administration’s attempt to actually prosecute an actual journalist, Julian Assange, under the Espionage Act.

It is about time, then, that someone highlighted the irony and hypocrisy of this ridiculous melodrama by confronting Acosta on these contradictions directly. Thanks to independent video journalist Matt Orfalea, we now have footage of one such necessary confrontation taking place.

At a publicity interview for Acosta’s new book (titled “The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America” in the author’s trademark self-righteous and histrionic fashion), Orfalea asked Acosta what he thought about the Trump administration’s charging Assange under the Espionage Act.

Acosta word-saladed for a while, mentioned apropos of nothing that Orfalea is probably a WikiLeaks supporter, and then, as you could probably predict, began babbling about Russia.

“My understanding about the Julian Assange situation is that you know he is being charged not just for trying to speak truth to power and trying to reveal things,” Acosta said. “He’s in trouble for other things. And you know what we’ve seen during the 2016 campaign where there were contacts between WikiLeaks and Russian operatives. That I think takes Wikileaks and Julian Assange into sort of a different category than is a straight news organization — straight publisher of news around the world.”