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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