I have a friend up in Boston named Anthony Cardinale, and he is a lawyer and some of his clients were, as you might call them, good family men. In that capacity, in defending those clients, Anthony helped crack wide open the corruption in the Boston FBI office regarding the devil’s bargain it had made with serial-murderer Whitey Bulger and his henchmen. Suffice it to say, if you ever get targeted by the Feds in a serious way, and especially if the Feds are playing foul, as they are wont to do from time to time, Anthony is your first three phone calls. As he said in a 2015 Metro piece:

“What my client did was horrible but what the government did was worse,” he said. “That happens in a lot of cases, every day, in every courthouse. That’s what we do as defense attorneys, we stop cops, prosecutors and judges from playing God.”

I check in with Anthony from time to time, because he understands what’s going on with this administration* in a very fundamental way that few other people do. So that is why, when I read this story about Julian Assange serving up El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to cut a deal, I thought of him. This is what they all do, eventually. At some point, they all get the gallows in their eyes, and they try to save themselves. From U.S. News:

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told a British court on Tuesday that he had been promised a pardon by people close to President Donald Trump. Assange made the remarks while appearing at a pretrial hearing via teleconference. Courtroom reporter James Doleman broke the news on Twitter. According to Doleman, Assange said that the pardon was conditional on him publicly announcing that Russia had nothing to do with the attack on the 2016 election.

Assange’s messianism always made me nervous, and his evolution into a disrupter-for-its-own-sake has been a disaster. But, as The Daily Beast reports, nobody wants to go to prison, and Assange really doesn’t want to come here for that purpose.

Assange’s lawyers said on Wednesday that former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal in 2017, a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published. WikiLeaks posted the stolen DNC emails after they were hacked by Russian operatives.

Does anyone doubt at this point that this could’ve happened? It’s exactly the price that the White House asked of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine. Not the investigation, per se, not even that. Just the public announcement of something. The show, that’s all they care about. Putting on the show, while they get rich looting the public treasury and running the Executive Branch like a third-rate protection racket. Now Assange is behaving like anyone else caught in a snare. He’s selling information.

Whitey Bulger, left, knows all about the devil’s deals. Boston Globe Getty Images

And, as Dave Foley, the duplicitous FBI agent in the late George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the best novel written about Boston since Henry James kicked the bucket, says to the unlucky title character:

Yeah, you give me some real stuff, too. You tell me about a guy that's gonna get hit, 15 minutes later he gets hit. You tell me about some guys on a job, but you don't tell me till their coming out the door with the money. That's not helping Uncle, Eddie. You gotta put your whole soul into it.

In a related development, here’s the latest Dead Whitey Bulger news. From the AP:

But now Uhlar says she regrets voting to convict Bulger on any of the murder charges. Her regret stems from a cache of more than 70 letters Bulger wrote to her from prison. In some, he describes his unwitting participation in a secret CIA experiment with LSD. In a desperate search for a mind control drug in the late 1950s, the agency dosed Bulger with the powerful hallucinogen more than 50 times when he was serving his first stretch in prison — something his lawyers never brought up in his federal trial.

“Had I known, I would have absolutely held off on the murder charges,” Uhlar told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “He didn’t murder prior to the LSD. His brain may have been altered, so how could you say he was really guilty?” At the same time, Uhlar says she would have voted to convict Bulger on the long list of other criminal counts, meaning he still would likely have died in prison.

Whitey, who deserves not a lick of sympathy and is properly roasting on a spit in hell as we speak, wrote about his experiences when he was dosed in the Atlanta federal penitentiary.

In minutes the drug would take over, and about eight or nine men — Dr. Pfeiffer and several men in suits who were not doctors — would give us tests to see how we reacted. Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state. Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.

That’s another devil’s bargain that the U.S. government struck—dosing people with a hallucinogen that nobody really understood because the Commies were working on mind control or some such fevered speculation. And it wasn’t just crooks and murderers who got dosed, either. This is the government, as Anthony Cardinale puts it, playing God. And losing. Why? Because the devil wins every bargain you cut with him. That’s something all of world literature, and most of the world's religions, teaches us, and something that every cop, prosecutor, and defense lawyer knows in their bones. The devil wins every bargain you cut with him because God wants it that way.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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