As of last Friday, the highest levels of the Trump administration are working “to try and intervene” in what has been dubbed the “shameful saga of Sabrina de Sousa” (click here) – the Portuguese American held in a Porto jail awaiting extradition to Italy to serve a four-year jail sentence for carrying out government orders.
While international media has made much of the fact that former CIA intelligence officer de Sousa has lost all her legal bids for freedom, Secure Freedom Radio – a US hosted by controversial former government defence advisor Frank Gaffney – reports that this is a story that should be “going away soon”.
The new US government is “now working on finding a solution and getting her (Sabrina) out of this predicament”, said Gaffney in conversation with former director of the CIA’s clandestine operations division, Bradley Johnson.
Fox News has also taken up the case, saying that the new administration recognises that de Sousa’s conviction by an Italian court over a decade ago was “a violation of her diplomatic status”.
The “highest levels” of Donald Trump’s new government are now “trying to intervene on her behalf” following years in which de Sousa has been effectively “abandoned” – “thrown under a bus” as Bradley Johnson termed it, for carrying out orders that were “approved all the way up to the White House”.
This is the ‘last throw of the dice” that de Sousa has been waiting for since hearing that Trump’s intelligence advisor Pete Hoekstra was on her side (click here).
But as Gaffney asked his interviewee last Friday, “what would be the impact if the United States government does not move heaven and earth to protect Sabrina de Sousa?”
His reasoning centred on the impact on intelligence gathering if operatives realise that their government will not support them if things go wrong.
For now, this is the “best news yet” in the fight to free Sabrina de Sousa from what Euro MEP Ana Gomes has dubbed a “shameful case” of being hung out to dry by a government that should be looking after its own.
