> Assange and WikiLeaks are guilty of participating in Russian attempts to spread disinformation in support of the Russian's agenda at a bare minimum.
What disinformation? They were hacked emails, the contents of which were authentic. Any disinformation involved would be intentional misinterpretation of the emails, which trolls on 4chan did, not Julian Assange or WikiLeaks afaik. Trolls on 4chan should never be taken seriously.
Also, is there any evidence that WikiLeaks had access to GOP hacked emails? You seem to imply it in your comment, but I have not found any sources claiming this is the case from brief Googling.
The biggest, real story exposed in those hacked emails was simply that the DNC was not a neutral party. They were helping Hillary Clinton get nominated, specifically in the case of sharing debate questions with her. Is there a reason this should not have been an important story at the time? I think it actually got a bit drowned out in comparison to all the trolling over Pizzagate. My base assumption is the people who even paid much attention to that story were the subset of Democrats who wanted Bernie to win the nomination.
The idea that truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate was reprehensible if it affected the outcome of the election was never actually justified, it was simply assumed.
The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks didn't reveal its source, but Assange said "no, nope, it definitely wasn't the Russian government, no way".
Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.
>Are you implying that the DNC intentionally leaked the emails to wikileaks and are colluding with the FBI to blame Russia?
Nope. He's just implying that FBI and DNC are working together.
What is more likely though is: DNC was hacked, Wikileaks is doing what it has done for 10 years i.e. releasing information so that it makes maximum impact and Clintons are trying to damage-control by implying that Russia is involved... all while telling their Russian friends to pretend as if they support Trump (who has never worked with anything Russian ever... unlike the Clintons).
>> Incidentally, what are the war crimes that were specifically revealed by this leak?
I guess the same as the massive corruption exposed by the brave Julian Assange of the infamous organized criminal organization known as the DNC. What? All the emails occurred after Sanders mathematically lost the nomination? Are you telling me the DNC was trying to support the certain nominee in a general election? Horrible and shocking!
On a related note the DNC scheduled so few debates because they wanted to help Clinton clearly. (Just ignore the fact that the number of debates was comparable to 2008 with far less candidates and a less competitive race.)
> Third one of the things that did ultimately come out of the DNC leak they were a part of was that some of the documents were altered from the originals and so they were “mostly real” but did have fake things in them. The reason for that was that it was an intelligence operation by the Russians that was specifically designed to throw the election at the last minute.
This isn't a valid criticism of Wikileaks. If the Russians were responsible - and there was so much later-discredited bullshit kicked up about hypothetical Russians in 2016 I'm not taking that at face value - but if they were they could just have posted up a big torrent somewhere to the same overall effect.
> I find it difficult to believe Wikileaks would have hesitated a nanosecond to hang any trump out to dry given the opportunity.
And yet they did have leaks about the RNC that weren't released. Why?
I mean, dirt on Trump isn't hard to come by - are you claiming that not once has anyone sent Wikileaks negative information on him or his campaign, and that's the only reason we haven't seen any?
> I think you wanted Wikileaks to suppress the information there and they didn’t.
To be unequivocally clear - The DNC is corrupt to its very soul. Whatever you or I think of Bernie Sanders, the way they handled the whole Sanders/Clinton situation is despicable and vile and an insult to the members of the party they purport to lead. And the fact that Debbie Wasserman-Schulz was running the Clinton campaign, effectively, less than 24 hours after being finally forced out of DNC leadership, to me just demonstrates that those theories were accurate.
> The content of the emails was the problem not Wikileaks for publishing truth.
Yes.
The other problem is Wikileaks sitting on OTHER email contents and choosing NOT to publish them AND communicating with political candidates on what they'd like to see leaked and not, and when.
> VIPS instead surmises that, after WikiLeaks' Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016 his intention to publish Hillary Clinton-related emails, the DNC rushed to fabricate evidence that it had been hacked by Russia to defuse any potential WikiLeaks disclosures.
This is laughably stupid. Why would attributing the hack to Russia instead of Wikileaks or whatever make any difference to the contents of the hacks?
The Washington Post, which published the article linked by HN, has a bit of an undisclosed angle in going against these leaks. This can be seen from the leaked email above about the clandestine fundraiser the lawyers would never allow ("Great – we were never going to list since the lawyers told us we cannot do it.").
But maybe someone can point me to where they've explained themselves, because it's entirely possible that I missed it.
> I don’t believe for a second that they didn’t know what they were doing when they partnered with Russia in 2016 to help draw as much attention as possible to the DNC emails
I don't know why you would talk like this. This is just a big lie wrapped in a sarcastic and condescending tone substituting for evidence. What you believe is not interesting to people, they care why you believe it because you may have an argument they haven't thought of.
The only thing that you're explaining to us is that you accept every anti-Assange argument proffered by the Democratic Party, and that the fact that the release was damaging is enough information to "confirm" for you that they are all true. If the release weren't damaging, there'd be no reason to talk about it, therefore you're citing the reasons you're having a discussion of Assange's guilt as evidence of Assange's guilt. It's weaker than circumstantial, even; you've simply decided that the DNC emails were released optimally for mysterious Russian interests, and are making a secular intelligent design argument.
I can't be read as anything but a public statement that you'll accept any charge against anyone accused of damaging your party, and over the subject of the safety of a journalist exposing government corruption no less. The scariest part of the whole thing is that the DNC emails exposed corruption. We should be celebrating their release because they exposed as true what was only suspected before. The Democratic Party fired people over it. But the current zeitgeist is about suppressing information from enemies and boosting information from friends, and Assange is a designated enemy. If the Democratic Party weren't so horrifically undemocratic internally, it would be celebrating the exposure of corruption in its own ranks, but instead it mourns the financial losses of the insiders who missed out on a H. Clinton presidency.
I will never get over Democrats supporting Trump in his prosecution of Assange because they decided that Assange supported Trump. Convincing people to support Trump prosecuting a journalist in order to avenge H. Clinton's loss to Trump is a real knot of a thought process to be twisted into.
> The story so far as I know is that "multiple US intelligence agencies" told Congress that (in 2016) people working for the Russian government hacked the DNC and provided the emails to Wikileaks.
Assange is the one publishing the secrets of "US intelligence agencies," so they don't like him very much. Given this conflict of interest and the knowledge that they'd never be asked to provide any actual evidence, their credibility is low.
> Mueller proceeded to indict a lot of Russians who allegedly were involved.
He indicted actual Russians, who are in Russia and not subject to US jurisdiction. The expectation was that they wouldn't show up in court and prosecutors would never have to prove their allegations.
But even if you ignore that they never proved it in court and just assume that it was Russians who obtained the emails, that still doesn't imply that Assange reports to Putin or had any knowledge Russians were involved. And given the unexplained decision to drop the charges, his impression that they weren't may have been the truth.
"Sources lacking in credibility make claim without evidence" is debunked by Hitchens's razor.
Do you have anything concrete to back that up? Wikileaks has been foolhardedly devoted to exposing uncomfortable truths about institutions across the political spectrum. Some people are maybe upset that this probably lead to Trump's election.
> who convinced people to ignore a woman’s story of sexual assault
The preliminary investigation into that case has been dropped. As far as I'm aware, he made no effort to convince people to ignore the story, but he did strongly deny the allegations. This says nothing either way of his innocence or criminality.
RE: Anyone questioning Assange's ties to Russia, there's the following article. Assange was purportedly contacted about a pardon in 2017 in exchange for denying Russian involvement into leaking Clinton's emails (which Julian declined)
> Lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s extradition trial in Britain have accepted the claim that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a presidential pardon by a congressman on the condition that he would help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.
> revelations in the emails that party officials had privately rooted
This does little justice to what actually is said in those emails
I mean I don't get why they talk about him timing it to hurt her, he literally said that the next emails he releases will contain “enough evidence” for the Department of Justice to indict Hillary Clinton. [0]
I guess it gets the most media attention now, albeit limited from mainstream publications. I find it annoying that the most coverage from mainstream American publications have been about the leaks and not the content.
More people have opinions on whether the Russians were the source for Wikileaks than about the content of the emails.
>The narrative spread far and wide is that Russia hacked the DNC and passed the emails to wikileaks, who distributed them in order to hurt HRC in the election and boost Trump.
Yes. And as far as I know this is generally not really disputed by experts nowadays, no?
>This was the premises for the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which took approximately 2 years and cost 26 million dollars and included "2,800 subpoenas, executed almost 500 search warrants, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses."
Yes.
>But nobody thought to go England (the FBI has a field office there, so no "going" necessary), where Julian Assange was under house arrest in Ecuador's embassy, and ask "Hey, where did you get those emails?" Oops!
I'd be pretty surprised if US or US-aligned law enforcement or intelligence didn't try to ask him about it, if they were able to. I'm not sure if they would legally be able to while he was protected by the Ecuadorian embassy, though.
Regardless, of course Russian intelligence isn't going to tell Assange "hey, Russian intelligence here, here's some emails". Assange would just repeat what we all already know: someone using the name Guccifer 2.0 supplied him with the emails. Beyond that, he knows nothing about who may be behind that identity. Why would he and how could he?
And as another commenter said: he could just refuse to say anything at all. "Wikileaks doesn't reveal any information about our sources."
Either way, he's not really the source of truth on this issue. He was the broker that helped distribute the emails; there's no reason why he would know anything about the true identity of the culprits, or even if the person who emailed him was actually the culprit and not just a different broker in the chain, etc.
> There is no confession if that is what you are asking for.
Your parent said:
but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign [here is an] Old interview of him talking about it: (link)
That seems to clearly imply that Assange would talk about his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
>Thanks for the polity - the undertone of your question implies he has to confess that word for word for that to be his intent.
The article fairly well debunks the source for those narratives (that Assange tanked the DNC on behalf of Russia). Here is the relevant quote.
Outraged the Clinton campaign swiftly ascribed the leaks to Vladimir Putin's intelligence apparatus as part of an operation to secure Trump's victory. The accusation was fueled by forensic analysis from the DNC's cybersecurity consultants, from CrowdStrike, detailing the potential links between the leaks and the Russian government.
Testifying under oath in a closed-door session before the committee in 2017, CrowdStrike’s chief security officer Shawn Henry admitted that he had no “concrete evidence” that the Russians had stolen the emails, or indeed that anyone had hacked the DNC’s system.
This crucial interview remained locked away until 2020. The press did little to acknowledge it; the testimony failed to attract even a passing mention in the New York Times, the Guardian, or any other mainstream outlet that had previously charted the Russian hacking story.
Do I think Assange targeted the DNC? Perhaps in the larger context of targeting powerful entities who hide details that directly affect the non-powerful. As to claims that Assange was directly working for the Russians, I strongly recommend reading the article all the way through.
sidebar: I like the work polity, btw. I can't recall coming across it before.
> How could WikiLeaks be interpreted as anything other than promoting civil liberties? Its sole purpose ...
Perhaps taken at face value that's true, but I judge them by their actions:
* They consistently advocate for one political point of view, an anti-US government one. Where are leaks about Putin? Bernie Sanders? Jill Stein? For comparison, the NY Times is hard on both candidates: For example, they both broke the Clinton email server story and Trump's tax return.
* They are cooperating in what appears to be a Russian intelligence disinformation campaign to disrupt U.S. democracy. Assange seems too smart to be an unwitting participant.
* There are reports it's due to a vendetta Assange has against Clinton.
Based on the above and other actions, I question whether their mission really is to promote civil liberties.
> Why in God's name are reputable news outlets repeating the completely unverified rumor that it was a Russian hack of the DNC? It seems insane to me!
The DNCleaks showed that the DNC directly colludes and influences various media outlets. They also revealed that the DNC strategy for dealing with any leaks of emails (originally for Hillary's private server) would be blamed on Russian hacking.
What we are seeing is basically the DNCs strategy coming in to play, except it's over the DNCleaks instead of anything from Hillary's email server.
The level of media manipulation and propaganda that is happening in this election campaign is astounding.
>Let's assume for a moment that your premise is true, and Assange got the DNC documents from Russian intelligence. Should he have buried the documents?
The idea that Wikileaks took a non-partisan, journalistic attitude towards these leaks is a fantasy. He repeatedly contacted the Trump campaign and told them that he had "damaging leaks" on the way, and made it clear in internal chats that he wanted to use Wikileaks to sway the election outcome.
> Here's my other issue with treating Assange as a journalist: he was clearly playing politics. You saw this in the Democratic email hacking and publication. This undermines the whole theory that Wikileaks was somehow different, impartial or open. It is and always was another tool to further a political end. At some point you aren't a journalist anymore;
How should 2016 Bernie supporters feel seeing the leaked emails showing the establishment conspiring against him? “Political” in the pejorative really depends on which side you’re one.
Wikileaks is/was a threat to the establishment. That’s why he’s currently locked up.
What disinformation? They were hacked emails, the contents of which were authentic. Any disinformation involved would be intentional misinterpretation of the emails, which trolls on 4chan did, not Julian Assange or WikiLeaks afaik. Trolls on 4chan should never be taken seriously.
Also, is there any evidence that WikiLeaks had access to GOP hacked emails? You seem to imply it in your comment, but I have not found any sources claiming this is the case from brief Googling.
The biggest, real story exposed in those hacked emails was simply that the DNC was not a neutral party. They were helping Hillary Clinton get nominated, specifically in the case of sharing debate questions with her. Is there a reason this should not have been an important story at the time? I think it actually got a bit drowned out in comparison to all the trolling over Pizzagate. My base assumption is the people who even paid much attention to that story were the subset of Democrats who wanted Bernie to win the nomination.
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