No, but knowingly releasing documents that were partially or entirely forged by the Russian intelligence agencies does make one a Russian puppet.
Which is exactly what Wikileaks did, openly, at Assange's direction...despite the misgivings of the rest of the staff that the releases were timed for political effect on the US campaign on not out of some desire for the truth.
This is the first I've heard that the DNC/Podesta emails were forged, do you have a source for that?
And personally, assuming the emails are legit, I would rather they release that info before the election when it actually matters instead of afterwards. If a candidate is engaging in collusion/corruption to rig the primary against a competitor (Sanders) and receiving debate questions prior to a debate that's something I'd want voters to know about.
This is in regards to emails leaked from a journalist David Satter by Fancy Bear, the article doesn't say those were published by Wikileaks and I couldn't confirm elsewhere that they were. The article does mention:
>The Clinton campaign warned about the files pilfered from Podesta and published on Wikileaks, though it never offered any proof.
While the Podesta emails are believed by US intelligence to have been hacked by Fancy Bear as well, the wikipedia page on the Podesta hack says this:
>Cybersecurity experts interviewed by PolitiFact believe the majority of emails are probably unaltered, while stating it is possible that the hackers inserted at least some doctored or fabricated emails. The article then attests that the Clinton campaign, however, has yet to produce any evidence that any specific emails in the latest leak were fraudulent.[4] A subsequent investigation by U.S. intelligence agencies also reported that the files obtained by WikiLeaks during the U.S. election contained no "evident forgeries".[5]
In regards to the DNC server leaks, there is no convincing evidence the Russians were involved and I do not trust the conclusions of an analysis done by a third-party cyber security company contracted by the DNC (Crowdstrike)
Technically, if you hack a mail server, you'll get access to DKIM private keys. I would only trust these mails DKIM signature if I personally received them prior to the breach.
Doing the Russians' bidding by enabling their interference in the US presidential election and openly stating his preference as to the result destroyed any possible credibility as a "journalist" and made him look very much like a Russian puppet.
>Doing the Russians' bidding by enabling their interference in the US presidential election
How specifically did he do this? Publishing 'Collateral Murder' embarrassed a lot of people in Washington and probably affected elections afterwards, yet I never heard anyone make these accusations back then. And this hysteria about Russia over 40k worth of Facebook ads and some twitter bots is outrageous, Facebook/Twitters policy of censoring conservatives likely has a much more significant effect on elections than those ads and bots ever could.
>openly stating his preference as to the result destroyed any possible credibility as a "journalist" and made him look very much like a Russian puppet.
The entirety of the corporate media openly stated their preference during the election as well, to put it lightly.
Releasing emails from the DNC is one thing, but releasing them with timing especially to have maximum political impact against one candidate is another thing entirely.
Timing the release of relevant information for maximum impact is exactly what any self-respecting media organisation should do.
Your statement only makes sense if Wikileaks had similar information regarding the Trump (edit: or other conservative) campaign and refused to release it.
You conveniently ignore the "political impact against one candidate" bit.
So your statement only makes sense if you assume that all journalists are trying to influence politics to the benefit of their preferred candidate in their reporting.
My point is, unless he also had info on Trump/Republicans, he couldn’t have impacted their campaign. So impact of just one candidate/party was inevitable. Then, optimise for max impact.
Wouldn't it have been dishonest to let people vote before they knew the DNC unfairly treated candidates that polled better against Trump like Sanders despite claiming to be neutral when taking people's money?
Releasing after the fact would have been dishonest and less helpful to either party. It also would have been dishonest to people who donated.
Yes, the DNC chairman resigned and was immediately given the golden parachute of being hired by the Clinton campaign, but the DNC could have made things right instead of that joke resignation. It's not Wikileak's fault the DNC is corrupt and stayed corrupt instead of doing the right thing, and they did the right thing by giving them a chance.
Which is exactly what Wikileaks did, openly, at Assange's direction...despite the misgivings of the rest of the staff that the releases were timed for political effect on the US campaign on not out of some desire for the truth.