If it's not "Russia" it's going to be a big embarrassment to many of his opponents. And worst case, even if it was Russia, it would still make him look good to be the one who got this confession from Assange.
> If it's not "Russia" it's going to be a big embarrassment to many of his opponents.
No, Assange being paid off by Trump for saying that it's someone other than Russia (which Assange has said, in less specific terms, before, repeatedly, as part of denying that he himself was acting as a witting or unwitting Russian agent and not an independent actor won't embarrass anyone) won't embarrass anyone.
OTOH, the offer (if there's was concrete evidence of it) itself would bolster Assange's claim that this is a political prosecution by the US Administration.
He would be able to say that his opponents spent 2 years on a wild goose chase and were harassing someone (himself) who was telling the truth the whole time.
I'm curious about the same thing, unless maybe he's gambling that it won't be completely tied to Russia. I suppose it could be that if it is something damaging, he can release the information and use it politically, and if not he'll try and keep it secret. This is a total guess though.
> I'm curious about the same thing, unless maybe he's gambling that it won't be completely tied to Russia.
Pardon offers are in no way binding or enforceable, so no actual gambling is involved. You just don't follow through unless you get the answer you want, as well as making very clear (such as by spending multiple years building a particular public narrative which the defendant actively participated in around your preferred answer) what the expected answer is so that, regardless of what the true answer is, the defendant knows what answer gets them free of the charges.
> I suppose it could be that if it is something damaging, he can release the information and use it politically, and if not he'll try and keep it secret.
This is in a British court, and the President is not empowered to gag the courts anyway (except sort of I guess, at the highly-constitutionally-questionable national security trials)
It's a no lose situation. There are two possible outcomes: Russia did it, or someone else did it. The FBI, CIA, and NSA published a report saying that the hack was carried out by Russia to support the Trump campaign, that is the accepted truth on the matter. Worst case scenario for Trump is that this holds up, in which case nothing changes.
In the event that Assange could prove some other actor sourced the emails, that would mean that the FBI, NSA, and CIA were wrong, and the single biggest argument in support of the 'Russia Collision' narrative would go away. Trump would fold this into his narrative that the investigation into Russian collusion was a witch hunt.
> In the event that Assange could prove some other actor sourced the emails, that would mean that the FBI, NSA, and CIA were wrong, ...
Which is just about impossible for him to prove. Does Assange have access to the kind of IT forensics experts, access to the hacked systems and other resources to prove someone else did it? No, he does not. He didn't do the hacking himself. Whoever he did get the leaked info from could of course claim not to be working for the Russians as an intermediary. But that is just a claim, and not proof.
Assange doesn't have to prove anything. He just has to say what Trump wants to get the pardon, and Trump will blast that all over Twitter and on every news outlet in the country.
If that sounds like an official act in return for a personal political favor to the president to help his reelection chances and therefore is illegal, you would be correct!
If you believe that Trump works under mafia rules of intimidation and plausible deniability, then you can read this as Assange can support Trump's theory that the emails came from the Ukraine, or he can face prosecution.
It's unlikely that someone with such an understanding (whether or not it's a correct assumption) would believe that Assange coming forward and saying he was given the emails by Russian assets coordinating with Roger Stone under the direction of Trump would then result in the promised pardon.
Note that, since then, Assange has not come forward with exculpatory evidence for Trump and the administration has begun prosecuting Assange.
Trump is a chaos monkey; it doesn't have to. This is why I found it hilarious when people believed in 2016 that a vote for Trump was a vote to free Julian Assange; the man doesn't adhere to traditional political strategy.
It could be to show information security in government is worth more than either party.
Also, being able to pardon Assange would also be his version of the Obama->Manning moment: viciously prosecutor a whistle blower and then symbolically free said whistle blower to make yourself look like the hero.
Even though the Russia narrative has pretty much been shown to be a pile of rubbish, a lot of Americans still don't believe it. Having Assange say it would reinforce that reality.
The "Russia narrative" was always extremely vague, so I doubt it can be disproven as such. There were a lot of insinuations that there was something big going on, but the facts that were substantiated were pretty minor. I haven't heard anyone alleging the emails that were leaked were anything but true, either - it is pretty grim when the most devastating tactic a foreign adversary can deploy is the truth.
A valid point. There's a huge disconnect in the American public's understanding of how politics works and how politics actually works. That can be exploited by revealing how the sausage is made on only one side of the aisle to paint the other side in proportionately better light (because people like to assume that the sausage machines work differently on the two sides, without asking why that assumption should be true or why that assumption should imply that the sausage-maker on the other side is better, not worse).
There was a 1,000 page bipartisan Senate report about Russian meddling in the 2016 election just released a few weeks ago [1]. The Senate intelligence committee is controlled by the GOP, so it's unlikely that this is some sort of partisan effort, and it's pretty damning.
Here's a summary of some of the key findings [2]. Among other things, the head of the Trump campaign was sharing confidential campaign information with an individual that the new GOP report identifies as a "Russian intelligence officer". It's all around pretty shocking stuff, if we lived in a world where people could be shocked anymore.
> Kilimnik was also the “primary liaison” between Manafort and one of his clients, sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, according to the Senate report, which also alleges that Manafort “worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.”
> The GOP-led committee said it “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU's hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” a reference to the Russian cyberattacks that targeted the DNC in the run-up to the election.
> Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, hinted that senators have additional information, including “evidence connecting Kilimnik to the GRU's hack-and-leak operations,” but those elements are redacted.
There is only a single source that can determine if it was the Russians that hackced the DNC: CrowdStrike. The servers were never made available to any government body or intelligence agency. The entirety of this narrative falls under the opinion of potentially a single unnamed, unaccountable person at some security consultancy. A single person who is working for a consultancy getting paid millions of dollars to serve a customer, and to make that customer happy, and to potentially deliver results that the customer wants.
Additionally, CrowdStrike admitted in sworn testimony that it didn't have any concrete proof. That their findings were based on appearances and estimations and assumptions.
>The servers were never made available to any government body or intelligence agency
Yes, because the only source of intelligence on an operation is the crime scene itself. Clearly this is bogus and so is the insinuation that there is no other sources of intelligence on Russian operations than evidence from the hacked server.
It actually seems like the most politically-neutral offer he can reasonably make. Many principled people want to see Assange released from his political prosecution, but the Russia narrative, though basically dead at this point, can still be an effective bludgeon or pretense for action: if the pardon is executed haphazardly, and without deference to the aggrieved party (the Democrats), it could be undermined and become worse than nothing.
A lot of people are still salty that Assange did journalism that exposed Hillary Clinton's wrongdoing, even people who idolized him until 2016 for his excellent work on America's foreign conflicts, so it's really hard to navigate this labyrinth and get away with doing the right thing.