“Rep. Dana Rohrabacher told Assange “on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr. Assange ... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC [Democratic National Committee] leaks,” The Daily Beast reported.
He got stiffed in that respect, but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
I'm aware, I'm just curious what the OP specifically finds "evil" in these or other actions. Most journalists preferred Hillary, Assange likely did not, and his journalism hindered her campaign. OK, where is the "evil" specifically?
I can't speak for op and evil is subjective - If I have to take a stab at their thoughts, it would be along the lines that he was being a useful idiot for an entity whose goal was to harm a society. You can debate those points; what questions he should have asked, if what the Mueller report says about his sources is true, if he had any actual malice - evil is too strong a word for my taste, as I use it for sadism. He certainly went for retribution however. I don't think we'll know his motivations for sure while he still has legal exposure.
Retribution for what? I'm just not sure what relevance any of this has anyway.
The only questions that are relevant for journalism are, "is the information correct?", and "is the information of interest to the public?".
Every source has their own motives, as does every journalist, and no story is so detailed as to paint the full picture. These questions are ultimately all irrelevant.
Hosting things like the snowden and manning leaks caused a lot of fallout for him, iirc. He was rightly pissed off at the administration. The information he had in 2016 was of interest to and was used against the public - those weren't mutually exclusive.
How this affects a legal precedent is infuriating beyond text, and it is incumbent on good people to defend him now.
Okay, so the "evil" he did is having a preference you don't like?
I mean, I don't like that preference either, but the documents he leaked were real. It's true that the documents were one-sided, but do we know that Wikileaks had documents it could have published on Trump and didn't? Can we agree that maybe Clinton shares some of the blame for, you know, breaking the law? Or the Democrats for even choosing her as a candidate?
What did wikileaks reveal that showed Clinton broke the law?
They revealed the DNC was trying to tip the scales towards her in their primary which was unsavory but I don’t recall wikileaks having anything to do with the classified emails…
although the main purpose of their release timing was to bury, drown, and distract from a certain other piece of info that had come out - bye bye claim to like transparency lol.
And the email server in hindsight also seems quaint - a scandal from a time of innocence and naivety. At the time it seemed overblown too, but now it’s downright quaint. Non stop private email and encrypted messenger app use followed that, and then we all know how classified docs have gone lately.
> although the main purpose of their release timing was to bury, drown, and distract from a certain other piece of info that had come out - bye bye claim to like transparency lol.
This is a conspiracy theory intended to discredit Assange and link him to Trump. There is zero evidence that the leak was timed to distract from anything, or that he and anyone close to Trump were in contact. In fact, Assange had announced an imminent release of information before that "other piece of info" had come out, so if you want to make a causal claim, it would make more sense that that info was timed to distract from Assange's release.
When I’m wrong I correct myself, I was wrong it wasn’t the dnc emails it was the podesta dump that came immediately after the billy bush tape.(1.)
The emails that turned out to be all hot air but hey use what you got when you’ve declared war like assange had on the Clintons. That’s not me saying he’d declare war on her it’s the Intercept publishing that fact (2.)
> he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
I read thru that interview and wasn't able to suss out where Assange asserted he had a goal of tanking the Clinton campaign. Could you repost those lines here for us?
There is no confession if that is what you are asking for. His credibility relies on that not being his goal. Thanks for the polity - the undertone of your question implies he has to confess that word for word for that to be his intent.
> 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.
I re-read the article, and they have a single sentence about the Mueller report - which claimed that they know the IP address of the specific GRU network which hacked the DNC, iirc. Crowd strike is a private company, I wouldn't expect them to have Pwned the GRU. Think that is how the Mueller report was able to say they have an IP? You should at best find a proxy IP when looking from the DNC's servers right? The article mocks this, putting exfiltrated in quotes. Sources and methods won't be publicized to be verified, so we are left with the fricken intelligence community's word (I'm assuming). Crowd strike is hilarious, in that they were so useful for creating political narratives, in more than one way.
I am curious if he thought he was targeting the DNC, because his public presence was disproportionately about things related to them. Notably, Daniel hale chose not to leak to them.
So yes, that would be why $politicalside doesn't like him, because he aligned with a very specific, pro-fascist $politicalside (whether or not he is actually a fascist).
downmod away folks but that's why $politicalside doesnt like Assange. He is extremely biased which makes the "journalist" angle look pretty weak. there's your answer
Having a preference you don't like is pretty different from "doing evil".
I mean, I don't like that preference either, but the documents leaked were real, and I haven't heard that Wikileaks/Assange had equivalent dirt on Trump they could have leaked and didn't.
well a lot of us think Trump was pretty much the definition of evil, i mean, extorted an entire country with the threat of illegally withholding US military aid unless they made up political campaign propaganda for him, sometimes you have to just draw a line, like when it's blindingly obvious Assange preferred helping to install a corrupt grifter to run the US government into the dirt. He hates the US government. A lot of us USians think "try to wreck the US government by installing a mobster as president" is evil.
Responses like this are just so bizarre to me. Do you think other Presidents didn't extort other countries for various concessions, even selfish ones that help their political ambitions? Do you think other Presidents were not grifters? Perhaps you should look into Obama's and the Clinton's net worth before and after their presidency.
What really broke people's brains about Trump is that he was openly rude and obnoxious and unapologetic about it, and so didn't hide the self-serving behind a polite facade that preserved the collective fiction that politicians were looking out for the people and not themselves. That's what people both love and hate about him.
> Do you think other Presidents didn't extort other countries for various concessions, even selfish ones that help their political ambitions?
illegally withheld US military aid unless the country fabricated a story to help the candidate's campaign? No Democratic president in modern times has done such a thing. Obama had a fully Republican congress for 6 years and they would have impeached him for such a thing. But that didn't happen. Nor for Clinton, who was of course impeached, but not for extorting another country; just for lying about sexual favors. that's the best they could come up with. If either president had some something 1% as evil as what Trump did in just that one incident, we of *course* would have been hearing about it for years.
I agree it shouldn't be normal, but it unfortunately already is to various degrees, though often in slightly more "subtle" ways, eg. nation building, defense contracts, insider trading, the revolving door of Washington leading to cushy lobbying gigs, speaking tours, etc.
Obama, Cheney and Bush are war criminals under international law and Trump isn't, but boy when Trump is rude to someone, there's no end to the condemnations that he's the worst person ever, despite being the only president of the past 30 or so years who didn't start a war. Even crazier, those war criminals are now all darlings of the Democrats because they trash talked Trump.
Trump and the way the media played on his craziness for ratings really broke people's brains. I wouldn't want that buffoon as president either, but really, get some perspective. He wouldn't be nearly as appealing if politicians weren't almost universally awful and self-serving, but because that's normal and they're "polite" about screwing you over, well that's just fine and dandy.
Even if he did have dirt on Trump and didn't publish it, I'm not sure why that's evil. Discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop was held back before the last election and most journalists still think that was perfectly justified. Either both are evil, or neither are, we should not apply double standards.
He got stiffed in that respect, but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
Old interview of him talking about it: https://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/25/exclusive_wikileaks_j...