[mhh__]

WikiLeaks arguably helped people to do that quite effectively. They've never really claimed to be neutral but especially around 2016 they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state (at best as a messenger). III.B.3 of the Mueller report

I don't know if they are evil but I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.

[93po]

> They've never really claimed to be neutral but especially around 2016 they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state (at best as a messenger).

Assange has a 100% truthful track record in matters of Wikileaks and was extremely explicit that the source of the Hillary leaks was not Russian in origin. This is more propaganda that people keep spreading and is exhausting. It's also exhausting that the narrative continues to be about Assange instead of Hillary for actually doing illegal and fucked up things.

[kornhole]

That is part of the false narrative you and many were fed and believed. Assange repeatedly explained that documents you are referring to were leaked from someone inside and alluded without exposing that the source could have been Seth Rich who was shot in the street.

[yclept]

That is part of the false narrative you and many were fed and believed. Investigations, reporting from many parties, and the vicitm's own family weigh against this drivel.

[kornhole]

The intelligence agencies and a paid contractor came up with the other story full of holes. Julian Assange has never lied to the public or published untrue information that I know of. So it is a matter of who do you trust: the government who constantly lies, or Julian Assange.

[the_third_wave]

> III.B.3 of the Mueller report

The 'Russian collusion case' has been thoroughly discredited so why do you bring it up here, other than to muddle the issue?

If you want to have a clear case of meddling with presidential elections I'd point at the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funding of the Steele dossier. Should that be brought up here as well? The 'dossier' was also discredited but it was used in the same way the data from Wikileaks was used to target Clinton. The difference here was that the data on Clinton was true while the 'Steele dossier' was fictitious.

[zopa]

Some of people’s wilder imaginings about Trump and Russia didn’t check out, sure, but I certainly consider the Mueller Report itself accurate.

[lamontcg]

> The 'Russian collusion case' has been thoroughly discredited

No, "collusion" doesn't exist as a crime. It wasn't discredited it just doesn't exist as a criminal thing.

And it turns out that "conspiracy" is something that requires the participants to understand that they're doing something wrong, and Mueller couldn't find any evidence of that. When you're rich and committing white collar crimes then the defense of "I didn't know it was illegal" apparently works, unlike us plebs when we get pulled over by the traffic cops.

There was plenty of evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and the Russians. Just none of it was considered crimes by the Muller investigation. Wikileaks was actively lending support to the Trump campaign in order to attempt to get Trump elected and defeat Hillary. So were the Russians. That is on solid factual ground. But Mueller didn't find anything there that the DOJ could charge him over.

It is also pretty clear that Mueller thought that the revelations would be shocking enough that Congress would impeach and remove Trump for what he had done and that "high crimes and misdemeanors" (which really has no legal definition) would cover it, but he didn't expect Congress to abdicate its responsibility in favor of partisan politics.

This is the same President that bragged he could "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and get away with it, and that is precisely what the Republican led Congress allowed him to do.

[dragonwriter]

> And it turns out that “conspiracy” is something that requires the participants to understand that they’re doing something wrong,

Another problem was that the investigation was obstructed (in the broad sense, including crimes like obstruction of justice, witness tampering, etc.), both by people who were charged for that (some convicted and some remaining beyond the reach of US justice), and by Trump, who could not be charged under Justice Department policy which, regardless of its legal correctness, Mueller was bound by.

(And charging Trump after he left office for crimes related to the 2016 campaign would, given the general 5 year statute of limitations for federal crimes, have been difficult – it might be possible to argue that OLC memo on Presidents being beyond federal prosecution was correct and that the same logic tolled statutes of limitations, but that’s a dicey argument to make; obstruction would have been less problematic, but the Trump pardons and other things would also complicate that.)

[93po]

> There was plenty of evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and the Russians.

There is zero reputable evidence of this

[mhh__]

There's no evidence at all it was from anyone else.

Where is the evidence that it was Seth Rich for example? Alex Jones?

[93po]

The evidence is that Assange emphatically said it wasn't Russia, flatly said it was someone internal to the DNC, and he's never been shown to be wrong or dishonest about Wikileaks business.

Additionally, Assange has implied it was Seth Rich as strongly as he can without actually confirming he was the source, because he's bound by journalistic ethics and his agreement with his source to not reveal them.

Lastly, the Mueller report tries to discredit this and states as fact that Seth Rich was not the source. But it provides absolutely zero reasoning or evidence for this, and there is literally no way they could know this for sure. It claims it as fact regardless, and so does the entire establishment corporate media.

[lamontcg]

> The evidence is that Assange emphatically said it wasn't Russia,

That isn't evidence.

Find some factual evidence that Seth Rich ever touched the e-mails or had access to them.

Best evidence I think that its clearly the Russian GRU that gave it to Wikileaks is Assange trying to blame it on Seth Rich. Because of what he's done to Seth Rich's family I'm quite happy to see him rotting in a jail cell. In an ideal world, everyone pushing that story should be in there with him.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state

The article addresses this belief and fairly well debunks it's origins.

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.

Something I personally observed (after 2006 and before 2020) is that we had 4 cybersecurity companies that frequently served as mouthpieces for US NatSec agencies - Mandiant, Fireeye, Crowdstrike and Cylance. They'd be called in to assist in some cybersecurity event and would unfailing parrot that agency's FUD, without ever providing any meaningful evidence. During these same events, non-gov cybersecurity experts were commonly casting doubts on US Gov's official narrative.

The above event seems like Crowdstrike acting is it's usual capacity as a Gov-adjacent mouthpiece - that is until the House committee compelled the CSO to supply evidence of Crowdstrike's parroted claim.

[PicassoCTs]

The press is not to have sides. Its to be a loose cannon in a democracy, firing at all and everybody who has power.

[hulitu]

Are you sure ? Because the press instead of "firing at all and everybody who has power" is kissing the asses of "all and everybody who has power".

[wutbrodo]

I may be missing context here, but you're referring to the fact that they leaked the Russian-state-hacked DNC emails, right? Could you elaborate on why you think it's "selective" to have leaked those?

Otherwise, it seems like you're saying "they're bad [via an unsupported claim like 'selectively truthful'] because they hurt my $politicalside"

[sandworm101]

If you are smart, and Assange isn't an idiot, then you should not allow yourself to become a tool of a foreign government. Having an open pro-information stance is all well and good, but when it is obvious that the people sending you information are doing so according to their own timetable, you have to take a higher stance. This is where journalistic ethics come into play. You must ask your source, why today? If you had this why did you not give it to me months ago? A good journalist isn't a mouthpiece for one government as it attacks another.

[mardifoufs]

The US was a foreign government to him. So why does it matter? Again, this is sort of weird blue-ultra-patriotism post 2016 is just extremely weird coming from the democratic voter base. It's almost as repulsive as GWB era "you're either with us or with the terrorists". A foreigner has absolutely no allegiance to the US government. In fact, he is much much more threatened by the American government. In huge part because he exposed a series of crimes and war crimes that were committed by said government. So why in the hell would you expect him to spare any kind of "courtoisie" to such a government?

[jstanley]

Are you suggesting Wikileaks should refuse to leak something just because they don't like the motivation of their source?

[throwwwaway69]

> you have to take a higher stance

I think the higher stance is to report as a journalist and not exercise your own bias into when you choose to publish. And regardless, if you choose to delay it, your source will simply go to someone who won't. There's never an instance where it makes sense to delay, and it never makes sense to decline to write on reputable information, since it's not like wikileaks has a monopoly on journalism

[wutbrodo]

> Having an open pro-information stance is all well and good, but when it is obvious that the people sending you information are doing so according to their own timetable, you have to take a higher stance. This is where journalistic ethics come into play

I think this is a well-articulated representation of a specific (and much more common) journalistic ethos, but he quite explicitly holds a different ethos that is much more radical about transparency.

Plus, this answers the opposite of my question: I asked how GP comment supports his claim that Assange's is "selectively truthful", and you responded by saying that he's not selective enough!

GP could have made an argument like the one you made, disputing the very foundations of Assange's open-information philosophy. What piqued my curiosity was his novel claim of unprincipled selectivity, and I charitably wanted to avoid the assumption that his comment was simply word-salad covering up a politically-motivated dislike of WL.

[93po]

> Russian-state-hacked DNC emails, right?

They weren't Russian state hacked, this is propaganda.

[mhh__]

Lots of private companies (there's a list on Wikipedia) performed their own analysis and came to the conclusion that Guccifer 2.0 was/is Russian, what says you?

[93po]

Private companies paid by who?

CrowdStrike - paid for by the DNC

Fidelis Cybersecurity - paid for by the DNC

FireEye's Mandiant - CEO at the time was Kevin Mandia, who's a known associate of Hillary Clinton and also publicly a democratic financial supporter.

SecureWorks - owned by Michael Dell, a known donator to the Clinton Foundation

ThreatConnect - not much info, but also explicitly only said "likely"

Trend Micro - Hillary and DNC are customers of Trend Micro, and they also did not actually say anything at all about a connection to Russia.

Additionally, the reports don't say it was Russian. They say the tools are ones that Russians have been thought to use, with no context into whether everyone uses these tools, to what confidence level they believe that Russians actually use these tools, no context as to whether someone would deliberately use these tools to make it look Russian, or virtually anything at all that substantiates this argument. They also almost universally use phrases like "likely" or "points to". Trying to characterize this situation as confirmed is just outright wrong.

Anyway, this is exhausting. Hyperbole becomes fact and I'm tired of having to disprove hyperbole.

[kerkeslager]

Put yourself in Wikileaks' shoes for a second: you have information, you might even know that the source is malicious, but you also know the information is true. Your mandate as an organization is to release truths. Are they really supposed to not release the truth because it hurts the Democrats?

I'm not a Trump supporter by any means, but the truth is the truth. If we only care about the truth when it favors us, I don't see how we're better than liars.

[rdiddly]

Agreed. Corruption was exposed. How did we ever let the exposed corrupt people control the narrative? They unsurprisingly would rather talk about (and malign) the source of the info, rather than answer to the charges. RE the source, whoever that hero whistleblower is, they deserve thanks, even if it were Russia, which it wasn't. MOVING ON, torpedoing the Sanders campaign for example is a prime example of perverting and undermining democracy in a completely boring and plausible way that doesn't involve exotic foreign bogeymen and deserves way more attention from the justice and legislative systems.

[bandyaboot]

Release the information when you get it and say, “do with this what you will.” Not at all what they did. They released in batches, for maximum effect, right up until the election. They knew exactly what they were doing.

[93po]

> They released in batches, for maximum effect, right up until the election. They knew exactly what they were doing.

There is absolutely no way to know the intent here, and there are plenty of rational reasons to release things in batches.

[bandyaboot]

The first of the batched releases being on the eve of the Democratic National Convention and proceeding daily if I remember correctly right up until shortly before the election. Get real.

[the_third_wave]

That is more or less what the New York Post did with the information on the "Hunter Biden Laptop". It did not work out very well for the New York Post, nor for what is now finally being admitted as "the truth" - this being that the device was his, that the material on the device was his, that the material was not "obtained by hacking". It did work out quite well for Hunter Biden and his family which seems to have been the intended result.

Had Wikileaks done the same they would have met with the same fate: they would have been accused of being in bed with whatever enemy-du-jour could be concocted and the material would have been buried under miles of accusations.

[leereeves]

Or consider what the Clintons did to the many women who truthfully (we now know) accused Bill of sexual harassment.

There is no way to publish damaging information about the Clintons without being attacked for it.

[leereeves]

> I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.

Is that a purely partisan view or do you know of some true information they had and refused to publish?

I suspect what happened is simply that the Clinton campaign had no use for Wikileaks because most of the media was working with them, so only Trump supporters sent info to Wikileaks.

[mynameishere]

Why would the Russian state want to help Trump? How did that ever make sense? "Bwahaha, let's connive to get a patriot into the White House rather than a bought-sold-and-enslaved traitor!" Unless they thought someone with an "America first" attitude would be less likely to start WWIII, it's a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Those boring leaks probably came from the inside.

[zopa]

Trump is, at minimum, lukewarm on NATO. If you think that’s good policy that’s your business, but surely it’s not hard to see what the appeal to Russia could be.

[93po]

> Why would the Russian state want to help Trump?

Especially because Trump was objectively pretty anti-Russia, and did a lot of things that pissed off Russia. But there is too much hysteria around "OMG RUSSIA AND TRUMP" and general FUD propaganda for anyone to see the forest for the trees of "orange man bad"

[CamperBob2]

"We get all the funding we need out of Russia," isn't objectively anti-Russia.

Believing Putin over his own intel agencies -- and publicly proclaiming as much -- is actively pro-Russia.

If Trump didn't want people to think he was a Russian asset, he might have tried not acting like one.

[dragonwriter]

> Why would the Russian state want to help Trump?

Their main objectives for the 2016 election was to prevent Clinton from being elected and to maximize internal division in the US; Trump was the main recipient of their support, but they also used their influence operations to support candidates to Clinton’s left (with varying responses from the candidates themselves) including Sanders (who publicly addressed it after being briefed on it, telling Russia to get out of US elections).

> How did that ever make sense?

Weakening NATO and Western unity alone was a pretty good benefit; its hardly the only place in the West where Russia, around the same time, backed nationalist political movements to disrupt internal or international unity in the West.

[throwwwaway69]

> They've never really claimed to be neutral

they do and they inarguably are. there is not any evidence at all that they have received reputable and material information and declined to report on it