[sackfield]

In an ideal world we would get to do a reverse investigation to understand which government officials were complicit in his very obviously politically motivated detention, action would be taken upon those individuals to ensure accountability, and the system itself would be updated so powerful interests can't abuse the law like this. How far are we from this world?

[xkcd-sucks]

I was reminded of this joke:

> A city slicker shoots a duck out in the country. As he's retrieving it, a farmer walks up and stops him, claiming that since the duck is on his farm, it technically belongs to him. After minutes of arguing, the farmer proposes they settle the matter "country style."

> "What's country style?" asks the city boy.

> "Out here in the country," the farmer says: "when two fellers have a dispute, one feller kicks the other one in the balls as hard as he can. Then that feller, why, he kicks the first one as hard as he can. And so forth. Last man standin' wins the dispute."

> Warily the city boy agrees and prepares himself. The farmer hauls off and kicks him in the groin with all his might. The city boy falls to the ground in the most intense pain he's ever felt, crying like a baby and rolling around on the ground. Finally he staggers to his feet and says: "All right, n-now it's–it's m-my turn."

> The farmer grins: "Forget it, you win. Keep the duck."

[Buttons840]

The real life version is a company sues you for a stupid reason and after spending a couple hundred thousand dollars on your defense the company loses and says "our bad lol", and then the matter is settled.

Or, in this case, after prosecutors hold someone in prison for a decade or two they offer a plea deal.

[acer4666]

That's not what's happened here. His time in UK prison counts towards his US charges and is the reason he's not doing time in US prison. It's more like if "settling things country style" involved giving each other ducks, and after round one the farmer received a duck then said "forget it keep your duck".

[paulddraper]

That's like playing "who can punch the softest" with my dad

[silisili]

Oh man, core memory unlocked. Only fell for that one once!

[paulddraper]

At least you won :)

[wmf]

There has been reporting on this. Apparently there was one zealous person in DOJ pushing the Assange case and everybody else thinks it's too weak to be worth it.

[tyingq]

This article from the Intercept covers it pretty well. The prosecutor in question is Gordon Kromberg.

https://archive.is/E5KbI

Here's another: https://www.newagebd.net/article/226187/julian-assanges-gran...

[doctorpangloss]

It's interesting, if you believe that one person can take down the system - as a whistleblower must - well surely, one person can buck the system's instincts and try to take down you.

[zarzavat]

This doesn’t make sense because the Assange case has been a diplomatic issue between the US and Australia ever since Albanese came to power.

Ultimately the responsibility falls to the President since the DOJ isn’t responsible for international relations. Biden must have thought the case was important otherwise there’s no reason to harm relations with an ally over something like that.

[alfiedotwtf]

Don’t forget Hillary was fixated on Assange for a long time, and was even quoted with “Can’t we just drone the guy?”.

The direct spat lead to Assange helping Trump and the Russians publish Hillary’s email server spool.

I don’t like that Assange ended up helping Trump and Russia, but you can’t blame him for helping the one person who can kick the person out of office who wants to Tomahawk you

[CalChris]

Unproven. At best unproven and denied.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/julian-assange-drone-strik...

[paulddraper]

1. Clinton neither admitted nor denied it. She only said she "didn't recall" making that statement.

2. In any case, Clinton has been very openly critical of Assange, saying the charges were not punishing journalism and that "he has to answer for what he's done." [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/Qc19Qk3KKCw?t=50

[CalChris]

Snopes sourced that accusation to the far right True Pundit which had also contributed to the Pizza Gate conspiracy theory. I'm done here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Pundit

[paulddraper]

For whatever role True Pundit played in spreading the rumor, Clinton played an equally large role via her "denial."

https://x.com/wikileaks/status/783424443070738433

[alfiedotwtf]

Logical fallacy

[Applejinx]

Clinton has had a knack for knowing the real truth of a situation and either not wanting to share that with the public, or doing it in a haughty way where she's simply not believed. Knowing what I know about her in that way, such a quote is worrying.

It implies that she's being characteristically tonedeaf and screwing up the communication of some pretty serious concerns about Assange, but I think that's no mystery by now. You can always get Clinton to make it all about her and spin it in a way that can let you get away with damn near anything, but that's just exploiting personal failings on her part, where if you dig into what she knows it's unsettling how sharp she is.

You can't go by whether Clinton's screwed up the optics.

[nullc]

Your link does not include a denial, it includes Clinton saying she did not recall making such a comment. Is there an outright denial elsewhere?

[nobody9999]

>Your link does not include a denial

I don't recall calling for or making detailed plans to assassinate the leaders of the G7 at their recent summit.

I also don't recall claiming that you were a pedophile, a murderer and a cross-dresser.

So does that mean you believe I have actually said/done the above, as I haven't denied them?

[nullc]

No one reported you claimed those things and particularly not in an official meeting where there should have been minutes and would have been witnesses which could have boosted a lack of recollection to certainty.

Your examples also fail to continue with "but if I did it was a joke" -- a remark itself almost as damning as the act. We're not talking about mere defamation in the case of Assange: talking about the secretary of state-- who unambiguously has the power to murder foreign persons with a suggestion-- suggesting that she's would joke about murdering people. Not a great look.

So, no, your remarks are unambiguously not denials, but no denial was required in your case.

[oska]

Mate, this is the comment that they were directly replying to :

> At best unproven and denied.

[hipadev23]

Check your sources. Alex Jones doesn't count.

[usernottaken]

I don't think the issue is whether Clinton made this comment or not. The legend simply points out what every one is thinking. That this threw the election for her, and that is likely her entire perspective on this. The Trump admin was likely motivated to prosecute, so as to appear they were not in collusion with the release of the emails, and the current administration directly backed HC. People like Kromberg do not come out of a vacuum.

[harry8]

I think this is nonsense?

As far as I know there is zero evidence that wikileaks did not publish everything newsworthy that they were given regardless of who it helped or hindered.

Anyone have anything credible showing they suppressed anything ever?

[whoitwas]

Wikileaks canary died a long, long time ago. Nothing from them has been trustworthy for a long time.

[GolfPopper]

I thought it was the warrant canary of their email provider (Riseup) that died in 2016. Did Wikileaks ever even have a canary?

Riseup currently has a canary[1], they state that it would not trigger for "gag orders, FISA court orders, National Security Letters" which seems like it makes it pretty useless.

1. https://riseup.net/en/canary

[whoitwas]

From wikileaks: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks_talk:PGP_Keys

[edm0nd]

Wikileaks in general (as a website) has been dead for years now. Just go look at the website.

Last update in the Leaks section is from 2018.

Last update in the News section is from 2021.

I'm interested to see if Assange brings it back to life.

[rtpg]

I thought there was some story about Wikileaks receiving a bunch of stuff regarding Russian gov't officials and there was internal debate in the org and it ended up not being published. Was that just a made up story?

[bardan]

It isn't made up. It was during one of the email leaks when the org was stretched to it's limits. Suddenly they get these documents that they don't have time to fully parse and don't look very interesting anyway. Immediately there are dozens of articles put out simultaneously about how Wikileaks refused to publish Russian documents. I guess they learned about the documents being passed to Wikileaks in the first place, wonder who let them know?

The documents were later published elsewhere and nobody cared because they were uninteresting.

[rtpg]

I mean all of their leaks are politically motivated, they are axiomatically a cutout. acting scandalized that someone tried to leak stuff is weird. I get the overworked argument in theory, but odd they didn’t publish it at all in the end.

[GolfPopper]

Foreign Policy: WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign

https://archive.is/ztpnZ

[harry8]

There is no claim here of documents or a story being suppressed by wikileaks. The documents and one side of the conversation were provided to ForeignPolicy.com. The anti-wikileaks angle immediately fizzes in the opening paragraphs.

WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.

The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks’s side of the conversation.

“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.

“WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.

[rendall]

404 not found

[richrichie]

No evidence of Russian hand. Most likely a DNC insider work.

[crummy]

A DNC insider that set up a very large trail indicating external phishing?

Edit: at the time I think this was considered to be a pretty comprehensive description of what happened. Not sure if new information has come to light since then.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg7xjb/how-hackers-broke-int...

[richrichie]

Anything is possible. Don’t underestimate the stupidity of the party members.

Hillary ran her own email server that trafficked classified information and that was maintained by a couple of Pakistani dudes.

[aredox]

This is a lie. Guccifer 2.0 has been clearly identified as Russian.

Julian Assange lied about Seth Rich, and never excused himseéf to his bereaved parents. He is no better than Alex Jones.

[richrichie]

> has been clearly identified as Russian

Identified by the same people that have lied about pretty much everything else?

[dboreham]

Responsibility has to be pretty defuse, right? You can at least begin with all the presidents in office since he was prosecuted, until N-1 since presumably the Nth just released him.

[sackfield]

Diffusion of responsibility is definitely a defense in these cases, but the system should recognize this shortcoming and assign accountability (at least in an ideal world).

Although I'm willing to bet that the true actors here weren't necessarily presidents (even though they would ultimately be accountable like you say). Would be interesting to see who demanded what and when.

[akira2501]

It's not to lionize Assange, but these are almost crimes against humanity, they stole peoples tax dollars and then built a surveillance state used against the citizens. When that was revealed they then used the same tools to destroy a single human being for the purposes of creating a decade long chilling effect for anyone who might consider doing the same.

There shouldn't be any diffuse responsibility for participating in this farce at any level. When the information was released the public never clamored for it to be investigated and for people to be hunted down and jailed for releasing it. It was entirely a captured administrative state claiming for itself rights it demonstrably never had, such as claiming a foreign national committed treason, or that he could be viewed as an "enemy combatant."

To have gone along with this willingly deserves the same scrutiny we gave German officers at the end of WWII.

[loup-vaillant]

> There shouldn't be any diffuse responsibility for participating in this farce at any level.

I would argue there should, no exception. Not even WWII. While keeping in mind that the responsibility was so gigantic to begin with, that even diffusing it might end up putting most participants in jail, some of them for a long time.

[ambicapter]

Diffusion of responsibility comes from diffusion of power, which is an intended goal of many stable systems of government. Cuts both ways.

[etchalon]

A lot of Assange supporters are going to feel weird about giving Biden credit for his release, especially since Biden was part of the administration that initially decided to pursue Assange.

[TallTales]

Also because he was forced into pleading guilty for doing journalism. A great crime has been committed against Assange and I understand why he would do this. I would never ask him to spend another day in a small Ecuadorian embassy room with no living facilities or in a medieval torture cell in England... He has suffered more for the free people of the world than we have a right to ask for but this is not a just outcome.

[dools]

He wasn't "doing journalism". WikiLeaks just posted a completely unevaluated firehose of data fed to it by whomever, which is why they were such an easy asset for Russian intelligence.

[mda]

I agree they have no idea about journalism. I remember they had put a big pile of emails sent to some government agency in Turkey. It was all some people complaining about daily things, reporting issues in their cities etc (emails were not anonymized of course), They just dumped them and claimed they were exposing the corrupt government.

[vincnetas]

Does it not count as whistleblower? You see wrong doing and tell a bout it.

"I'we seen bad thigs, this is all i got, lets look at it together."

[varjag]

There were hardly any wrong things uncovered in the cables though. The most shocking part of them is American civil servants are pretty good at prose.

[darby_nine]

I'm struggling to figure out how wikileaks works as a russian intelligence asset in a way that somehow doesn't apply more aptly and openly to western media as a whole. Hell our entire elections are built around directly and indirectly paying media to run content ("ads").

There is no genuine concern here over some deep vulnerability our society has to russians or anyone because of wikileaks. Assange (nor snowden) caused any material harm remotely proportional to the blowback they've received since. This is about punishment for circumventing state-level controls and embarrassing the state. To think that Trump would somehow be more lenient on either is unthinkable—he's part of the same class of people that Clinton is that is most sensitive to the health of systems Assange threatens.

[Applejinx]

Oh, but it does, and that's also a problem. Key Western media, for instance the NYT, are seriously compromised due to being poster children for what's called 'MICE' (Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego): if the NYT, like all newspapers, is going broke in the age of the Internet, it's got all of that as vulnerabilities, especially Ego as it sees itself as the bulwark of truth, yet it can't pay its bills.

Enter Russian oligarchs, just like they bought up London, and then control the oligarchs by force when you can't simply direct them by shared ideology, and you've got pretty much the most powerful propaganda outlet you could possibly have, until you exploit it so heavily that you burn its former reputation to the ground. Which you do, because you yourself care nothing for its well-being: it's a tool for your political aims in fighting NATO and furthering your empire.

Sure, it applies to western media as a whole, from the bottom to the top.

If WWIII had stayed entirely in the infosphere, and Russia had not invaded Ukraine and tried to make good on their preparations, nobody would ever have known WWIII had been waged in the infosphere. That's how well it had been going. It ran aground when physical countries had to be annexed.

[rendall]

This is misinformation. Their policy was never to publish anything they could not verify, and the "asset for Russian intelligence" was only ever a DNC and US intelligence smear to discredit Wikileaks.

[af78]

It's not just "DNC and US intelligence." Wikileaks tried to influence the 2017 election in France among other examples. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacronLeaks. This partially backfired when the dump of e-mails they published was found to contain russian-language messages.

That Wikileaks systematically favors the russian government, and never does anything contrary to the interests of the russian government, strongly suggests they are an asset of russia.

[safety1st]

To quote the article: "“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice and there was no White House involvement in the plea deal decision,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement Monday evening."

[matthewdgreen]

My recollection is that the Obama administration was split on this, with DoJ officials enthusiastic but Obama purportedly being concerned about the political implications for journalism. The charges were only filed in 2018/2019 under the Trump administration, which presumably did not have major concerns about journalism. Am I wrong in this?

[GeekyBear]

The DOJ and the Obama administration were in agreement that you would have had to prosecute the papers and journalists who had previously run stories on the Bush era leaks revealed through Wikikeaks as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/julia...

[throwawaythekey]

I'm trying to work this out myself. Julian's wiki page has

> He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012[10] on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States.[11]

It seems to me like the Trump administration simply mainted the status quo of what came before them. One theory could be the timing of the charges was more aligned with Ecuador changing PM/kicking Assange out of the embassy. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/14/lenin-moreno-julian-assan...

[rootusrootus]

> concerned about the political implications for journalism

As I recall, Wikileaks made the choice to take sides in politics, so the blame lies with them.

[whatshisface]

Without starting the whole "is publishing documents received from an enemy of the state seditious," debate, I didn't think there was supposed to be a jail term on taking sides in politics. :-)

[vkou]

No, but there may be jail terms for assisting your source in accessing computer networks in order to leak that information.

[alfiedotwtf]

Hillary wanted to drone Assange, so you would expect Wikileaks to take her opponent’s side

[kristopolous]

The Biden administration doesn't have a terrible track record with a bunch of things (bringing back net neutrality for instance) they just have a really bad marketing department.

[rayiner]

I don’t know if Biden had anything to do with this, but he has some good old school democrat instincts. The problem is that he’s surrounded by globalists and progressives who can’t loudly promote the good things he did, like tariffs, getting out of Afghanistan, initially maintaining tight border restrictions, etc.

I mean, even if Biden has something to do with this plea deal, his staffers won’t promote it because they think Assange is a kremlin puppet who conspired to help Trump get elected.

[tophi]

You are not wrong. Nor are they.

[kristopolous]

Some of the Bernie people managed to sneak their way into the Biden administration in a few minor departments.

They were too virtuous to run an election but they seem to make pretty decent policy decisions

[varjag]

Right it's all little Bernie elves, nothing can be credited to the sitting president at all.

[tptacek]

Or: nothing really interesting happened here at all, the USAO figured they were 2-3 years out from wrapping up a trial on these charges, that the only toothy charges they had for Assange were conspiracy charges for which Assange's active participation was weak, and so the sentencing guidelines would likely have left him at "time served", which is not a good use of the prosecution's time.

But, I mean, sure, maybe Biden directed DOJ about an open case, and AG Garland just rolled with it, because he sure seems like the type.

[rayiner]

I’m just responding to the person giving Biden credit above. I don’t know what happened. But the DOJ is under the executive, so why wouldn’t Biden be able to direct the DOJ about the case? Even if to say “I don’t want my administration prosecuting whistleblowers?”

[roenxi]

In the sense that the US letting up on the poor man is a surprise, yes. But without having polled the pro-Assange crowd it doesn't seem like a special surprise that it was Biden. He's been the name on impressive things before, like ending the Afghanistan war (which at the time had been a political humiliation for the US longer than Assange had).

Supporting transparency and good journalism isn't a partisan issue, and there are going to be good people in any administration. Plus Assange wasn't annoying presidents, he was going after people in the deep state.

[impossiblefork]

This isn't Biden being decent though.

They're forcing Assange to 'confess' to a crime in the US, where he has never been and which creates enormous problems. It should be remembered how severe what the US was doing at the time. They got some people handed over to them here in Sweden, who they agreed to not torture, and then started already at the airport. They had torture facilities in Poland, where people almost certainly died, etcetera.

What Assange did was legal and what the many activities the US was engaging in to obtain people abroad etc., illegal. He has no duty to the US, because he is not a US citizen or permanent resident.

Consequently even this is not a friendly act from Biden. It ends Assange's imprisonment, but it is a use of threats in order to obtain something from him, namely his 'confession'.

[jesterson]

Oh boy, very far, unfortunately.

What you say we need badly as it keeps every government employee accountable for what they did.

[tophi]

Cheers. what say you to Navalny’s torture, detainment, and death?

[pastage]

Corrupting legal processes with a combination of weasel talk and bureaucracy is always the first step towards a Navalnyj situation. When that happens to political dissidents how ever bad they are we should all feel great concern.

But I might missunderstand you.

[tophi]

1. I agree with you. 2. Assange is a Russian asset and the West’s (esp USAs) emphasis on freedom of speech puts us in a very difficult situation with respect to information dissemination. 3. This blind spot is being heavily leveraged to alarming success and Authoritarian regimes are gaining momentum with their goals. Mainly To destabilize democracies and make us all like them. We also want them to fail and be reborn as democracies. 4. I do not know how to navigate this challenge in an ethical/moral way. But i want to make sure we all recognize the biggest genuine threat to our descendants’ freedoms.

[sackfield]

I don't know a lot about it, on the face of it I think its terrible. Why do you ask?

[hajile]

Most reasonable people would denounce BOTH. You seem to be pushing toward the idea that "if they do something evil, my evil is no longer evil".

[tophi]

No, absolutely not. The West must be held to a higher standard and we have a duty to hold ourselves there, but too many are failing to understand the biggest threat to all the world’s freedom. Hint hint, it is the actual authoritarians.

[29athrowaway]

There is a big overlap between political organizations and organized crime.

[ajross]

> action would be taken upon those individuals to ensure accountability

Out of genuine curiosity: what "actions" do you want taken and what accountability are you interested in? I mean, to be blunt: you think this is a crime, right? You want someone charged and prosecuted in a court, with due process, in front of a jury of peers, yada yada.

So... what if your imaginary prosecutor jumps ship to somewhere else where they get arrested and detained, and then refuse to come back to the US to face trial. Are they not then a political prisoner? Why not?

The point being: Assange wasn't thrown in jail without trial, he was thrown in jail because he refused trial. And there's an important difference.