this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Jesus Christ, I can't believe how dense people are being about this. First of all, they weren't Hillary Clinton's emails, they were John Podesta's emails. Second of all, and more importantly, the, "Mainstream Political Media," didn't publish those emails, Wikileaks did.
In 2016, Russian hackers got Podesta's emails, Wikileaks published them, and the media reported on them once they were already exposed. In 2024, Wikileaks is functionally dead, so Iranian hackers sent them directly to mainstream media outlets. Mainstream outlets don't want to deal with the legal issues associated with releasing hacked information, so they sit on them.
This isn't some conspiracy by the media to ensure Trump wins. This is a direct result of 20+ of allowing our government to persecute whistleblowers and leakers.
Don't give Assange a pass for being a leaker. He had Republican emails in 2016 and choose not to leak them.
I'm like...80% sure that's not true. I don't remember any story about GOP emails, and I can't find any reporting on it now.
That being said, I'm not giving Assange a pass. At the time he was getting Podesta's emails from Russian hackers, he was declining to publish a cache of Russian government documents. It's possible that dropping those leaks was part of his negotiations to get the Podesta emails, or that he had just developed a strong anti-U.S. bias after being imprisoned in an embassy for 4 years, but that's still no excuse for violating the Wikileaks' founding principle of holding all power accountable. Also, beyond the bias problems, I think the sexual assault allegations against Assange are credible, and he should have been prosecuted in Sweeden. Wikileaks was a very flawed organization, and Assange is a complete piece of shit.
However, the U.S. didn't want to prosecute Assange for the Podesta hack, or Russian espionage, or sexual assault. They wanted to prosecute him for telling the world that the U.S. military murdered two Reuters journalists. For all of Wikileaks flaws, they did some important work, and there's no one willing to do that work now that they're gone. A great example of that is all these legacy media groups sitting on Trump's emails but being too scared to publish them.
Assange denied getting any leaks from the rnc, but one of the alphabet agencies confirmed that the rnc was hacked at the same time. Getting any of this information is difficult at best now with how shitty search has become and the fact that any search you do will bring up podesta or the recent email leak. It's also sketchy that right after Assange started doing a show for RT. Assange is a self serving narcissist not a whistle blower, except when it's to his benefit.
Fair enough, I'll adjust my search terms to see if I can find anything on that. I agree that Assange is a PoS, and it does seem like his Kremlin ties are genuine. I tend to be skeptical when the security agencies tell us someone is secretly a Russian asset (like when the state department revoked Snowden's passport while he was stopped in Russia on his way to Ecuador, then accused him of going there to aid Russia, even though they literally forced him to be there), but it certainly seems like Assange had or developed an interest in aiding the Russian government.
Wikileaks was unfortunately too centered around Assange himself, and only had a non-governing advisory board as it's infrastructure, so there really was no way to separate the organization from the man. It's a shame, because I think the work they did (especially early on) was very important, and I think the world is worse off without an organization like them.
I definitely agree. The work WikiLeaks did, especially early on, shed light on things we probably wouldn't have seen without it. Then it became Assange's personal grudge machine, and I had a hard time trusting it after that. He insists he never did any curation of the leaks he released, but how do we know that's true once he started to show his bias.