Hacker News Reader

Comment by maneesh | Hacker News Reader

Why are they discredited?

It appears that wikileaks did work directly with Trump Jr. to coordinate pro Trump leaks and campaigning [1]. Whether wikileaks was actually pro-Trump, or merely playing the part with the hope of developing a relationship which could lead to their acquisition of confidential information is unclear.

"“Hey Don. We have an unusual idea,” WikiLeaks wrote on October 21, 2016. “Leak us one or more of your father’s tax returns.” WikiLeaks then laid out three reasons why this would benefit both the Trumps and WikiLeaks. One, The New York Times had already published a fragment of Trump’s tax returns on October 1; two, the rest could come out any time “through the most biased source (e.g. NYT/MSNBC).”"

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...

You left out the part that I find horrifying:

> It is the third reason, though, WikiLeaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” WikiLeaks explained. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.” It then provided an email address and link where the Trump campaign could send the tax returns, and adds, “The same for any other negative stuff (documents, recordings) that you think has a decent chance of coming out. Let us put it out.”

> Trump Jr. did not respond to this message.

"improve the perception of our impartiality" sounds as if "we're not impartial, and the world is figuring that out. If you have nothing to lose otherwise, please make it seem as if we were impartial."

Thanks. I was looking for that exact quote, but I did not manage to find it when reading/scanning through the article for the second time.

Deleted my post, which doesn't really refute the parent, I was just tilted by his shameless soapboxing. You do wonder how a thread on John Raines becomes one on Wikileaks.

Actually that quote is incorrect. It has been widely misquoted by the main stream media for their own propagandistic reasons.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-atlantic-commits-malp...

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/930237935680618496

To summarize, various sources have quoted wikileaks as saying "because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source". The message is actually "because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with".

I'll be honest, that doesn't really change my interpretation of the sentence, they already had "pro-Trump" and "pro-Russia" in quotes, which made it clear to me they didn't believe them to be as such.

It's not the semantics of the sentence that bother me, it's that they went to great lengths to get DNC and Clinton emails but just go ahead and ask the Trump campaign for information. Clearly they are treating the Trump campaign with softer gloves than the Clinton campaign.

This may seem pedantic, but I think your quote of the misquote is wrong. The media have been putting the period / 'full stop' within the quotation marks (not just outside which you have above) which Caitlin Johnstone rightfully calls out as journalistic malpractice. That very few people know the actual quote is testament to the mainstream media's ability to sell a false narrative.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

I seriously don't see how transposing the period and end quote characters changes the meaning of the sentence. And I don't see how removing those few words at the end changes the meaning of the sentence.

Fair enough. You may not see the difference, but one is false and the other is true. My point is that many would disagree with your assessment if only they knew that there was a misquote to begin with. Many who want to put forth a false narrative use these kind of disinformation tactics. If only the mainstream media did not have to resort to such slimy tactics. Wikileaks has a far better record of journalistic integrity. You can rely on a quote as being true at least. How many false stories have been printed by Wikileaks as opposed to the Atlantic? How many retractions?

I did not know this. I agree that it was very misleading of The Atlantic to publish the quote in this fashion.

It doesn't seem to fully reverse my opinion of WikiLeaks although I wonder if I can really be objective now.

Those DM's weren't all that discrediting. I read them as Wikileaks trying to extract data from a source (Jr), which takes some convincing. Journalists asking "Hey give us Trump Sr's tax returns so we can dig for controversy" isn't going to yield results.

No need to make things this complicated. Assange simply tried to do the most damage that he could to US interests. That this aligns quite well with Russian interests and Trumps is merely coincidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com