> essentially a Russian asset
This is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. Obviously a platform like Wikileaks can be "weaponized" by any party against another party.
I think it's a question of what is the most relevant aspect of the leak overall, not who leaked it or why. For instance, suppose someone had leaked detailed information about the misconduct of Jerry Sandusky several years before it became widely known. Would it matter if the leaker had been affiliated with a rival football program?
What I think is so ingenious about Wikileaks is that by releasing the full documents and data sets, it is very easy to take the leaked information simply at face value without worrying about what may have been selectively leaked and why.
In the case of the HRC emails, there were a few concerning themes regarding campaign finance and the Foundation, but those items could easily have been diffused if HRC had owned up to it and offered to have various experts dig deeper into the financials to show that nothing unusual was going on. For some reason the campaign chose a strategy of claiming the emails were fake, which was soon revealed as a lie by the DKIM/DomainKeys signatures on the emails themselves.
So unfortunately in the case of the HRC emails, the campaign chose a bad strategy and then got caught in a lie, all of which was much more consequential than the few bits of information that were potentially worthy of a deeper dive.
Also, one has to believe that WL would not have published damning information about Trump if it had been available. There is no evidence to support that claim either.
My take all along has been that all that is required for WL to be a force of good is for there to be no selective releasing or editorially driven redaction, and for there to be no evidence that WL sat on important information to suppress it. Neither of these have been the case.
WL did maximize the PR value of the HRC/Podesta emails, but I view that as being (especially in hindsight) more of a fundraising/bootstrapping decision than an editorial one. There wasn't anything "smoking gun"-like in the latter emails, they were all apparently released at random to much fanfare.
So anyway, I think the point is in the laundry itself, and that intent matters much less than it would with more narrowly focused leaks, such as those that traditional journalists typically use/abuse.