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Comment by runningoutofta | Hacker News Reader

wikileaks published the DNC emails which harmed the DNC and Hillary in particular. It was a factor in low turnout and Hillary's loss. Since then wikileaks has been associated with Russia / Putin / Trump (bad). The collateral damage era has been mostly forgotten.

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"harmed" seems like an odd choice of words. The leaks made public a lot of exceedingly unflattering facts (and perhaps illegalities) that put the DNC and Clinton in a very different light. AFAIK, few or none of those facts has been refuted. To me, it looks like the leaks were a great public service.

(I have not much doubt that one could find a similar cesspool on the RNC side.)

The effect of the leaks would have been rather minor if all involved would have just issued a mea culpa and fired the head of the DNC outright. Instead, it felt like they just told us all to suck it up.

That was a pretty "clever" part in the smear campaign.

First declare him a "rapist". But that didn't cut it.

So they made him a "Trumpist". And many people still believe it up to this day.

"they" did?

So emails and conversations that show the Trump campaign and family communicating with Assange over leaks and timings were ... what ... smear?

* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...

* https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/563996442...

* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-campaign...

> On Oct. 3, WikiLeaks, writing a day before it was set to announce the release of hacked Democratic emails, wrote to Trump Jr.: "Hiya. It'd be great if you guys could comment on /push this story."

Yeah. Can't imagine why he might be considered a "Trumpist"...

What's interesting is, many of the same people who criticize the leaks for hurting Hillary's chances would also applaud the leaks for demonstrating DNC bias against Bernie.

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