Trump offered to pardon Assange if he provided source for DNC emails – lawyer
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/julian-assange-our-source...
Edit: oh wow, to -2 in less than 2 minutes.
It's a point of information, not an endorsement.
Double-edit: Ha, ok, colour me shocked. The discussion thread is excellent and I thank everyone involved for remaining civil.
Though they are still both very partisan.
15 years ago I might have agreed with you... Not so much anymore.
How many open Trump supporters do you interact with a week? Or would you feel comfortable telling your coworkers you plan to vote for Trump? He very well may win this election.
As I said, about 5-8 depending on how active my group chats are.
Why would I tell my coworkers I'm voting for Trump? I'm not going to. So yes I would feel uncomfortable lying.
I don't think this is the same as bush era politics. How can I exist with coworkers while we do anti racist book clubs, and then announce support for the man who calls black protesters thugs? We don't have room for racism at my company. That's only a political issue because the republican party nominated a racist - I don't see how that's our problem.
Want some help?
How can I exist with co-workers who think every point of inequality is systemic racism and white supremacy, Trump supporter's are all trailer park hicks, 97% of the protests are peaceful, believe that just because of your skin color you shouldn't be called a thug for looting, believe Trump colluded with the Russians despite 0 evidence, think Flynn deserves to be in prison, think Trump isn't helping the black community...
Uhhh isn't palmer luckey a Trump supporter? And Kanye west? Plus a bunch of rich old folks back home. Lol obviously not all Trump supporters are trailer park (do you mean poor?), My experience at protests in LA alone would make it absurd to believe that.
Thug is a racist dog whistle. Is property damage an improper response to murder? Yet conservatives defend a kid that committed murder after traveling to protests to "protect property," so I guess murder is an appropriate response to property damage.
Are you not reading reports from yesterday wherein intelligence community members are warning congress about russian influence in the upcoming election? You make me suspect the only "evidence" you'll accept is Putin being caught with his fingers literally in the guts of a voting machine.
Trump passed a couple democrat written prison reform bills that vaguely helped the black community, but his DOJ is specifically targeting those early release people for reconviction, so it's moot.
I don't really care about Flynn.
I guess I don't fit into the clean little Other that Rupert murdoch defined for you?
Maybe property damage might be a proper response to murder, _if it was the property of the murderer_ (the police), as opposed to random small business nearby, many owned by minorities.
Have you not seen the videos of "peaceful protestors" literally smashing and burning down buildings? Committing indiscriminate property destruction and arson makes people thugs, regardless of the colour of their skin.
I saw a couple videos of burning buildings, sure. I had trouble caring though, because the only places that happened in are the ones where soldier cops got insanely abusive with peaceful protesters. The onus is on the state to back down, not the people.
Did you see video of out of state proud boys driving in armed caravans to protest areas, paintballing and pepper spraying indiscriminately?
Really? I'm a native English speaker, albeit not American, and I've never heard thug implied to have racist connotations. The original word comes from a Hindi word for criminal, which was also used for a violent cult: "Devotees of the goddess Kali, the Thugs waylaid and strangled their victims, usually travellers, in a ritually prescribed manner. They were suppressed by the British in the 1830s."
>I had trouble caring though, because the only places that happened in are the ones where soldier cops got insanely abusive with peaceful protesters.
How does the police being abusive make it okay for the rioters to burn down random buildings?
It doesn't absolve any responsibility, but if you take a step back - the police behavior was the indirect and sometimes direct cause of the other symptom.
E.g. on NPR you hear talking heads speak about “staunch conservatives” like Bill Barr. This term is now a dog whistle on the left that means ‘white nationalist’
Like you did in this comment, to the word "dog whistle?" Let me guess, SJWs are the enemy of the people?
What shall we call it when a white supremacist waggles his eyebrows and says "those people" then? Willful ignorance is painful to witness.
Maybe if staunch conservatives stop being white nationalists, or stopped catering to white nationalists so overtly, or actually spoke out against their white nationalist base (instead of "both sides"ing them), people wouldn't associate staunch conservatism with white nationalism? Just a thought.
The non-GTP-3 agent above was surprised to learn that the word ‘Thug’ now means something else. It’s like the rug was pulled out from under them.
Great! Then, the protesters are acting in self defense as well, as the bar is apparently quite low for self defense.
What's the point of claiming that a tech bubble is a "cancer" and a "drain on the progression of ideas"? There's definitely a "valley paradigm" of sorts, but there are multiple technology centers around the world. I do think it is important to be aware of paradigms and try to reach out from them, mind you, but this seems more like a generalized accusation.
And I'm not sure where Trump comes into this. I do have Trump supporters within my extended family; I have plenty of non-Trump supporters in my circle too. While the information is still incomplete, it is still more information than I have about, say, (random example) National vs. Labour voters of New Zealand (or one of the many other smaller political parties in that country), since I have no one who I directly talk to from there.
The one nugget that I know from the limited experience I have is that generalizations of cultural blocs must be taken as the simplification that it is. It is an unfortunate necessity to generalize complexity, of course, so while they tend to be "incorrect" in the details, I tend to have no problems with non-malicious generalizations, as long as the generalization tries to be as accurate as one can and tries to be thoughtful instead of relying on tired tropes. However, I do tend to look heavily down on any malicious, inflammatory generalization of a culture -- I mean, even the ordinary generalizations often are wrong at some level, right? People who use wrong information to inflame and anger receive poor marks from me, and if they are doing this in spite of knowing better, even more so.
If the bubble is just Democrats and Republicans and other Americans, then it's still a fairly small bubble with a narrow view on the world.
It's a huge world, and there's a lot more perspectives on it than is likely to be _easily_ encountered during water cooler conversations at the office.
You can disbelieve what Assange says if you don't believe him. Discounting what Assange says, explicitly, clearly and deliberately because Hannity is interviewing him is foolish. It was a friendly interview. So what.
Weird how I didn't mention any of these in my comment. The problem is that the interview is not designed to elicit credible testimony. It's designed to put on a show. Thus, I discount it heavily.
Not to mention the way the questions were worded allowed Assange to answer without answering. Did the Russian government directly give Assange that data? No, and that would be hilariously inept for Russia. The way Hannity phrases all his questions allows Assange to easily answer "no." Just a terrible interview.
This "interview" is why Hannity is not, and should not be considered, a journalist.
Secondly, about your second point, many people will downvote you simply for complaining about downvotes. Next time, just wait. Votes eventually land where they should be, and complaining about votes adds nothing to the conversation.
>ASSANGE: Yes.
>HANNITY: ... or anybody associated with Russia?
>ASSANGE: We -- we can say and we have said repeatedly...
>HANNITY: Right.
>ASSANGE: ... over the last two months, that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.
He's basically saying that Vlad didn't call him up one day and say "Russia wants to give you some files." No shit.
-----
> Researchers from the Atlanta-based cybersecurity firm Dell SecureWorks reported that the emails had been obtained through a data theft carried out by the hacker group Fancy Bear, a group of Russian intelligence-linked hackers that were also responsible for cyberattacks that targeted the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), resulting in WikiLeaks publishing emails from those hacks.
> On December 9, 2016, the CIA told U.S. legislators the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded that the Russian government was behind the hack and gave to WikiLeaks a collection of hacked emails from John Podesta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails#Data_theft
> "The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions," Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the panel, said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-report-affirms-u-s-intel...
> Following a comprehensive investigation that CrowdStrike detailed publicly, the company concluded in May 2016 that two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries breached the DNC network.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
> We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
etc, etc, etc.
I thought this was pretty well accepted at this point.
He won't elaborate on the DNC hack because he says he has no original reporting. Does that mean no one on the forums or in the subculture talks about it?
He said:
"Based on what I’ve learned over the past decade studying Russian language, culture and hacking communities, my sense is that if the Russians were responsible and wanted to hide that fact — they’d have left a trail leading back to some other country’s door."
And note, the founders of phishing in the early 90s were mostly teenage kids, maybe 14-16. It doesn't take a state actor to 'spear phish'.
> They can and they have. Let's not pretend we live in fantasy land.
He didn't say they're incapable of lying to Congress, just that it's illegal for them to lie Congress. By the GP's statement, if they lied then they also broke the law.
Not this claim, but a recent example of the CIA lying to Congress with impunity.
> "The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions," Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the panel, said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-report-affirms-u-s-intel...
Trump lies like he breathes, but that doesn't mean we have to believe obvious fantasy that obviously supports the continued stupid wars of the military-industrial complex. In general, the most likely possibility is that both the president and the TLAs are lying.
I agree with you but I think using terms like this can hurt credibility.
As I understand it the DoD is just the department these agencies fall under (unless it's the DHS). The actual agencies you've just about covered, surely? CIA, NSA, ICE being the most problematic, then FBI and, what else?
I mean yea they suck but I don't think it's necessarily a hydra.
The CIA is entrusted with protecting US interests, much like every other intelligence service in the world. They do a range of things, much of them boring. It's government.
They have outlets to disseminate disinformation just like Russia does. We're just arguing about where and how it's happening.
I think this is increasingly protecting the interest of the super rich (those with vested interests in large corps). Not "the people".
I'm not claiming other govts are better. Just saying they've shown they cannot be trusted.
Yeah, I remember that: even with the bold and explicit lies put forward by the White House and political leadership at DoD, particularly, and some other agencies, the actual releases from the intelligence agencies were quite guarded and reserved.
The intelligence community is in the business of lying to it's targets, sure, but also of protecting it's credibility to decision makers, both within the executive branch and outside of it, including even the American public. The political leadership, OTOH, is often more shortsighted.
The CIA spied on the Senate, the director lied to them about it, and nothing happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-di...
The CIA would be no good to anyone if they were in the business of lying.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.ht...
This is exactly what I said.
> Hanyok further argues that Agency officials had "mishandled" SIGINT concerning the events of August 4 and provided top level officials with "skewed" intelligence supporting claims of an August 4 attack. "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred." Key pieces of evidence are missing from the Agency's archives, such as the original decrypted Vietnamese text of a document that played an important role in the White House's case. Hanyok has not found a "smoking gun" to demonstrate a cover-up but believes that the evidence suggests "an active effort to make SIGINT fit the claim of what happened during the evening of 4 August in the Gulf of Tonkin." Senior officials at the Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House were none the wiser about the gaps in the intelligence. Hanyok's conclusions have sparked controversy among old Agency hands but his research confirms the insight of journalist I.F. Stone, who questioned the second attack only weeks after the events. Hanyok's article is part of a larger study on the National Security Agency and the Vietnam War, "Spartans in Darkness," which is the subject of a pending FOIA request by the National Security Archive.
To figure out who the liars are we need to know who engaged in a cover-up. Who manipulated, withheld information, or lied. You already know my opinion: I don't think it was the NSA.
For example "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred" suggests that the NSA's information was, in fact, good. It just was ignored, manipulated, omitted, etc.
I don't find that you mention NSA ITT before my comment. Parent comment did mention them, and your response was the off-topic (for Tonkin, anyway) "CIA doesn't lie!"
Neither supposed "attack" occurred! NSA reports were used to claim that they did occur! You don't think NSA has and is currently withholding information? Why don't you read what you pasted above? "Key pieces of evidence are missing"? If only the TLAs had the technology to preserve the information they gather... this is not credible.
Even if NSA reports had said "there was definitely no Vietnamese attack", those reports were used by the executive branch to ramp up the war. The authors of those reports, and every superior of those authors up the chain to the president, would have had a duty to contradict the false claims. Of course this is fantasy. NSA doesn't oppose war, and its reports reflect this.
I think the lying occurs higher up in the command structure where some intelligence is omitted from consideration because it doesn't fit the narrative the higher-ups are pursuing. I suppose there's a question here about who, exactly, is involved in this process of filtering out inconvenient information. Are those people part of the intelligence agency or not? This is a tricky question but, even if they are part of the intelligence agency, the pressure to omit comes from the executive branch. The NSA/CIA/etc aren't pursuing a pro-War policy...the executive branch is.
For example, imagine someone in the CIA is asked to provide a report about the likelihood of Iraq having radioactive material that could be weaponized. This person performs diligent research and produces, to the best of their abilities, a factual report. The executive branch presents this report as a "slam dunk" which shows that Iraq has radioactive material. Who lied?
Toward the end of your post, you blur the distinction between "lying" and "having a duty to contradict false claims". I'm only talking about lying although I agree that people do have an imperfect duty to contradict false claims.
In every press conference announcing some fresh horrific stupid war, there are spooks present and they do receive direct questions. It would be better for humanity if they didn't lie when answering.
Claims that CIA aren't pro-war and must be corrupted by evil presidents are pure fantasy. CIA have fought wars, by themselves, without telling the president. [0]
[EDIT:] If you've reached the point that you're imagining that honest secret reports are overruled by the public statements and actions of dishonest elected officials, could you accept that the whole idea of government secrecy is mistaken? Why not have these conversations in the open? Surely we'd make better decisions?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Personally I'm pro-regime change, especially in Cold War Latin America, but that doesn't change anything.
Why does the military industrial complex together with intelligence agencies fabricate lies to keep us embroiled forever in these evil endless wars? Every time we try and pull out there's a new BS story from these groups that everyone laps up: "Bounties on US soldiers! War is good! War is peace! War forever!"
I would not consider him CIA material, let's say. :)
It's not just a case of believing what the CIA say, they and other independent cyber security teams who have also investigated this, have also presented evidence to back up their investigations to show why they think this. There are also other cases of known proven Russian hacking. Assange has provided nothing. So let's not pretend this is a symmetric case of word versus word.
Saddam's non-existent WMDs? Reported by the CIA under an presidential administration that was clutching for any reason to go to war with Iraq.
Gulf of Tonkin? Again, the CIA reporting on something that buttressed the case for war. Again, aligned with the then-presdential administration's desire to escalate things in Vietnam.
The DNC hack is reported by the CIA to be Russia. The current presidential administration has full-throated in their bias toward Russia and against any supposed pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 election. And the CIA still says a highly-damaging (to the Democrats' electoral chances) email dump was orchestrated by Russia.
One of these things isn't like the other.
President Obama signed off the operation, however it was a CIA creation & execution, with the help of Arab intelligence.
CIA does way more than lying and propaganda. They create wars too.
No one is saying they don't create wars. Look into the School of Americas for all the death and destruction the CIA caused in Latin and South America. The CIA was also first on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. But that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about a CIA report on a subject of importance to the president. The CIA isn't going to release that report without sign-off from the top brass, all of whom serve at the pleasure of the president.
The CIA trying to overthrow Assad is good though, the humanitarian disaster is his fault, and Putin's.
None of it is "propaganda".
Yes, this is splitting-hairs, but the Russian Federation isn't anything like North Korea - nor remotely Communist.
These groups are either working explicitly with governments, or their leadership has been approached by domestic police forces and are strong-armed into focusing their attention on specific organizations.
p. 38 and beyond. Also check out the table of contents; it will point you to other technical specifics.
I guess they're all part of the deep state cabal too?
It's like religion, you think your news source is right while all the other ones are wrong (Fox news watchers don't think theirs is propaganda, while MSNBC/CNN viewers clearly see Fox News as propaganda. But MSNBC/CNN does as much propaganda as Fox News).
Anyways, if you're interested in non-corporate news, where if you watch it over many months, thing start to become obvious to the point where you can't unsee it anymore, I recommend Jimmy Dore. He's a comedien. Kind of like a modern day court jester who can tell the truth. Of course, make your own decisions, he may be totally wrong as well, but I've found it to be an insightful source.
Here is one on Crowdstrike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoTGlQ4JMA
My comment links to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, NBC News, the WSJ quoting Republican leadership, and CrowdStrike's own account. They're all collaborating on some elaborate lie and Jimmy Dore has dug up the truth? Give me a break.
I don't know if you're mostly joking; if so, I'll admit it's over my head.
Jimmy Dore isn't the only one, there are lots of other great commentators such as Kyle Kulinski, Rising With The Hill's Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (this one may be more your style, Krystal is left-leaning and comes from MSNBC and Saagar is right-leaning. They don't agree with everything but they cut through the BS pretty well).
I would just say be open-minded and simply start watching one of these sources, it's good to be skeptical. You probably won't agree with them much in the beginning, but when you start seeing how things play out over months, it starts to make a lot more sense, then eventually it becomes obvious.
Note: I am not a conspiracy person AT ALL! Having been captivated by Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World over 20 years ago, I'm actually a big skeptic. Huge James Randi fan, etc. So, don't think that I'm some conspiracy hack, quite the opposite.
I don't own a TV or watch cable news; I get most of my news from feeds like AP or Reuters, then try to decide for myself what I think before reading some commentary/analysis.
It's a little worrying to hear things like "[...], if you watch sources like Jimmy Dore over a period of months, it starts to become obvious." This is exactly how conspiracy theories and other quackery work. People get fed up with the mainstream and seek out alternative narratives about how the world _really_ works, then over time cede so much factual ground that their frame of reference becomes broken. This is exactly how people get into flat earth, 9/11 was an inside job, etc.
A slightly better "alternative" might be a news org like The Intercept or a writer like Matt Taibbi. Both are highly ideological but fairly constrained by the facts.
Another symptom of the illness that ails us. It's the job of comedians to make us laugh, not to tell the truth. If a lie is funny enough, some comedians will tell it for that reason alone.
>> Kind of like a modern day court jester who can tell the truth
Responding to the GP: I think that's a misunderstanding of the myth of court jesters. It wasn't that they were the only ones that could tell the truth, it was that they were the only ones that could hint at uncomfortable truths to the king if they wrapped it up in enough humor. Other people could tell the truth amongst themselves, but they had to flatter the king because of his power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
Why take it from a comedian? There is a much more reliable source that knows all[0], sees all and reads a lot.
More details[1].
#WWG1WGA
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/20/904237192/journalist-enters-t...
All I'm saying is, start watching the commentators I'm suggesting over a period of time, and you will see they are not conspiracy theorists.
FWIW, sometimes my posts get significantly downvoted at first, and within a few hours end up with a lot more upvotes. I try to not care in the first place, but sometimes this makes me feel better.
Assuming Assange is telling the truth, how would he even know who the ultimate source was?
I mean, Russia might be sophisticated enough to not pass on information like this using someone with an obvious connection to them. It's not like their agents are required to have an accent out of a Bond movie and wear a KGB/FSB uniform all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...
If he received the emails from someone with direct access to them - e.g. someone who worked for the DNC - Occam's Razor would suggest a lack of Russian involvement.
(Not saying this is the case, just pointing out one possibility.)
Well, you have to realize when you link Fox News, most people wouldn't call that a "point of information".. If one links any obviously biased news site, then it is perceived more of an endorsement than just putting a 'fact' out there.
He has no way of knowing if where he got them from was hired by Russia.
So Russia, aswell as any of every other organization, state or individual on the planet, might indirectly have handed the info over.
> It's a point of information, not an endorsement.
Please follow the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), specifically: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. "
Honestly, I think "our supposed higher IQ's" (or more precisely: a self-image as being much smarter than average) can actually be a handicap when dealing with areas outside of one's specialty. It can very easily lead to overconfidence.
They go into other fields, declare that the field is just so easy, try to model things as 1m radius spheres of water, see that the four interstitial cell layers of the bovine second stomach are hyper-complex and noisy when saline levels change 2% (or things to that effect), declare that the field still needs to change, write a paper up that is simplistic and help no one in the field, get a bit of press coverage, assuage their damaged egos, and then try out landscape painting or Ethiopian cooking.
This phenomenon of overconfident and un-humble emeritus Physicists is not restricted to just them, I'm afraid, but all people.
Humility is a virtue.
I'm guessing it's a generalization from a relatively common great respect for academic science as an institution. However, even that's far from universal, which the pandemic has shown.
I do agree with you. I think there's at least as much overconfident mistrust of institutions than respect for them there.
(Saddam had incentive to pretend he had WMD. He certainly didn't want Iran to know he didn't. He obviously didn't want inspectors inside his government buildings. But Bush and his team used Saddam's behavior as evidence he was hiding WMD, rather than the fact that he was hiding the lack of WMD.)
Once the CIA realized that war was inevitable, it went into cover-your-ass-mode and said Saddam might have chemical weapons so that US soldiers wouldn't go into Iraq with insufficient protection in-case there were chemical weapons after all.
Bush was unwilling to listen to counter-naratives. If Condi Rice or, more likely, Colin Powell had been willing to say "I don't think war is such a good idea" maybe it wouldn't have happened. But Bush surrounded himself with yes men. If Powell hadn't supported the war, likely he and his entire staff would have had to resign. If that had happened, Bush would have lost Tony Blair's support and with that, any international support. Bush probably would have at least thought twice about going to Iraq alone.
So in this case, it wasn't so much that the institutions weren't trustworthy, it's that they fell in line with pressure that started from Bush. It doesn't do any good to have experts at your disposal if you're not going to listen to any of them.
Source: Robert Draper's exhaustively researched book on how Iraq happened:
https://www.amazon.com/Start-War-Bush-Administration-America...
Interview with the author:
https://www.vox.com/2020/9/2/21417224/why-did-america-invade...
(Also, the U.S. media didn't do its job. The cynical side of me says there's money to be made in covering war. But probably, it was just incompetence. I still haven't forgiven the NYT though.)
How does falling into line with pressure that started from Bush make them trustworthy? That is exactly the kind of failure which makes them untrustworthy.
So were the intelligence institutions trustworthy to provide good information? Yes.
Bush did an end-run around them.
Were they able to stop the U.S. from going to war? No. But that was Congress’s (and maybe the US media’s) job and certainly _those_ institutions failed.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-phishing-email-that-hacked-...
That said, considering the context of the election, Trumps close ties with Russia and Russian agents, and the broad and multifaceted attempts at hacking the election attributed to Russia (disinformation farms, hacking state election networks), it is very likely that Russia was also behind the DNC hack. These weak attempts at casting doubt on Russia's involvement are transparent.
You, directly above that: Assange's denials about Russia's involvement aren't credible on its face.
Yeah, I'm confused. This is all beside the point. It is lawful to publish true information about candidates that is of interest to the public.
Actually it's an established fact. They were being watched live on their computers and security cameras as they were doing the hacking.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch...
Imaging burning a source so valuable for the sake of the U.S., only to have us elect Trump anyways and four years later pretend like its still an open question whether Russia was involved.
Is there some connection between State Dept in 2014 and DNC in 2016?
I'm sticking with the 007 analysis that UK intel is golden and the US contact is about as cowboy as a spy can get but won't stand injustice.
Same old biological biases embedded within.
For example, how this forum often lauds certain non-gods and ignores the math that luck of time and place, not inherent abilities, are what bring people wealth.
Ignoring all the alternatives and historical evidence of high taxation’s value to a society, this forum likes to cling to celebrity worship of economists and tech elites who can only be elite given a tilted economic reward system tilted by biological indoctrination that’s proven in experiment....
Or how in a democracy we seem to end up in a pretty tilted political power structure.
But here they are anyway ignoring science because of biological contentment.
Western culture is as irredeemable as any other. Logistical capabilities are what matters, not ideology. Humans can’t escape their own ego though.
Yes, I guess it's a report. But it contains just assertions, so it's only meaningful if you trust the institution making it. I've read reports that actually contained the process the core conclusion were arrived at, like various opensource investigations from Bellingcat, etc. And these were indeed more convincing.
Not sure why hacker should just go by blind trust to institutions, lol.
"According to Crowdstrike..."
That's it. No one else did any investigation, just Crowdstrike. The same underhanded, dishonest company that LulzSec and Anonymous felt the needs to expose time and time again for their fraudulent ways. People who have no problem lying or framing people.
It's correlated with the recent rise in Trump's polling. Left wingers who oppose lockdowns, cancel culture and the riots are being pushed towards the right.
The more popular a site is, the more enticing it becomes to those who are interested in marketing/manipulation/etc. To give credit where it's due, I think HN is far more resilient to these kinds of attacks than most other sites. But it's still important to keep in mind that these malicious actors do exist, and are attempting to influence your opinions.
Tech culture is changing. The generation that was primarily brought up around CS and engineering in academia and influenced by the counterculture of the 70s, Free Software and anarchism is being replaced by a tech culture raised by Silicon Valley techo-libertarianism, Reddit and 4chan. The Unabomber manifesto is far more influential on the politics of modern tech culture than the Hacker Manifesto. We've gone from hackers building the web to liberate the world from the gatekeepers of information and communication to hackers wanting to burn the web down because it's too mainstream.
That's a cultural schism that Hacker News hasn't been able to deal with.
It’s like a detective saying “I think he’s guilty, so there’s no need to get a statement.”
The lack of thoroughness here has always bothered me.
https://apnews.com/ef3b036949174a9b98d785129a93428b/Report:-...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch...
I don't believe anything the state says and so far every leak Asange has provided has been proven to be true. At this time he has more credibility than the government.
And the question here isn't if his leaks were true, it's if they were coordinated with Russia to disseminate information stolen in an attack targeted to influence one side of America's election. It has been proven in court that Assange was working the Trump campaign via Roger Stone. There is an abundance of evidence the hacker alias who procured the emails was a front for GRU. There is an abundance of evidence that GRU was actively working to support Donald Trump. Trump openly supported their help. The email leak came out immediately after the Access Hollywood tape revealed Trump's penchant for sexual assault.
What happened to the time that the people actually were wise enough to see those with suspicion?
The "convincing evidence" has been of the kind "let's prosecute this guy involved in big politics selectively for stuff that everybody else has been doing on the side for decades, and pretend like he is some rare exception, and hope that people wont see that it doesn't really prove anything about our greater point". Or the kind "yeah, our guys totally have seen these people attacking that system, and they can't be anything but X, would we ever lie? Here's a report".
Narratives matter to most people far, far, far more than facts.
This is the world we live in now. And tbh, this is the problem.
1. Assange really will choose to say who is or isn't a source (that carries its own risks in so many directions...).
2. Assange actually wants to tell the truth about the source...
3. Assange actually KNOWS the nature of the source? If Bob comes to him and says he's from Brazil (random country selected) and he got the info from Australia (another rando country) ... how sure can Assange be?
I'm not sure I find Assange to be a reliable narrator. The nature of wikileaks has for a while felt like it wants to craft its own narrative rather than just release information. Even as far back as when they were on Facebook (not sure if they still are) any question that seemed to even be distantly critical was deleted. They'd announce a big upcoming leak and nothing would happen ... if you asked anything about it your post was deleted.
I felt like they were playing their own game(s).
But even if that isn't the case, I don't trust that Assange can be as sure as he sounds about where information comes from. If he just up and trusts what his source tells him or just assumes he has the resources to be sure, that's kinda naive...
That said, Wikileaks was very proud of its "reporting" track record, methods, and sources. Their minimal exposition was journalistic cover for their original sources that was typically so thin that it would be difficult to contain errors.
Based on that track record and lengths Assange has gone through to maintain that integrity, I tend to believe who he says his source wasn't, that he would not intentionally reveal a source - living or dead, and that their are likely intermediaries or collaborators that would be compromised even if the original source would no longer be affected. That chain of trust is how they help ensure other leakers come to them first, and it seems their opsec is good enough to keep those sources secret even when the organization is significantly compromised.
I completely agree that they often oversold their releases. There were often claims of a deadman switch as well. If that hasn't triggered after all that's happened, was it a bluff? did it fail? was it compromised? did it contain information about the wrong target?
Conclusion: Assange is not a Russian asset.
(If you want to be ultra-pedantic this power is still vested in the monarch, but they can't use it without the direction of the Home Secretary, who in turn is bound by convention to generally almost never use it, and certainly not purely of their own initiative.)
I think you could divide uses of this power into a few categories:
- Righting past wrongs; pardoning people convicted under old laws now repealed and considered immoral - this is the primary use in most countries that retain a pardon.
- Influencing policy; pardoning people convicted under existing laws that the pardoner is personally opposed to - this happens in the US a bit.
- Electoral franchise; pardoning people to restore their right to vote - this one is mostly only US relevant, as most developed democracies (including large parts of the US) don't remove the franchise for this reason.
- Patronage - Pardoning personal friends/contributors/etc. This historically happened quite a lot in the US.
- Quid pro quo - Trump seems to be the main offender here.
(This isn't a political statement. I liked Obama, and I don't like Trump.)
I would have replied sooner but i'm being slowbanned. Mea culpa.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executi... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executi...
Most of Trump's appear to be pardons of notable people, often aligned with Trump, currently serving their sentence, and in the case of Stone actually convicted for activity relating to Trump. There are a few more traditional cases (eg Jack Johnson), but all in all they're two very different lists, showing a very different use of the power.
To be clear, I'm of the opinion that both are bad and that the power should be restricted to a judicial committee or similar, as elsewhere, but I do think these two cases are _different_.
I'm not saying this is for sure the case.. just that your comment smells of bias to me.
By the way, at the end of his first term, Obama had pardoned _17_ people. Expect a flood of pardons from Donald in January (or, if he's re-elected, in January 2025) as is traditional.
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2017/0120/On-Obama-s-l...
Go ahead and review Obama's pardons and check for bias. He had an extra 4 years to fill with a legacy of criminal justice reform and forgiveness. I see 1 entry for perjury, a 3 month sentence, and no entries of past employees, advisors, friends, or contacts who plead guilty to or were convicted of crimes connected to the president. Trump pardoned Stone after he literally threatened the judge involved in his case on social media, an open threat against the entire US justice system. Recently a NJ judge's house was attacked and family members killed by someone who took action on that type of threat.
Trump pardoned someone who threatened a judge AND was convicted of lying to protect Trump. Perhaps he should face a second round of impeachment for such abuses of power.
What about judges though? In Obama's last year, an election year, the Senate held open over 100 judge positions including refusing to even hear a SCotUS pick (Garland). Obama had 324 picks confirmed over 8 years or about 40 per year. Trump has had 194 in his 3.5 years including that open SCotUS seat plus 1 or about 55 per year, a nearly 40% increase over Obama. Also, many of these lifetime justices are young, promoted by right wing interest groups including pseudo campaigns for SCotUS seats, and often rated unqualified or unexperienced by various Bar associations which is not only unprecedented but an incredible overreach by the Senate. McConnell held open over 100 seats for Trump to fill but continues to confirm judges for an impeached president in an election year. These justices may have 40+ year careers as partisan hacks disrupting our legal system which already suffers from insane structural racism and inequality (both things Obama was tearing down until his last day on the job).
Trump has appointed 2 SCotUS justices (one who likes to boof and drink) and 40% more judges than Obama, year to year, even after his impeachment and during an election year.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/06/04/senate-obst...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/15/how-trump-c...
Even if "most" of Trump's pardons were "blatantly corrupt", the fact that he has pardoned those who could implicate him in crimes and corruption and not those with unjust sentences, evidence of innocence, or convicted of breaking laws no longer on the books is downright indefensible and an indictment of his character and corruption as well as blank check from the GOP to cover up hypocritically instilling partisan justices.
It's important to question things and come to your own, well research and evidence based views on issues and events. Some of us have extensive education or experience in reviewing history and politics so the information is readily available or easy to find and it is important to understand where systems are broken and where people are breaking systems that work well when run by honest citizens, like the USPS. Obama definitely had more pardons but also used the power with humility and a conscience to fight injustice, not to further his own ends and protect himself from investigation.
Obama pardoned 1 person for perjury and they weren't even connected to him.
Of all the things a ruler with unchecked power could do, I'd argue pardoning people is possibly the least dangerous. "Oh no, please help me, the evil dictator is going around flagrantly pardoning people, hope he doesn't pardon me!"
I wish I still wondered where this vehement hatred for innocent victims of the state comes from...
In fact, in _very_ corrupt systems, it is common to put people you need something from in legal jeopardy _for the purpose_ of dangling a pardon to get the thing you wanted in the first place. To be clear, I don't think that's the case here; Trump was attempting to get a quid pro quo but probably didn't set up the initial situation.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-conclud...
Many later Republics (eg Ireland) inherited from monarchist systems with more of a ceremonial role for the king, and presidents tend to have more of a ceremonial role too.
Anyway, to various extents and with lots of caveats... Presidents have the power to pardon in a lot of democratic countries. In Ireland, for example, the power is constitutionally with the President, but in practice the power is with the government/parliament.
Whatever the details, pardons (and clemencies) are a necessary device. Even courts need check valves and this is a way of checking courts without harming the court as an institution. Yes, it is open to abuse, but on balance I do think it's necessary.
I agree that this sounds like an ugly politicisation... but everything about the Assange case is highly politicised. The content of the offense publishing politically damaging information about parties, politicians, defense and intelligence bodies. There have been tactical indictments in multiple countries. Secretive proceedings. Etc.
This was never a case where blind justice reigns pristine. It's an inevitably political shitshow.
For analogy, think of US impeachment. It's an obviously political, and whether or not the President has enough friends in Congress matters more than evidence. It's a whole lot better than nothing though. If you want to see what not having anything looks like, you can look at the shitshow going on in Israel currently.
Sometimes you need a way around standard rules. Standard rules exist for a reason, and bypasses aren't without a cost... but I do think they're necessary.
While this is generally true, France is a weird case; it was a parliamentary democracy for a bit! The current semi-presidential setup is pretty new.
> Whatever the details, pardons (and clemencies) are a necessary device. Even courts need check valves and this is a way of checking courts without harming the court as an institution. Yes, it is open to abuse, but on balance I do think it's necessary.
Sure, but it shouldn't be at the behest of one person. It's fine if it is ceremonially, as in the UK and Ireland cases, but not if it is _in fact_.
In any case, aside from motivations, I think this is the sort of case where pardons should be considered. There were a lot of shenanigans. Motivations, political involvement, tactical levers (legal, espionage-ish, diplomatic..) that can't (won't, at least) be revealed. These are the kinds of situations for which pardons exist.
"Internet armies" is very real, not some conspiracy.
It was weird, because news started out as a blend of neutral/positive/negative when the issue was first known. Then suddenly--and not only on reddit--within 30 minutes of a Chelsea Manning topic being posted anywhere, it would have an absurd number of outrageous, angry responses.
The same happened with Assange news. Sometimes even Snowden.
It's really confusing then: If he know that he did not use Russia, acquiring that knowledge wouldn't help much since the next election is in 3 years, so it can't be used as a leverage, unless he wanted the information as an insurance to the probe being biased by DNC influence. If he did, why would he want to know the source? The only thing he would want to know if Assange have been contacted by democrat, or if that information were available to begin with.
Sure is a news that asks more question than it answers, and why was it even mentioned in a court in London?
I'm not sure about the reasoning for why one would do this, but it's the same person that took a gamble to get dirt on Biden and got impeached over it, so probably shouldn't approach it from a place of pure rationality. It's terrifying that Rohrabacher was a part of this though, and really skews my personal take that nothing about this was above board.
If I’m reading this correctly, they were literally trying to create a disinformation campaign to demonize their opponents, which is very much in line with all these Republican operatives flying to Ukraine trying to get some dirt on Biden.
It can be assumed that he wasn't making this deal in order to implicate Russian hackers (and Assange would likely have known that).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/house...
But in my view, Assange is unprincipled enough that he'll say whatever Trump/the thugs running the West wants, so he can be freed. Or to paint it in a different light, they're torturing him so he'll say whatever they want him to say.
The fact that he didn't go with the pardon offer this very page is discussing suggests that this is wrong. You don't think Assange had options to be freed in the past however many years?
"biased hit piece" indeed
How would this benefit Trump politically?
> Democrat Party is an epithet for the Democratic Party of the United States, used in a disparaging fashion by the party's opponents. While the term has been used in a non-hostile way, it has grown in its negative use since the 1940s
This is in a British court, and the President is not empowered to gag the courts anyway (except sort of I guess, at the highly-constitutionally-questionable national security trials)
Pardon offers are in no way binding or enforceable, so no actual gambling is involved. You just don't follow through unless you get the answer you want, as well as making very clear (such as by spending multiple years building a particular public narrative which the defendant actively participated in around your preferred answer) what the expected answer is so that, regardless of what the true answer is, the defendant knows what answer gets them free of the charges.
No, Assange being paid off by Trump for saying that it's someone other than Russia (which Assange has said, in less specific terms, before, repeatedly, as part of denying that he himself was acting as a witting or unwitting Russian agent and not an independent actor won't embarrass anyone) won't embarrass anyone.
OTOH, the offer (if there's was concrete evidence of it) itself would bolster Assange's claim that this is a political prosecution by the US Administration.
A lot of people are still salty that Assange did journalism that exposed Hillary Clinton's wrongdoing, even people who idolized him until 2016 for his excellent work on America's foreign conflicts, so it's really hard to navigate this labyrinth and get away with doing the right thing.
Also, being able to pardon Assange would also be his version of the Obama->Manning moment: viciously prosecutor a whistle blower and then symbolically free said whistle blower to make yourself look like the hero.
Even though the Russia narrative has pretty much been shown to be a pile of rubbish, a lot of Americans still don't believe it. Having Assange say it would reinforce that reality.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/mar/18/wikileaks-rus...
Here's a summary of some of the key findings [2]. Among other things, the head of the Trump campaign was sharing confidential campaign information with an individual that the new GOP report identifies as a "Russian intelligence officer". It's all around pretty shocking stuff, if we lived in a world where people could be shocked anymore.
> Kilimnik was also the “primary liaison” between Manafort and one of his clients, sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, according to the Senate report, which also alleges that Manafort “worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.”
> The GOP-led committee said it “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU's hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” a reference to the Russian cyberattacks that targeted the DNC in the run-up to the election.
> Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, hinted that senators have additional information, including “evidence connecting Kilimnik to the GRU's hack-and-leak operations,” but those elements are redacted.
[1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/press/rubio-statement-se... [2] https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512613-five-tak...
Additionally, CrowdStrike admitted in sworn testimony that it didn't have any concrete proof. That their findings were based on appearances and estimations and assumptions.
Yes, because the only source of intelligence on an operation is the crime scene itself. Clearly this is bogus and so is the insinuation that there is no other sources of intelligence on Russian operations than evidence from the hacked server.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
It's unlikely that someone with such an understanding (whether or not it's a correct assumption) would believe that Assange coming forward and saying he was given the emails by Russian assets coordinating with Roger Stone under the direction of Trump would then result in the promised pardon.
Note that, since then, Assange has not come forward with exculpatory evidence for Trump and the administration has begun prosecuting Assange.
In the event that Assange could prove some other actor sourced the emails, that would mean that the FBI, NSA, and CIA were wrong, and the single biggest argument in support of the 'Russia Collision' narrative would go away. Trump would fold this into his narrative that the investigation into Russian collusion was a witch hunt.
Which is just about impossible for him to prove. Does Assange have access to the kind of IT forensics experts, access to the hacked systems and other resources to prove someone else did it? No, he does not. He didn't do the hacking himself. Whoever he did get the leaked info from could of course claim not to be working for the Russians as an intermediary. But that is just a claim, and not proof.
If that sounds like an official act in return for a personal political favor to the president to help his reelection chances and therefore is illegal, you would be correct!
I'm not sure why it wouldn't.
Not everything that the mainstream culture war has picked up as its touchstones is actually about the mainstream culture war.
Shoehorning leaking of data, by a hacker, about corrupt governments into the standard (and frankly boring) left/right US culture war is one of the most obvious examples of this ridiculous phenomenon.
Regardless of your political affiliation, the world is a better place that this information is public.
In its purest form, I'm inclined to agree with you.
But I think Assange is more of a tool than a tool-user. He's a launderer of information provided by parties with an agenda.
This might be inevitable, given the players, but it doesn't make it pure or honest.
Also I think he injects a lot of personal agenda into his curation of released information. This opens him up for legitimate criticism, just like any other activist or politician.
Just as much as Trump doesn't want Russia to have helped him become president, Assange doesn't want to be seen as an unwitting pawn of Russia.
Notably, "Guccifer 2.0"'s IP address was part of a block allocated to the GRU headquarters in Moscow. I seriously doubt that was an _accidental_ disclosure; it was an advertisement. It's an implicit threat to others.
We saw it with the Brexit campaign and now with Boris Johnson over here, it turns out that if you spew as much dishonesty, jingoistic bile, and corruption as possible you can win an election. Think about the debates in 2016, where do you even start when arguing against "No puppet, No puppet, you're the puppet, no puppet" constitutes a debate.
Sure, there was a time on the 19th century when all American presidents were all like that. But the U.S. were a very different country back then, the Federal government was a lot less powerful.
Doesn’t help that we’ve had God Emperors like FDR.
The American president has also been mythologized. They’re calling all the shots and doing whatever. Unfortunately that means they can trample over the Constitution and only the opposing party usually cares.
The republicans didn't even ratify any policies at the RNC this year.
Obviously you have to support your guy, but if I said to you a majority / near-majority of the speakers at the convention were family and friends of the President would you think of a some backward state or the most powerful democracy in the world.
But yea the major party duopoly is gross and has been for a while now. The dynastic families are insufferable.
The tables are completely turned. America has become the country to show pity towards.
Unless America changes its way of governance this Fall, 4 more years and what exactly is the difference between America and Brazil?
I recall, probably in the 80's, an incident where the US government objected to a foreign aid organisation distributing food aid in the US on equal basis to the kind of food aid programs operated in third world countries.
Several European countries also refers to "American conditions" as a threat of chaos during political debates. E.g. I grew up in Norway, where the threat of "American conditions" was a common scare-tactic by the left to get people to oppose right wing policies. This was decades ago - the first threats of "American conditions dates back more than half a century.
This is because poorer countries have seen this story before. They didn't need a war to make them poor. Their incompetent leadership over years was enough.
My greatest fear is Trumpism is a harbinger for a half century or more of American instability and decline, the same way Peronism was.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/opinion/can-bal-keshav-th...
BUT I have to say that even in my 3rd world country, President/Prime Minister tier leaders rarely, if ever, succumb to the kind of rhetoric Trump uses. Usually, that's reserved for tier-2 leaders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
Italy, Turkey and Russia were pretty much not third world countries when that word had a political meaning.
Later on it became a synonym for developing world, which basically rules out most of the rest of your list, since Brazil, Argentina and Philippines aren't on that list either.
So I assume you just use it a slur, meaning that those countries have a dysfunctional political systems, with corrupted strongmen; ok, I guess; just say "corrupt, failed, authoritarian political systems"; third world brings too much baggage, needlessly insulting people who live in those countries and who produce vibrant economies that have nothing to do the perception of starving masses associated with the "third world" slur.
He is forcing Assange to say "I will not reveal my sources as I am a journalist". Trump then gets to say he tried. The "media", especially any real journalists that take their profession seriously, will provide analysis that Assange is right for refusing. This gives Trump another opening to smear the media by portraying them as pro Assange, pro hacking and anti DNC.
We must stay TOGETHER in demanding a pardon, rather than indefinite detention meant to keep him quiet. We must not allow this to get dragged into the political culture wars.
Edit: thankfully the headline has been changed.
Edit: It appears CrowdStrike has officially changed their conclusion in their investigation after the FBI concluded theirs. I hope you people know this is all complete nonsense. The CEO himself said they ONLY had 'circumstantial evidence', and nothing at all concrete. Not a single thing.
Edit2: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/05/13/...
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/05/13/...
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
Anecdotally I remember reading an intel report from Crowdstrike about Fancy Bear...
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/05/13/...
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
During the 2016 election these news outlets breathlessly repeated the misleading statement that 17 intelligence agencies agreed Russia was responsible for the stolen emails based on a statement from USIC, which represented 16, and Crowdstrike, which was the 17th. The USIC statement says nothing about how many subsidiary agencies were actually suggesting this (later we learned it was 3 or 4).[1] A year later when Trump’s USIC issued a statement, NPR was quick to point out that the USIC comprises 17 organizations, but only a few of them reached conclusions in the report.[0] We’ve also since learned that Crowdstrike, while publicly saying Russia was responsible for exfiltrating data from the DNC, was telling Congress under oath that it had no evidence to such claims. no other agency had access to the servers in question, including US federal intelligence agencies, which could have performed forensics while a sympathetic party was still in control of the executive branch.
0 - https://www.npr.org/sections/memmos/2018/07/18/630057400/gui... 1 - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...
(edit: s/ ased/ based/)
My personal opinion is that all major news outlets (Fox included) can not be taken at face value, requiring an unreasonable amount of research to determine what’s actually happening in current events. It’s not even just major events, it’s even happening at the local level. Our local newspaper monopoly reported that our neighborhood school district was opening last week with no evidence and after the board had just decided to delay opening. It’s unclear there was an agenda or just sloppy reporting, but this was then used by parents to as evidence to pressure their own districts to open. None issue public retractions or corrections anymore, just stealth edits.
Then I come to a place like HN where I find critical thinkers in nearly every aspect except current events which have become so polluted by political bias. We get it, conservatives need to shut up and tow the line. I’m getting too old for that. Facts can stand on their own outside opinion. /getoffmylawn
What's more likely, that Seth Rich really was murdered for leaking some (overall fairly tame) emails or that his death is completely unrelated and it was just opportunistically reused by far-right groups to make up one of the conspiracy theories they like so much?
Because it is. Don't waste your attention on this.
Rich was pissed at what the DNC did to Bernie (look at his past), and I think it's a fair guess to say he wanted to screw them over. He was in the perfect position to do so. If that's the truth, why Assange won't leak that, I'm not sure.
On top of all this, CrowdStrike themselves said under oath that it's likely it was hacked internally, although they have now conveniently changed their stance. See my original comment.
im sure you're an expert on crime but it is not in fact ridiculous that when a robbery is botched and someone gets shot they won't steal anything because you want to run immediately. you're sheltered.
I can't prove a negative, but I am not sure where you got the idea that Seth was in a "perfect position to screw" the DNC over, nor the idea he was motivated to do so. His family has begged for years for conspiracy theorists like you to let this rest.
-Crowdstrike said it's likely someone internally hacked the server
-Seth Rich was in the position and time to do so and had a direct grudge against the DNC
-He was murdered almost around the exact same time the server was hacked in a wealthy area with no history of something like that ever happening.
You can come to other conclusions. I've come to mine. It's not certain of course, but it's the most likely with the information I have now. If you think it's more likely he was randomly murdered, that's possible but it's not the most likely.
You can come to any conclusion you'd like. Just like I can point out your obvious hypocrisy. You demand far more evidence from others than you present for your own stance. The Mueller Report and Senate Intelligence Report each investigated this allegation and found it to be non-credible [1].
Mueller Report:
"Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had made statements “designed to obscure” the source of the DNC leaks and of having “implied falsely” that Rich was his source."
Senate Intelligence Report:
"One narrative from Assange involved a conspiracy theory that Seth Rich, a DNC staffer killed in a botched robbery, was the source of the DNC email leak and had been murdered in response. On August 9, Assange gave an interview on Dutch television implying that Rich was the source of the DNC emails, and that day WikiLeaks announced that it would be issuing a reward for information about Rich’s murder. In a subsequent interview, Assange commented about the WikiLeaks interest in the Rich case as concerning “someone who’s potentially connected to our publication.”
The bipartisan Senate report was unequivocal about the factual basis for this theory: “The Committee found that no credible evidence supports this narrative.”"
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/senate-i...
bloomingdale, washington d.c., where he got shot, has a rate of robbery almost 4x the national average, and twice the murder rate.
There had been a string of armed robberies in the area, which residents had been complaining about.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/bloomingd... https://www.popville.com/2016/07/two-more-armed-robberies-in...
It also simply doesn't fit the mold of an assassination attempt. Seth Rich was shot (twice) in the back, not the head, without a silencer. In fact, he was conscious when police got there, and didn't succumb to his injuries until he was in the hospital 1.5 hours later.
Conspiracyland (https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYWNhc3QuY29...) did its season 1 on Seth Rich murder. I highly recommend it.
Jeffrey Epstein's body wasn't even cold before people were tying his death to the Clintons, claiming they had him killed to hide their involvement in his sex trafficking ring. It's just one of their go-to memes.
"The fact that the Democratic Party employed the two private firms that generated the core allegations at the heart of Russiagate -- Russian email hacking and Trump-Russia collusion – suggests that the federal investigation was compromised from the start."
How does it "suggest" the investigation was compromised? I don't see the evidence.