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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Did he have any republican emails? If so that's news to me and I would not mind seeing them.

Emails specificially? I'm not sure if that has ever been confirmed, but this is directly from Assange[1]:

>“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post.

>“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said.

If Wikileak's primary goal is transparency, why not release these docs too?

[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...

You won't because Wikileaks refused to release them. Their stated justification for this was, so much bad stuff had already been revealed about Trump that there was no need. Reallly.

Possibly not, Russia most likely decided not to feed those to WikiLeaks.

Well, you can hardly blame Assange for that. I see a lot of shooting the messenger going on with this case.

Even if you assume that Assange just released all information that was available to him, I still think it's hard to argue he's completely blameless. It seems naive to think that you wouldn't be made a tool of propagandists, even if you didn't endeavor to be a propagandist yourself.

Suppose that Russia gave you a cache of emails implicating a politician of your own favorite party in some kind of massive corruption scandal. Furthermore, suppose that you somehow knew they were real, and also somehow knew it was Russia (the second condition being the least realistic, but I'm working with you here.) Would you hide the emails to protect your former favorite party, allowing the corruption to continue, or would you release them in an action that would appear to help a foreign power? That's a serious question and I am interested which side HN would come down on.

Nice hypothetical for some political ethics class, but nothing to do with what actually happened. Assange wanted to influence the US election, specifically, to defeat Clinton and elect Trump. He worked with the Trump campaign and the Russians to do everything within his power to make that happen. Meanwhile, Wikileaks was provided with leaked Trump campaign emails and refused to release them, claiming it wasn't important to do that.

To portray this as an difficult decision for poor Assange is just absurd. He made clear in his own emails, his entire goal was to bring down Clinton. She lost the election for many reasons, including Assange's efforts but also a very poorly run campaign and many bad decisions on her own part.

You must release the emails.

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