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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

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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