I don't know if they are evil but I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.
Assange has a 100% truthful track record in matters of Wikileaks and was extremely explicit that the source of the Hillary leaks was not Russian in origin. This is more propaganda that people keep spreading and is exhausting. It's also exhausting that the narrative continues to be about Assange instead of Hillary for actually doing illegal and fucked up things.
The 'Russian collusion case' has been thoroughly discredited so why do you bring it up here, other than to muddle the issue?
If you want to have a clear case of meddling with presidential elections I'd point at the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funding of the Steele dossier. Should that be brought up here as well? The 'dossier' was also discredited but it was used in the same way the data from Wikileaks was used to target Clinton. The difference here was that the data on Clinton was true while the 'Steele dossier' was fictitious.
No, "collusion" doesn't exist as a crime. It wasn't discredited it just doesn't exist as a criminal thing.
And it turns out that "conspiracy" is something that requires the participants to understand that they're doing something wrong, and Mueller couldn't find any evidence of that. When you're rich and committing white collar crimes then the defense of "I didn't know it was illegal" apparently works, unlike us plebs when we get pulled over by the traffic cops.
There was plenty of evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and the Russians. Just none of it was considered crimes by the Muller investigation. Wikileaks was actively lending support to the Trump campaign in order to attempt to get Trump elected and defeat Hillary. So were the Russians. That is on solid factual ground. But Mueller didn't find anything there that the DOJ could charge him over.
It is also pretty clear that Mueller thought that the revelations would be shocking enough that Congress would impeach and remove Trump for what he had done and that "high crimes and misdemeanors" (which really has no legal definition) would cover it, but he didn't expect Congress to abdicate its responsibility in favor of partisan politics.
This is the same President that bragged he could "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and get away with it, and that is precisely what the Republican led Congress allowed him to do.
Another problem was that the investigation was obstructed (in the broad sense, including crimes like obstruction of justice, witness tampering, etc.), both by people who were charged for that (some convicted and some remaining beyond the reach of US justice), and by Trump, who could not be charged under Justice Department policy which, regardless of its legal correctness, Mueller was bound by.
(And charging Trump after he left office for crimes related to the 2016 campaign would, given the general 5 year statute of limitations for federal crimes, have been difficult – it might be possible to argue that OLC memo on Presidents being beyond federal prosecution was correct and that the same logic tolled statutes of limitations, but that’s a dicey argument to make; obstruction would have been less problematic, but the Trump pardons and other things would also complicate that.)
There is zero reputable evidence of this
Where is the evidence that it was Seth Rich for example? Alex Jones?
Additionally, Assange has implied it was Seth Rich as strongly as he can without actually confirming he was the source, because he's bound by journalistic ethics and his agreement with his source to not reveal them.
Lastly, the Mueller report tries to discredit this and states as fact that Seth Rich was not the source. But it provides absolutely zero reasoning or evidence for this, and there is literally no way they could know this for sure. It claims it as fact regardless, and so does the entire establishment corporate media.
That isn't evidence.
Find some factual evidence that Seth Rich ever touched the e-mails or had access to them.
Best evidence I think that its clearly the Russian GRU that gave it to Wikileaks is Assange trying to blame it on Seth Rich. Because of what he's done to Seth Rich's family I'm quite happy to see him rotting in a jail cell. In an ideal world, everyone pushing that story should be in there with him.
The article addresses this belief and fairly well debunks it's origins.
Outraged the Clinton campaign swiftly ascribed the leaks to Vladimir Putin's intelligence apparatus as part of an operation to secure Trump's victory. The accusation was fueled by forensic analysis from the DNC's cybersecurity consultants, from CrowdStrike, detailing the potential links between the leaks and the Russian government.
Testifying under oath in a closed-door session before the committee in 2017, CrowdStrike’s chief security officer Shawn Henry admitted that he had no “concrete evidence” that the Russians had stolen the emails, or indeed that anyone had hacked the DNC’s system.
This crucial interview remained locked away until 2020. The press did little to acknowledge it; the testimony failed to attract even a passing mention in the New York Times, the Guardian, or any other mainstream outlet that had previously charted the Russian hacking story.
Something I personally observed (after 2006 and before 2020) is that we had 4 cybersecurity companies that frequently served as mouthpieces for US NatSec agencies - Mandiant, Fireeye, Crowdstrike and Cylance. They'd be called in to assist in some cybersecurity event and would unfailing parrot that agency's FUD, without ever providing any meaningful evidence. During these same events, non-gov cybersecurity experts were commonly casting doubts on US Gov's official narrative.
The above event seems like Crowdstrike acting is it's usual capacity as a Gov-adjacent mouthpiece - that is until the House committee compelled the CSO to supply evidence of Crowdstrike's parroted claim.
Otherwise, it seems like you're saying "they're bad [via an unsupported claim like 'selectively truthful'] because they hurt my $politicalside"
I think this is a well-articulated representation of a specific (and much more common) journalistic ethos, but he quite explicitly holds a different ethos that is much more radical about transparency.
Plus, this answers the opposite of my question: I asked how GP comment supports his claim that Assange's is "selectively truthful", and you responded by saying that he's not selective enough!
GP could have made an argument like the one you made, disputing the very foundations of Assange's open-information philosophy. What piqued my curiosity was his novel claim of unprincipled selectivity, and I charitably wanted to avoid the assumption that his comment was simply word-salad covering up a politically-motivated dislike of WL.
I think the higher stance is to report as a journalist and not exercise your own bias into when you choose to publish. And regardless, if you choose to delay it, your source will simply go to someone who won't. There's never an instance where it makes sense to delay, and it never makes sense to decline to write on reputable information, since it's not like wikileaks has a monopoly on journalism
They weren't Russian state hacked, this is propaganda.
CrowdStrike - paid for by the DNC
Fidelis Cybersecurity - paid for by the DNC
FireEye's Mandiant - CEO at the time was Kevin Mandia, who's a known associate of Hillary Clinton and also publicly a democratic financial supporter.
SecureWorks - owned by Michael Dell, a known donator to the Clinton Foundation
ThreatConnect - not much info, but also explicitly only said "likely"
Trend Micro - Hillary and DNC are customers of Trend Micro, and they also did not actually say anything at all about a connection to Russia.
Additionally, the reports don't say it was Russian. They say the tools are ones that Russians have been thought to use, with no context into whether everyone uses these tools, to what confidence level they believe that Russians actually use these tools, no context as to whether someone would deliberately use these tools to make it look Russian, or virtually anything at all that substantiates this argument. They also almost universally use phrases like "likely" or "points to". Trying to characterize this situation as confirmed is just outright wrong.
Anyway, this is exhausting. Hyperbole becomes fact and I'm tired of having to disprove hyperbole.
I'm not a Trump supporter by any means, but the truth is the truth. If we only care about the truth when it favors us, I don't see how we're better than liars.
Had Wikileaks done the same they would have met with the same fate: they would have been accused of being in bed with whatever enemy-du-jour could be concocted and the material would have been buried under miles of accusations.
There is no way to publish damaging information about the Clintons without being attacked for it.
There is absolutely no way to know the intent here, and there are plenty of rational reasons to release things in batches.
Is that a purely partisan view or do you know of some true information they had and refused to publish?
I suspect what happened is simply that the Clinton campaign had no use for Wikileaks because most of the media was working with them, so only Trump supporters sent info to Wikileaks.
Those boring leaks probably came from the inside.
Especially because Trump was objectively pretty anti-Russia, and did a lot of things that pissed off Russia. But there is too much hysteria around "OMG RUSSIA AND TRUMP" and general FUD propaganda for anyone to see the forest for the trees of "orange man bad"
Believing Putin over his own intel agencies -- and publicly proclaiming as much -- is actively pro-Russia.
If Trump didn't want people to think he was a Russian asset, he might have tried not acting like one.
Their main objectives for the 2016 election was to prevent Clinton from being elected and to maximize internal division in the US; Trump was the main recipient of their support, but they also used their influence operations to support candidates to Clinton’s left (with varying responses from the candidates themselves) including Sanders (who publicly addressed it after being briefed on it, telling Russia to get out of US elections).
> How did that ever make sense?
Weakening NATO and Western unity alone was a pretty good benefit; its hardly the only place in the West where Russia, around the same time, backed nationalist political movements to disrupt internal or international unity in the West.
they do and they inarguably are. there is not any evidence at all that they have received reputable and material information and declined to report on it