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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

There has been reporting on this. Apparently there was one zealous person in DOJ pushing the Assange case and everybody else thinks it's too weak to be worth it.

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This article from the Intercept covers it pretty well. The prosecutor in question is Gordon Kromberg.

https://archive.is/E5KbI

Here's another: https://www.newagebd.net/article/226187/julian-assanges-gran...

It's interesting, if you believe that one person can take down the system - as a whistleblower must - well surely, one person can buck the system's instincts and try to take down you.

This doesn’t make sense because the Assange case has been a diplomatic issue between the US and Australia ever since Albanese came to power.

Ultimately the responsibility falls to the President since the DOJ isn’t responsible for international relations. Biden must have thought the case was important otherwise there’s no reason to harm relations with an ally over something like that.

Don’t forget Hillary was fixated on Assange for a long time, and was even quoted with “Can’t we just drone the guy?”.

The direct spat lead to Assange helping Trump and the Russians publish Hillary’s email server spool.

I don’t like that Assange ended up helping Trump and Russia, but you can’t blame him for helping the one person who can kick the person out of office who wants to Tomahawk you

I think this is nonsense?

As far as I know there is zero evidence that wikileaks did not publish everything newsworthy that they were given regardless of who it helped or hindered.

Anyone have anything credible showing they suppressed anything ever?

Wikileaks canary died a long, long time ago. Nothing from them has been trustworthy for a long time.

I thought it was the warrant canary of their email provider (Riseup) that died in 2016. Did Wikileaks ever even have a canary?

Riseup currently has a canary[1], they state that it would not trigger for "gag orders, FISA court orders, National Security Letters" which seems like it makes it pretty useless.

1. https://riseup.net/en/canary

From wikileaks: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks_talk:PGP_Keys

This says nothing about it being a canary. All canaries are stated as such.

Instead, all I see is some debate about PGP.

I can believe that only one submission ever used it. PGP is not friendly to people who barely undersrand how computers work (99.999% of the population), and some panicking whistleblower isn't interested in taking a layman's course in crypto to send some docs.

So why would wikileaks renew their useless(from their perspective) PGP key?

Wikileaks in general (as a website) has been dead for years now. Just go look at the website.

Last update in the Leaks section is from 2018.

Last update in the News section is from 2021.

I'm interested to see if Assange brings it back to life.

I thought there was some story about Wikileaks receiving a bunch of stuff regarding Russian gov't officials and there was internal debate in the org and it ended up not being published. Was that just a made up story?

It isn't made up. It was during one of the email leaks when the org was stretched to it's limits. Suddenly they get these documents that they don't have time to fully parse and don't look very interesting anyway. Immediately there are dozens of articles put out simultaneously about how Wikileaks refused to publish Russian documents. I guess they learned about the documents being passed to Wikileaks in the first place, wonder who let them know?

The documents were later published elsewhere and nobody cared because they were uninteresting.

I mean all of their leaks are politically motivated, they are axiomatically a cutout. acting scandalized that someone tried to leak stuff is weird. I get the overworked argument in theory, but odd they didn’t publish it at all in the end.

As I mentioned they were in the middle of one of the biggest releases in their history, the submitted documents didn't look interesting and indeed when they were published nobody cared. Do you know what they were? Publishers won't just publish any old trash you send them.

Foreign Policy: WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign

https://archive.is/ztpnZ

404 not found

Fixed, ty.

There is no claim here of documents or a story being suppressed by wikileaks. The documents and one side of the conversation were provided to ForeignPolicy.com. The anti-wikileaks angle immediately fizzes in the opening paragraphs.

WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.

The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks’s side of the conversation.

“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.

“WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.

Unproven. At best unproven and denied.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/julian-assange-drone-strik...

Your link does not include a denial, it includes Clinton saying she did not recall making such a comment. Is there an outright denial elsewhere?

>Your link does not include a denial

I don't recall calling for or making detailed plans to assassinate the leaders of the G7 at their recent summit.

I also don't recall claiming that you were a pedophile, a murderer and a cross-dresser.

So does that mean you believe I have actually said/done the above, as I haven't denied them?

No one reported you claimed those things and particularly not in an official meeting where there should have been minutes and would have been witnesses which could have boosted a lack of recollection to certainty.

Your examples also fail to continue with "but if I did it was a joke" -- a remark itself almost as damning as the act. We're not talking about mere defamation in the case of Assange: talking about the secretary of state-- who unambiguously has the power to murder foreign persons with a suggestion-- suggesting that she's would joke about murdering people. Not a great look.

So, no, your remarks are unambiguously not denials, but no denial was required in your case.

Mate, this is the comment that they were directly replying to :

> At best unproven and denied.

1. Clinton neither admitted nor denied it. She only said she "didn't recall" making that statement.

2. In any case, Clinton has been very openly critical of Assange, saying the charges were not punishing journalism and that "he has to answer for what he's done." [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/Qc19Qk3KKCw?t=50

Snopes sourced that accusation to the far right True Pundit which had also contributed to the Pizza Gate conspiracy theory. I'm done here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Pundit

Logical fallacy

Ad hominem is a fallacy if you are arguing hypotheticals and philosophy in a Greek salon.

In understanding how the world around us works, credibility matters quite a bit, and "I'm not interested in pretending True Pundit says true things" is a pretty reasonable shortcut.

Rather than just thought-terminate with "logical fallacy," the burden is now on the one bringing the evidence to bring it via a channel other than True Pundit.

For whatever role True Pundit played in spreading the rumor, Clinton played an equally large role via her "denial."

https://x.com/wikileaks/status/783424443070738433

Clinton has had a knack for knowing the real truth of a situation and either not wanting to share that with the public, or doing it in a haughty way where she's simply not believed. Knowing what I know about her in that way, such a quote is worrying.

It implies that she's being characteristically tonedeaf and screwing up the communication of some pretty serious concerns about Assange, but I think that's no mystery by now. You can always get Clinton to make it all about her and spin it in a way that can let you get away with damn near anything, but that's just exploiting personal failings on her part, where if you dig into what she knows it's unsettling how sharp she is.

You can't go by whether Clinton's screwed up the optics.

Check your sources. Alex Jones doesn't count.

I don't think the issue is whether Clinton made this comment or not. The legend simply points out what every one is thinking. That this threw the election for her, and that is likely her entire perspective on this. The Trump admin was likely motivated to prosecute, so as to appear they were not in collusion with the release of the emails, and the current administration directly backed HC. People like Kromberg do not come out of a vacuum.

No evidence of Russian hand. Most likely a DNC insider work.

A DNC insider that set up a very large trail indicating external phishing?

Edit: at the time I think this was considered to be a pretty comprehensive description of what happened. Not sure if new information has come to light since then.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg7xjb/how-hackers-broke-int...

Anything is possible. Don’t underestimate the stupidity of the party members.

Hillary ran her own email server that trafficked classified information and that was maintained by a couple of Pakistani dudes.

This is a lie. Guccifer 2.0 has been clearly identified as Russian.

Julian Assange lied about Seth Rich, and never excused himseéf to his bereaved parents. He is no better than Alex Jones.

> has been clearly identified as Russian

Identified by the same people that have lied about pretty much everything else?

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