Assange image darker by the day

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By Frida Ghitis
Contributing columnist
September 27

... The new president of Ecuador is showing exasperation with Assange’s presence, and the embassy has restricted his Internet access and other privileges. Though Sweden has long since dropped its original arrest warrant for Assange on rape and sexual assault allegations, the British police are still keen to take him into custody for evading a warrant of their own ...

Assange, we now know, was a key player in the Russian operation to undermine the 2016 U.S. presidential election — by actively helping Donald Trump to become president and undercutting Americans’ trust in their democracy, the twin goals of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interference campaign ...

Mueller’s investigators have recently questioned at least five witnesses about Assange’s role in the 2016 campaign. The WikiLeaks founder’s ties to Trump confidant Roger Stone appear to be a focus of that line of inquiry, as ABC News reported last week ...

Guccifer 2.0 confirmed he was working with Assange, and Wikileaks became an important tool in the Russian operation. Oddly enough, Assange’s quest for documents never extended to the Trump campaign, which was more secretive than any in recent U.S. political history. WikiLeaks didn’t appear to have much interest in Trump’s tax returns, or in any of the communications between top campaign officials and Russian figures. Nor has WikiLeaks ever provided any sensational revelations from the databases of the Kremlin ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/09/27/the-image-of-julian-assange-grows-darker-by-the-day/?utm_term=.ed565d680a19

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1. WikiLeaks names new editor-in-chief

WikiLeaks on Wednesday named one-time spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson as its new editor-in-chief. The ramifications of the move are unclear ...

WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange will stay on as the group's "publisher." Assange had his communications cut in March by Ecuador's new president, and Wednesday's statement said he remained "incommunicado."

WikiLeaks' job titles have proven fluid over the years. Assange has variously described himself as the group's spokesman, publisher and editor ...

Hrafnsson ... hung up when asked further questions Wednesday, saying he was busy cooking dinner.

https://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-names-editor-in-chief-because-julian-assange-incommunicado-2018-9

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2. UK, Ecuador seek end to Assange stand-off

Claudia Torrens AAP
Thursday, 27 September 2018 10:16PM

... "Being five or six years in an embassy already violates his human rights," Moreno said on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. "But his presence in the embassy is also a problem."

Ecuador's previous left-leaning administration gave Assange asylum in 2012, saying it feared his life was in danger for publishing thousands of diplomatic cables that put US officials in a difficult position.

But Assange's relationship with the Ecuadorian government has soured since the centrist Moreno became president.

Over the past two years Assange's access to the internet has been suspended on several occasions, as he continues to publish material from hacked politicians' accounts and make controversial statements on his social media accounts ...

https://thewest.com.au/politics/uk-ecuador-seek-end-to-assange-stand-off-ng-s-1894757

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3. Stone sought contact with Assange, email suggests

BY ABC News Radio | September 23, 2018

(WASHINGTON) — As the special counsel’s office appears to be focusing in on President Donald Trump’s longtime political ally Roger Stone, an email recently obtained by ABC News suggests Stone sought contact with WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange during what may have been a critical moment in the 2016 campaign.

The email is one of at least two between Stone and Jerome Corsi, a political commentator and self-proclaimed conspiracy theorist, that refer to London-based conservative author Ted Malloch, according to people familiar with the emails.

The July 31, 2016, email appears to be an explicit attempt by Stone to connect with Assange using Corsi and Malloch as intermediaries. ABC News was not able to independently verify the email’s authenticity, though Stone confirmed to ABC News that he sent it and two separate sources confirmed its existence ...

http://kticradio.com/abc_politics/roger-stone-sought-contact-with-wikileaks-julian-assange-email-suggests-abcid36112843/

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4. Russia considered smuggling Assange out of UK, report claims

Russian embassy in London denies plot
Adam Forrest
6 days ago

Russian officials reportedly held talks with associates of Julian Assange about helping him escape from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The secret breakout plan involved smuggling the WikiLeaks founder out of the embassy using a diplomatic vehicle and moving him to another country, according to The Guardian.

Sources said Russia was one of the possible havens discussed for Mr Assange. The smuggling operation was provisionally set to take place on Christmas Eve in 2017, but was thought too risky and scrapped ...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assange-russia-wikileaks-smuggle-out-uk-ecuador-embassy-putin-a8549996.html

[triron]

13. Of course. No big surprise.

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5. Ecuador tried giving Assange diplomatic post in Russia

By Chris Perez September 21, 2018 | 8:35pm | Updated

... in 2017 — when Ecuador attempted to give the WikiLeaks founder a diplomatic post in Moscow but was forced to rescind the offer after the British refused to play ball, a report says.

Government documents obtained by Reuters outline the failed plot, which was supposed to be hatched that December.

Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno had reached out to the Russians and Britain’s Foreign Office for their approval. The British got back to Ecuador in a Dec. 21 note, saying UK officials did not “consider that Mr. Assange enjoys any type of privileges and immunities under the Vienna Convention.”

Ecuador chose to rescind its offer as a result, according to Reuters ...

https://nypost.com/2018/09/21/ecuador-tried-giving-assange-diplomatic-post-in-russia/

[DetlefK]

6. That article is incorrect in multiple ways. Wikileaks DID have leaked documents on Trump, but...

... but they refused to publish them as leaks.

Later Assange gave the argument that the leaked documents weren't important enough and less outrageous than what Trump was already doing in public in broad daylight during the campaign.
(Which is a believable argument: The whole purpose of the Wikileaks-operation is to create public outrage about bad people and publicity for themselves. Publishing something boring about Trump could have harmed their brand as troublemakers.)





Also, Wikileaks DID ask DT Jr. for Trump's tax-returns in their Twitter direct-messages. They proposed that Wikileaks leak the tax-returns on behalf of Trump to make Wikileaks look nonpartisan again, so they will have more credibility when attacking Clinton.

Later, when pressed about this, Wikileaks said that they had lied to the Trump-campaign the whole time, that they had never had any intention to help the Trump-campaign and that they only proposed this fake leak as a means to get their hands on the tax-returns themselves.

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7. Why Is Assange Helping Trump?

October 2016
Jonathan Freedland

...The traffic in leaked texts has been entirely one-way: it’s been all Clinton, all the time. In July, Assange signaled a glum even-handedness when asked whether he backed Trump or Clinton: “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea.” But that’s not how it’s played out. WikiLeaks has not released, say, the elusive tax returns of Donald Trump—which might have confirmed his all-but-admitted non-payment of federal income tax over the last two decade—or those much sought-after outtakes from The Apprentice, which are rumored to supply yet more proof of his boorish, if not predatory, attitude to women. Or indeed anything which would discomfort both candidates rather than just one.

Instead, WikiLeaks has devoted itself exclusively to the release of documents that might damage Hillary Clinton, documents that independent analysts as well as the US government say were most likely hacked by, or on behalf of, Vladimir Putin’s Russia ...

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/19/wikileaks-why-is-assange-helping-trump/

[DetlefK]

11. The goal of Wikileaks is not promoting transparency. It's orchestrating political change.

When Wikileaks was founded in late 2006, the premise of Wikileaks was given (in internal emails which were leaked a few years later) as fighting oppressive regimes. Russia and the US were explicitly listed as an example.

That was the original plan.



In 2010, the FSB threatened Wikileaks not to leak russian documents. A foreign-policy-expert later clarified that the FSB's choice of words should be understood as an implicit threat of murder.
So, what did Wikileaks do? They founded an office in Russia in 2016, headed by the russian cybercriminal Peter Chayanov, and leaked outdated information about the russian government's wiretapping-program SORM.

Wikileaks allied with the lesser evil Russia in order to weaken the bigger evil US.



And during the campaign Wikileaks allied with the lesser evil Trump to weaken the bigger evil Clinton.



How serious was Wikileaks about this?
Wikileaks refused to publish stolen text-messages from Paul Manafort's daughter that implicated him in murder. They were handed to Wikileaks on a silver-platter and Wikileaks refused to publish them.

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12. Links posted by me so far: 10. Links posted by you so far: 0

[DetlefK]

16. I don't have notes ready and such things aren't easy to find. But...

Start here:

http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm

Internal emails from Wikileaks before it was founded.
Also, the Daily Beast has a nice article about a professor who refused to become a founding-member of Wikileaks, describing them as delusional wannabe-heroes.



https://www.wired.com/2016/10/want-know-julian-assanges-endgame-told-decade-ago/

Wikileaks is founded on the premise that leaking as much as possible will bring about a better world. Leaking destroys good and evil organizations, but Wikileaks thinks of the destruction of good organizations and the suffering of good people as not even so much as collateral damage. Assange talks about them in only maybe a sentence in his whole 12-page thesis.

The suffering that Wikileaks causes is a necessary price to pay for the utopia that Wikileaks thinks they are creating.



https://emma.best/

She has all the goodies. She tried to give Wikileaks the Manafort-texts and they said No.



https://patribotics.blog/2017/04/04/putins-hacker-wikileaks-host-pyotr-chayanov-hacked-americas-vote-system-and-the-dnc/

This is a nice start if you want to inform yourself about Peter Chayanov. He is hosting a server for Wikileaks, situated in Moscow in small non-descript alley. (Can't find the original article right now.)

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8. Trump Jr.'s exchanges with WikiLeaks

By Marshall Cohen, CNN
Updated 1:17 PM ET, Tue November 14, 2017

... On Monday, it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr. exchanged some private messages on Twitter with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. The news was first reported by The Atlantic and later confirmed by Trump Jr., who posted screenshots of the messages.

A source familiar with the matter told CNN that Congress has known about these messages for a while and they came up during Trump Jr.'s closed-door testimony in September.

The messages show that WikiLeaks reached out fairly often to Trump Jr., who is only known to have replied on two occasions. Trump Jr.'s final response to WikiLeaks was in October 2016, though the WikiLeaks account continued its outreach until July 2017, according to the messages he released ...

https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/14/politics/donald-trump-jr-wikileaks-timeline/index.html

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9. Correspondence between Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks

JULIA IOFFE
NOV 13, 2017

Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?”...

The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States ...

Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to “ask around.” According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/

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10. Omarosa claims Trump knew about hacked emails prior to WikiLeaks release

BY MORGAN CHALFANT - 08/14/18 02:50 PM EDT

Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman claimed Tuesday that President Trump knew about the hacked Democratic emails obtained by WikiLeaks before they were released during the height of the 2016 election campaign.

She made the allegation during an interview that aired on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon, saying that Trump “absolutely” knew about the emails before they were released by WikiLeaks. She also said campaign officials were instructed to bring up the emails at every point they could during the end of the campaign.

U.S. officials have linked the hacked emails to a broader plot by Russia to interfere in the election ...

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/401792-omarosa-claims-trump-knew-about-hacked-emails-before-wikileaks-released

[triron]

14. I'm sure that's correct.

[Initech]

15. The only news I want to hear about Assange is that he's dead or in jail.

Otherwise I couldn't give less of a shit. Fuck that treason weasel.