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I don't think Assange is a partisan. He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election. I think he is releasing info on Hillary because that is what h

I don't think Assange is a partisan. He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election. I think he is releasing info on Hillary because that is what he has and is timing the release for maximum public exposure. If he had similar info on Trump, I firmly believe he would be doing the same thing.

grecy 10y ago
> He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election Increasingly I think every citizen of the world has a stake in this election, given how global the reach of the US is. For a high profile "wanted" man like Assange, I can imagine it's much more than us regular people.
edanm 10y ago
It's pretty well known that Assange has a vendetta against Hillary Clinton. Just searching for Assange Clinton on Google brings up lots of articles on the subject.
- monocasa 10y ago
  To be fair, it's because Clinton and her staff have called both publicly and privately for him to be executed, extrajudicially if need be. I'd have a grudge too.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Fair or not, it's still a bias.
  - sanjeetsuhag 10y ago
    I'd like a source on Clinton herself calling for Assange's execution.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      The best I could find is a bit weak as it's second hand. "Can't we just drone this guy". http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/clinton-assange-drone/ http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/clinton-assange-drone/
      - hypersoar 10y ago
        There's just absolutely no way that Hillary Clinton was seriously proposing a drone strike on the on the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.
        monocasa 10y ago
        She allegedly said this in 2010, two years before Assange entered the Ecuadorian Embassy.
      - HNaTTY 10y ago
        It looks like the True Pundit article (linked above) is the original source for this claim, which is sourced as "according to State Department sources". Then there was a wikileaks email (https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1099 https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1099) which has the subject "an SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks", but which doesn't actually mention the strategies and only says "The result is the attached memo, which has one interesting legal approach and I think some very good suggestions about how to handle our public diplomacy". The attachment is not provided as far as I can tell. IMO, it was likely a joke.
        lostlogin 10y ago
        I agree that it sounded like a joke. However the article says she pushed ahead discussing it after the laughter ended. Given that the source didn't want to be identified it makes it rather hard to verify.
    - dpweb 10y ago
      She didn't deny it, but said “It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don't recall that.” I say that indicates she likely said it, although maybe jokingly. Speaking for myself I know I would never say that, so the response would be "No, I never said that."
      - BookmarkSaver 10y ago
        When your entire life is recorded, you never know what soundbite is floating around out there that will contradict your position. If you say something as a joke or that could be taken out of context, and then later claim to have never said it, suddenly you are a liar even though you didn't actually do anything wrong. It's possible that she just didn't want to get contradicted by some frustrated exclamation she had made years previously.
        appleflaxen 10y ago
        and yet, it's exactly this same person who will strengthen the NSA security apparatus that slurps up domestic communication wholesale, and saves it for all eternity. I hope you don't end up on the wrong end of a powerful person's anger, because you will go down the exact same way.
        BookmarkSaver 10y ago
        I don't see how that is relevant at all. Some pointless, trite warning/threat about crap that I already know.
      - randomguy23 10y ago
        yeah, but everything she and WJC say has to be filtered through the lawyer lens... depending on what the definition of is is. She's good at that - almost anything she says can be spun multiple ways.
      - gaius 10y ago
        If candidate A gets to write off a controversial, possibly illegal, statement as "a joke" then candidate B does too, right?
    - fattire 10y ago
      Aside from the "can't we just drone this guy" comment that Clinton doesn't remember saying and if she did it was a joke, etc. the closest I can find: I would also add that to the American people and to our friends and partners, I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information. https://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/152078.htm https://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/1...
  - smazero 10y ago
    That's a rather extraordinary statement to make without providing any substantiation! I had a quick search around to see what I could find, and I did find a recent tweet from Wikileaks showing a clip from some pundit on Fox News called Bob Beckel calling for exactly that: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763380671796678656/video/1 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763380671796678656/vide... But a little further checking showed that despite this being tweeted in August this year with a headline and hashtag suggesting a link to the leaked emails, this video is actually from 2010, moreover from my exhaustive five minute search (it wasn't exhaustive really) I couldn't find any evidence of a link to Clinton's campaign, in fact according to Wikipedia the last campaign this strange chap worked on was Walter Mondale's in 1984.
    - monocasa 10y ago
      It was initially in 2010 in response to the Manning leaks. http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wikileaks-secretary-of-state-hillary-clinton-proposed-drone-strike-on-julian-assange/ http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wiki...
      - Brakenshire 10y ago
        Anonymous sources, speaking to a blog. Does anyone seriously believe this constitutes evidence?
    - fattire 10y ago
      Might wanna have a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuQW0US2sJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuQW0US2sJw (not particularly partisan, many calls for his death-- honestly mostly from the right but not exclusively.)
- snewk 10y ago
  i dont think that necessarily makes him 'pro trump'
  - dharma1 10y ago
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-11/how-julian-assange-turned-wikileaks-into-trump-s-best-friend https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-11/how-julia... https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/14/wiileaks-from-liberal-beacon-to-a-prop-for-trump-what-has-happened https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/14/wiileaks-from-...
    - onetimeusename 10y ago
      from the bloomberg article: >Sarah Harrison, a British journalist and a longtime WikiLeaks editor, says that the organization would publish documents damaging to Trump if it had them. The bloomberg article also quoted someone from reddit as evidence that the right wing was 'shivering in anticipation' of leaks damaging to clinton. It's not great journalism and seems biased but it doesn't seem there is any evidence that assange is pro trump.
      - dharma1 10y ago
        The Guardian one is slightly better. I don't think there is real evidence, and Assange isn't so stupid as to publicly say he supports Trump (even if he does, for whatever reason). But if there is no agenda, it does make one wonder why the Wikileaks of late have focused on Clinton in the run up to the election
        cwkoss 10y ago
        Occams Razor says that they've only received credible leaks about the HRC campaign. Seems to me like anyone with credible evidence against Trump can sell it to the highest bidding mainstream media org and be sure it will get national attention. Why would a Trump leaker need wikileaks?
        fluentintypo 10y ago
- tptacek 10y ago
  No, it's pretty well known that Assange claims to have a vendetta against HRC. The details of that vendetta don't make much sense. It's clearly easier for him and his supporters to claim that they're acting out of enmity towards Clinton --- a minor figure in virtually all of Assange's dealings with the US --- than to simply cop to the fact that they are aggressively and overly supporting Donald Trump. Nerddom and the left (and I'm somewhere in the overlapping circles on that Venn diagram) have a powerful rooting interest in Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who many of us see as a vanguard of an effort to disrupt politics and the media, both of whom we as a demographic have little respect for. The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. But that's very hard for us to admit, regardless of the amount of evidence we're confronted with.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    > The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. One possible explanation for this is that Assange will support the candidate that he believes will hurt US interests most.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      I am absolutely OK with stipulating that.
    - dpweb 10y ago
      Assange/Wikileaks nemesis is secrecy and corruption, not HRC specifically. Now if they view her as the most corrupt, they would naturally be against her, and inevitably that supports Trump. But that is not the same as the rabid right wing supporter of Trump. Assange is savvy enough to know their position inevitably supports Trump, but there isn't any reason to think if they viewed Trump as more corrupt they would be against him. So it is possible they take a principled position while wrongly accused of having a preference in who wins the election.
      - tptacek 10y ago
        This argument depends on Trump being "less corrupt" than HRC. If you believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate, you can plausibly argue that Assange is somehow justified in supporting a candidate who is calling for the death penalty for leakers. It won't be a strong argument, but it'll be coherent. But very few observers of US politics believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate. A more widely held belief is that he's the most corrupt major party nominee in the history of US politics.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  He may have a vendetta against Clinton, but it's not a thing against 'Democrats' per-sey. And despite his 'vendetta' I have no doubt that he would release anti-Trump bits if he had them. Wikipedia - whatever it's credibility - is headed by a dude with somewhat demagogic and self-glorifying tendencies himself.
- andrei_says_ 10y ago
  No, it is not "pretty well known." Sources please. This kind of language is common for propaganda and astroturfing.
- moeadham 10y ago
  He has very recently claimed he is "working on" getting Trump's Tax returns: https://youtu.be/kmIlc9qE2i0?t=405 https://youtu.be/kmIlc9qE2i0?t=405 HRC likely just has a larger attack surface.
jeffmould 10y ago
Assange actually has said that he has info on Trump, however, the info is nothing worse than what Trump already says publicly. (http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/08/27/wikileaks-info-donald-trump/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/08/27/wikileaks-info-dona...)
- mejari 10y ago
  And yet he won't release it so we can be sure of that, while we just have to know Podesta's risotto recipe.
  - copperheart 10y ago
    The importance of the leaked Podesta emails is much greater than simply learning about a recipe.
    - mejari 10y ago
      According to some. To others there's not really much in there other than some unsavory, but not unusual, political maneuvering.
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    That's the thing. Rather than being a neutral clearinghouse, that it pretends to be, it's more and more selectively his mouthpiece, used to release information on people Assange dislikes, threaten others, and withhold release for groups he approves of. Who knows what they have?
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
There is Assange's alleged Russian sponsorship [1]. The lack of Wikileaks activity critical of Russia and the attribution of some of its content to Russian intelligence operations [2] supports that. [1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-julian-assange-russia.html?referer=https://duckduckgo.com/ http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-... [2] http://www.salon.com/2016/10/11/russian-propaganda-on-wikileaks-makes-its-way-into-a-donald-trump-speech-in-record-time/ http://www.salon.com/2016/10/11/russian-propaganda-on-wikile...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
sickbeard 10y ago
So why does wiki leaks retweet Gulliani? https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/785571152836042752 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/785571152836042752
- etjossem 10y ago
  Because they are desperate for recognition from any serious political figure who will mention them aloud.
a3n 10y ago
> He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election. He's in sanctuary, in part, because of fear of extradition to the US. So yeah, he does have a stake. If Clinton wins she has no motivation to stop an extradition, since she figures in WL and other leaks. If Trump wins, and Assange/WL is seen to have implicitly supported him, there is a hope for Assange that President Trump could prohibit his DoJ from extraditing, and his DoD from rendering. Not from gratitude, but because Trump is vindictive and that would be a way to stick it to ... to ... The Global Media/Banking/Government/NotWhite Conspiracy. I'm kind of amazed that WL or someone else hasn't hacked and released Trump data. Do they just not use computers?
thesimpsons1022 10y ago
i think it is pretty silly to say he has no stake in the election. almost everyone on in the world has a stake in who the american president is. even if it didn't have a direct effect on him, he is extremely idealogical and sees it as himself fighting against the global elite.

grecy 10y ago

> He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election Increasingly I think every citizen of the world has a stake in this election, given how global the reach of the US is. For a high profile "wanted" man like Assange, I can imagine it's much more than us regular people.

edanm 10y ago

It's pretty well known that Assange has a vendetta against Hillary Clinton. Just searching for Assange Clinton on Google brings up lots of articles on the subject.

monocasa 10y ago
To be fair, it's because Clinton and her staff have called both publicly and privately for him to be executed, extrajudicially if need be. I'd have a grudge too.
- ethbro 10y ago
  Fair or not, it's still a bias.
- sanjeetsuhag 10y ago
  I'd like a source on Clinton herself calling for Assange's execution.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    The best I could find is a bit weak as it's second hand. "Can't we just drone this guy". http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/clinton-assange-drone/ http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/clinton-assange-drone/
    - hypersoar 10y ago
      There's just absolutely no way that Hillary Clinton was seriously proposing a drone strike on the on the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.
      - monocasa 10y ago
        She allegedly said this in 2010, two years before Assange entered the Ecuadorian Embassy.
    - HNaTTY 10y ago
      It looks like the True Pundit article (linked above) is the original source for this claim, which is sourced as "according to State Department sources". Then there was a wikileaks email (https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1099 https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1099) which has the subject "an SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks", but which doesn't actually mention the strategies and only says "The result is the attached memo, which has one interesting legal approach and I think some very good suggestions about how to handle our public diplomacy". The attachment is not provided as far as I can tell. IMO, it was likely a joke.
      - lostlogin 10y ago
        I agree that it sounded like a joke. However the article says she pushed ahead discussing it after the laughter ended. Given that the source didn't want to be identified it makes it rather hard to verify.
  - dpweb 10y ago
    She didn't deny it, but said “It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don't recall that.” I say that indicates she likely said it, although maybe jokingly. Speaking for myself I know I would never say that, so the response would be "No, I never said that."
    - BookmarkSaver 10y ago
      When your entire life is recorded, you never know what soundbite is floating around out there that will contradict your position. If you say something as a joke or that could be taken out of context, and then later claim to have never said it, suddenly you are a liar even though you didn't actually do anything wrong. It's possible that she just didn't want to get contradicted by some frustrated exclamation she had made years previously.
      - appleflaxen 10y ago
        and yet, it's exactly this same person who will strengthen the NSA security apparatus that slurps up domestic communication wholesale, and saves it for all eternity. I hope you don't end up on the wrong end of a powerful person's anger, because you will go down the exact same way.
        BookmarkSaver 10y ago
        I don't see how that is relevant at all. Some pointless, trite warning/threat about crap that I already know.
    - randomguy23 10y ago
      yeah, but everything she and WJC say has to be filtered through the lawyer lens... depending on what the definition of is is. She's good at that - almost anything she says can be spun multiple ways.
    - gaius 10y ago
      If candidate A gets to write off a controversial, possibly illegal, statement as "a joke" then candidate B does too, right?
  - fattire 10y ago
    Aside from the "can't we just drone this guy" comment that Clinton doesn't remember saying and if she did it was a joke, etc. the closest I can find: I would also add that to the American people and to our friends and partners, I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information. https://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/152078.htm https://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/11/1...
- smazero 10y ago
  That's a rather extraordinary statement to make without providing any substantiation! I had a quick search around to see what I could find, and I did find a recent tweet from Wikileaks showing a clip from some pundit on Fox News called Bob Beckel calling for exactly that: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763380671796678656/video/1 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763380671796678656/vide... But a little further checking showed that despite this being tweeted in August this year with a headline and hashtag suggesting a link to the leaked emails, this video is actually from 2010, moreover from my exhaustive five minute search (it wasn't exhaustive really) I couldn't find any evidence of a link to Clinton's campaign, in fact according to Wikipedia the last campaign this strange chap worked on was Walter Mondale's in 1984.
  - monocasa 10y ago
    It was initially in 2010 in response to the Manning leaks. http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wikileaks-secretary-of-state-hillary-clinton-proposed-drone-strike-on-julian-assange/ http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wiki...
    - Brakenshire 10y ago
      Anonymous sources, speaking to a blog. Does anyone seriously believe this constitutes evidence?
  - fattire 10y ago
    Might wanna have a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuQW0US2sJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuQW0US2sJw (not particularly partisan, many calls for his death-- honestly mostly from the right but not exclusively.)
snewk 10y ago
i dont think that necessarily makes him 'pro trump'
- dharma1 10y ago
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-11/how-julian-assange-turned-wikileaks-into-trump-s-best-friend https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-11/how-julia... https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/14/wiileaks-from-liberal-beacon-to-a-prop-for-trump-what-has-happened https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/14/wiileaks-from-...
  - onetimeusename 10y ago
    from the bloomberg article: >Sarah Harrison, a British journalist and a longtime WikiLeaks editor, says that the organization would publish documents damaging to Trump if it had them. The bloomberg article also quoted someone from reddit as evidence that the right wing was 'shivering in anticipation' of leaks damaging to clinton. It's not great journalism and seems biased but it doesn't seem there is any evidence that assange is pro trump.
    - dharma1 10y ago
      The Guardian one is slightly better. I don't think there is real evidence, and Assange isn't so stupid as to publicly say he supports Trump (even if he does, for whatever reason). But if there is no agenda, it does make one wonder why the Wikileaks of late have focused on Clinton in the run up to the election
      - cwkoss 10y ago
        Occams Razor says that they've only received credible leaks about the HRC campaign. Seems to me like anyone with credible evidence against Trump can sell it to the highest bidding mainstream media org and be sure it will get national attention. Why would a Trump leaker need wikileaks?
      - fluentintypo 10y ago
tptacek 10y ago
No, it's pretty well known that Assange claims to have a vendetta against HRC. The details of that vendetta don't make much sense. It's clearly easier for him and his supporters to claim that they're acting out of enmity towards Clinton --- a minor figure in virtually all of Assange's dealings with the US --- than to simply cop to the fact that they are aggressively and overly supporting Donald Trump. Nerddom and the left (and I'm somewhere in the overlapping circles on that Venn diagram) have a powerful rooting interest in Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who many of us see as a vanguard of an effort to disrupt politics and the media, both of whom we as a demographic have little respect for. The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. But that's very hard for us to admit, regardless of the amount of evidence we're confronted with.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. One possible explanation for this is that Assange will support the candidate that he believes will hurt US interests most.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I am absolutely OK with stipulating that.
  - dpweb 10y ago
    Assange/Wikileaks nemesis is secrecy and corruption, not HRC specifically. Now if they view her as the most corrupt, they would naturally be against her, and inevitably that supports Trump. But that is not the same as the rabid right wing supporter of Trump. Assange is savvy enough to know their position inevitably supports Trump, but there isn't any reason to think if they viewed Trump as more corrupt they would be against him. So it is possible they take a principled position while wrongly accused of having a preference in who wins the election.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      This argument depends on Trump being "less corrupt" than HRC. If you believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate, you can plausibly argue that Assange is somehow justified in supporting a candidate who is calling for the death penalty for leakers. It won't be a strong argument, but it'll be coherent. But very few observers of US politics believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate. A more widely held belief is that he's the most corrupt major party nominee in the history of US politics.
jomamaxx 10y ago
He may have a vendetta against Clinton, but it's not a thing against 'Democrats' per-sey. And despite his 'vendetta' I have no doubt that he would release anti-Trump bits if he had them. Wikipedia - whatever it's credibility - is headed by a dude with somewhat demagogic and self-glorifying tendencies himself.
andrei_says_ 10y ago
No, it is not "pretty well known." Sources please. This kind of language is common for propaganda and astroturfing.
moeadham 10y ago
He has very recently claimed he is "working on" getting Trump's Tax returns: https://youtu.be/kmIlc9qE2i0?t=405 https://youtu.be/kmIlc9qE2i0?t=405 HRC likely just has a larger attack surface.

jeffmould 10y ago

Assange actually has said that he has info on Trump, however, the info is nothing worse than what Trump already says publicly. (http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/08/27/wikileaks-info-donald-trump/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/08/27/wikileaks-info-dona...)

mejari 10y ago
And yet he won't release it so we can be sure of that, while we just have to know Podesta's risotto recipe.
- copperheart 10y ago
  The importance of the leaked Podesta emails is much greater than simply learning about a recipe.
  - mejari 10y ago
    According to some. To others there's not really much in there other than some unsavory, but not unusual, political maneuvering.
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  That's the thing. Rather than being a neutral clearinghouse, that it pretends to be, it's more and more selectively his mouthpiece, used to release information on people Assange dislikes, threaten others, and withhold release for groups he approves of. Who knows what they have?

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

There is Assange's alleged Russian sponsorship [1]. The lack of Wikileaks activity critical of Russia and the attribution of some of its content to Russian intelligence operations [2] supports that. [1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-julian-assange-russia.html?referer=https://duckduckgo.com/ http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-... [2] http://www.salon.com/2016/10/11/russian-propaganda-on-wikileaks-makes-its-way-into-a-donald-trump-speech-in-record-time/ http://www.salon.com/2016/10/11/russian-propaganda-on-wikile...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

sickbeard 10y ago

So why does wiki leaks retweet Gulliani? https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/785571152836042752 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/785571152836042752

etjossem 10y ago
Because they are desperate for recognition from any serious political figure who will mention them aloud.

a3n 10y ago

> He's Australian after all and has no stake in this election. He's in sanctuary, in part, because of fear of extradition to the US. So yeah, he does have a stake. If Clinton wins she has no motivation to stop an extradition, since she figures in WL and other leaks. If Trump wins, and Assange/WL is seen to have implicitly supported him, there is a hope for Assange that President Trump could prohibit his DoJ from extraditing, and his DoD from rendering. Not from gratitude, but because Trump is vindictive and that would be a way to stick it to ... to ... The Global Media/Banking/Government/NotWhite Conspiracy. I'm kind of amazed that WL or someone else hasn't hacked and released Trump data. Do they just not use computers?

thesimpsons1022 10y ago

i think it is pretty silly to say he has no stake in the election. almost everyone on in the world has a stake in who the american president is. even if it didn't have a direct effect on him, he is extremely idealogical and sees it as himself fighting against the global elite.