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UPDATE:

 

I can understand the argument for sympathy for the Devil but I have none for Julian Assange.

Ok, with yesterday’s arrest of Julian Assange there have been some countervailing reactions. Some liberals have focused on the idea that this sets a bad precedent for journalists.

I do understand the concern-while technically Assange is not charged for anything he published-but the allegation he helped Chelsey Manning hack information back in 2010-this is after all Trump’s Russia House we’re talking about. You can understand the fear he’ll use this precedent to go after journalists covering him in ways or covering stories he doesn’t like.

It’s true the Obama White House never did this despite their deep concerns with what Assange had done with Chelsey Manning. On the other hand that was before Wikileaks coordinated with Russia and the Trump campaign to rig the 2016 election.

We don’t know what other things Assange may subsequently be charged with. He was charged with helping Manning hack information in 2010-this at least sets the foundation to accuse him of the same thing vis a vis the 2016 campaign.

And 2016 has changed the perspective of many of us-in 2016 Assange didn’t act like a journalist so much as Trump-and the GOP’s-glorified Super PAC. As noted in Chapter A we have all those Twitter DMs and texts that make it clear Wikileaks-run by Assange-wasn’t just pro Trump but pro GOP. Indeed, going back to 2013 we have Assange already saying that he’d like to see someone from the ‘libertarian wing of the GOP like Rand Paul’ win in 2016. 

One reason Wikileaks was such an effective cutout in 2016 was that many leftists failed to understand Assange is and always has been a man of the Right.

So is Assange really a journalist? Was he ever and if so is he still a journalist today? I’d argue that he seemed more like a journalist in 2010-2011 but by 2016-and since-he’s been essentially a GOP oppo research guy.

By the way if Assange has been involved in any hacking-and this is what the current allegation is about him-that’s a violation of an agreement he has with a European court back in 1994 when a teenaged Assange agreed to never hack anything again in exchange for avoiding prison.

So is Assange a journalist or an accused thief?

Both?

“Is Julian Assange a journalist? The Justice Department sidestepped that question in its indictment of Assange. But his case is still certain to stir a debate about whether the WikiLeaks founder deserves protection under the First Amendment.

Assange was arrested in London on Thursday, as U.S. prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing him of conspiring with Chelsea Manning to hack a Defense Department computer network in 2010 to obtain secret documents that WikiLeaks hoped to publish.

The indictment focuses on Assange’s alleged attempt to help Manning crack a password and gain special “administrative-level privileges,” an effort that proved unsuccessful. But the underlying “purpose and object of the conspiracy” was “so that WikiLeaks could publicly disseminate the information on its website,” prosecutors said.

Assange’s supporters describe his arrest and proposed extradition to the United States as an attack on press freedom. But there’s some skepticism about that claim, even from several of the country’s most prominent defenders of the First Amendment.”

Despite what I said above-I can see sympathy for the Devil but not for Julian Assange-it’s true that his arrest-for alleged crime of computer hacking of material with Chelsey Manning-raises some uncomfortable questions. Still those defending Assange on the basis that he did nothing but report the truth haven’t read him in many years.

One defense of him you hear is that he’s published nothing but the truth. Really?

Thanks to this piece of ‘journalism’ someone was almost murdered in a Washington DC pizzeria.

If nothing else, Assange’s sense of journalistic integrity and ethics was-at least by 2016-virtually nonexistent. Unless you think that Wikileaks’ ‘scoop’ two days before the election that Clinton was a literal satanist was journalism.

Do I hear Pulitzer?

As for Sean Hannity-he clearly agreed with me that Assange is a GOP operative-how else would you explain this deleted tweet?

https://twitter.com/KT_So_It_Goes/status/1116337387658010625

UPDATE: Tucker Carlson says Assange’s real sin was preventing Hillary Clinton from being President. 

Indeed agreed. I mean the idea that Assange would pick our President is appalling and it’s why Trump will never be legitimate no matter what spin Coverup Bill Barr tries.

The Washington Post editorial page argues that Assange is no free press hero and is long overdue for personal accountability. 

AFTER SIX-PLUS years of asylum in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was removed from that diplomatic facility Thursday by British police and jailed for up to 12 months for jumping bail back in August 2012. He may ultimately face courts in the United States or Sweden, as well. If these democracies handle it properly, Mr. Assange’s case could conclude as a victory for the rule of law, not the defeat for civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn.

Contrary to much pro-WikiLeaks propaganda, Mr. Assange had no legitimate fears for his life, either at the hands of CIA assassins or, via extradition, the U.S. death penalty, when he fled to the embassy of what was then an anti-American government. Rather, he was avoiding transfer to Sweden pursuant to a seemingly credible sexual assault charge lodged against him in that country. He then proceeded to abuse the hospitality of his South American hosts, most egregiously by presiding over what an indictment by U.S. special counsel Robert S. Mueller III described as Russian intelligence’s use of WikiLeaks as a front for its interference in the U.S. election. Democratic Party documents stolen by the Russians made their way into the public domain under the WikiLeaks label. Ecuador’s new, more pragmatic president, Lenín Moreno, cited Mr. Assange’s more recent alleged involvement in the release of confidential Vatican documents, along with threats against the government in Quito, as reasons to oust him.

Mr. Assange is not a free-press hero. Yes, WikiLeaks acquired and published secret government documents, many of them newsworthy, as shown by their subsequent use in newspaper articles (including in The Post). Contrary to the norms of journalism, however, Mr. Assange sometimes obtained such records unethically — including, according to a separate federal indictment unsealed Thursday, by trying to help now-former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning hack into a classified U.S. computer system.

WaPo then makes the point I made above-great minds think alike…-that Assange certainly showed little to any sense of journalistic ethics.

“Also unlike real journalists, WikiLeaks dumped material into the public domain without any effort independently to verify its factuality or give named individuals an opportunity to comment. Nor, needless to say, would a real journalist have cooperated with a plot by an authoritarian regime’s intelligence service to harm one U.S. presidential candidate and benefit another.”

Precisely-again this is the work of a GOP oppo guy not a journalist.

“Even if it isn’t really about journalism, the Assange case may touch on genuine issues of free expression, as would any matter related to the dissemination of information, secret or otherwise. The Justice Department proposes to try Mr. Assange on a single count of conspiring (with Ms. Manning) to break into a U.S. computer system, which, on its face, does not criminalize the communication of the secrets thereby obtained. Having already given assurances to Ecuador that it will not extradite Mr. Assange to the United States on any charge (including, implicitly, espionage) that might carry capital punishment, Britain should not fear that sending him for trial on that hacking count would endanger freedom of the press.”

Yes I have to say that despite Paul Waldman’s prudent advice I am celebrating Assange’s indictment-and here WaPo documents why:

To the contrary, Mr. Assange’s transfer to U.S. custody, followed possibly by additional Russia-related charges or his conversion into a cooperating witness, could be the key to learning more about Russian intelligence’s efforts to undermine democracy in the West. Certainly he is long overdue for personal accountability.

That is certainly my hope and the hope of many us regarding Assange’s timely indictment. After Barr’s fake Exoneration Letter

Trump, his GOP co-conspirators and his MSM enablers a la Ken Dilanian have taunted the Dems-that we’re ‘disappointed by the Mueller Report.’

Uh no, the disappointment is that it’s been hidden and that despite seeing a half sentence Dilanian and Friends have wrongly claimed Trump to be ‘innocent’-not being criminally charged is far from being ‘innocent’ but more importantly can we see the report first before throwing a ticker tape parade for this fake ‘President?’

What Trump and Dilanian fail to understand is that-yes we’d like to see Trump impeached if that’s what he deserves; it should have been clear that Trump was not going to be indicted-certainly not before leaving Office-but first and foremost we want information-we want to see the fruits of a huge investigation that went on for the last two years. What did Mueller find? About Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, Peter Smith, Manafort giving Kilimnik the campaign polling data, etc.

I know I’d like to see if Mueller noticed the story of Jason Wilson who claims Papaopoulos told him in a Chicago bar that the Coffee Boy had in fact told Jeff Sessions about Mifsud’s promise of incriminating emails-or if he has even more evidence and information in that regard.

This is a point Chris Matthews made recently-the country was furious when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. Part of this was that Americans hated to see Nixon escape accountability-the American people believe in accountability something that Democrats would also do well to remember-to the extent any of them are saying ‘forget this Mueller stuff and win in 2020.’

But Matthews explained, a lot of it was simply that people wanted to know what happened they wanted the full story of Watergate in the public record.

And this is the hope for Assange being in custody-that we will learn a great deal more about Russian interference and collusion.

Though I’d defend Mueller at this point-let’s see his actual report before we presume what he did or didn’t do.

Indeed, Assange’s’ indictment raises all kinds of questions.

Indeed-a failure they have not learned from but only compounded a la Dilanian: TOTAL EXONERATION FOR THE PRESIDENT! NO CONSPIRACY! NO OBSTRUCTION!

FN: Susan is totally right about Andrea Mitchell’s conduct though Mitchell has emerged as one of the best Beltway reporters during the Trump era-she treats him much more skeptically than most of her colleagues on MSNBC daytime do.

Meanwhile I criticized Chris Hayes-with justification-in Chapter B for buying into much of the TOTAL EXONERATION canard himself.

But you have to give him credit here for doing some self criticism and admitting that he previously gave Assange too much credit.

Having said that I’m not sure I agree with him and Margaret Sullivan. I get the concerns about journalism but there are countervailing concerns-and enough room to doubt he’s really a journalist-holding him accountable but especially the possible information we can get from him regarding Russian interference and collusion. The big concern right is that Trump is walking away scot free and if we can get the truth from Assange then we have to do it. What is a worse threat the precedent set with Assange or destroying the Rule of Law by letting Trump escape accountability?

 

While Waldman and others rightly worry about the Trump DOJ using this as a pretense to go after journalists that criticize them, it’s not at all clear that Trump drove this-it seems to have been a different part of DOJ who pushed to get Assange.

Trump claimed yesterday to have had nothing to do with Assange’s indictment and this is one thing he’s said that I find believable-a busted clock…

What is interesting, however, is contextualizing this with previous reporting. We know that Trump supporters from Roger Stone, to Dana Rohrbacher, to Chuck Johnson-as we saw in Chapter A Johnson argued with Roger Stone on who deserves credit for bringing the Clinton accusers to the debate with Trump after Hollywood Access; my question is how much did they pay the accusers to show up on Trump’s arm?-spoke about getting a pardon for Assange in exchange for him ‘proving it wasn’t Russia.’

Then we had the reporting on Manafort meeting with the President of Ecuador in 2017 about handing Assange over to the US. This was reported on by the NYTimes-though as noted in Chapter C the Times later repudiated its own reporting after the MSM decided that the Guardian story that Assange and Manafort had met three times previous to the 2016 campaign-the last time in March 2016 just before he jointed it was FAKE NEWS.

As Seth Abramson has pointed out because the MSM has decided that the very idea of any connection between Assange and Manafort is just yucky-ie, not part of their narrative-the (Not So)SmartSet hasn’t considered that it’s very likely that the ‘senior campaign aide’ in Mueller’s sentencing memo who directed Roger Stone to find out what else Wikileaks had on Clinton and the Democrats was very likely Paul Manafort-after all, Stone and Manafort were 40 year friends and business partners  and Stone took credit for Manafort being hired as campaign manager.

As Malcolm Nance puts it coincidences take a lot of planning-how’s this for a coincidence: on the same day Corsi got back to Stone and told him that Wikileaks had Podesta’s emails and that they would be released around October Manafort was handing over polling data to Kilimnik over dinner as they discussed sanctions and the DNC email hacks. 

I mean c’mon-it’s not exactly hard to see what the Occam’s Razor solution is here.

But then again, Wikileaks is about first and foremost the failure of the MSM in 2016-they continue to fail.

TOTAL EXONERATION FOR THE PRESIDENT! NO CONSPIRACY! NO OBSTRUCTION!

Whistle-blowing, as Mr. Ellsberg did, is a time-honored means for exposing the secret machinations of the powerful. But the release of huge amounts of hacked data, with no apparent oversight or curation, does the opposite. Such leaks threaten our ability to dissent by destroying privacy and unleashing a glut of questionable information that functions, somewhat unexpectedly, as its own form of censorship, rather than as a way to illuminate the maneuverings of the powerful.

The latest example of these data dumps comes from WikiLeaks, which is releasing the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, in dribs and drabs going back to 2008, when Mr. Podesta was the co-chairman of Barack Obama’s transition team.

“Wait,” you might think. John Podesta is about as far from dissident politics as you can get. These leaks have produced genuine news. We finally got to see the text of Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, for example. What’s wrong with that? Doesn’t that serve the public interest?

The hacked emails did provide the public with some notable information. But any benefit of such mass data releases does not undo their harm. And that harm is relevant whether or not the data was stolen by a foreign government seeking to influence this election.

The victims here are not just Mr. Podesta and the people in his contacts list who are embarrassed or compromised. The victim of leaks of private communication is the ability of dissidents to function in a democracy.

Demanding transparency from the powerful is not a right to see every single private email anyone in a position of power ever sent or received. WikiLeaks, for example, gleefully tweeted to its millions of followers that a Clinton Foundation employee had attempted suicide; news outlets repeated the report.

Wanton destruction of the personal privacy of any person who has ever come near a political organization is a vicious but effective means to smother dissent. This method is so common in Russia and the former Soviet states that it has a name: “kompromat,” releasing compromising material against political opponents. Emails of dissidents are hacked, their houses bugged, the activities in their bedrooms videotaped, and the material made public to embarrass and intimidate people whose politics displeases the powerful. Kompromat does not have to go after every single dissident to work: If you know that getting near politics means that your personal privacy may be destroyed, you will understandably stay away.

But all this continues to sail over the heads of Ken Dilanian, Chris Cillizza, and Dean Baquet.

BUT HER EMAILS! EXTREMELY CARELESS!

TOTAL EXONERATION FOR THE PRESIDENT! NO CONSPIRACY! NO OBSTRUCTION!

So their failure to get to the bottom of what really happened between Manafort and Assange is part of their bigger failure to learn a damn thing in 2 and a half years.

After all, Kasie Hunt is tired of Mueller and Katty Kay has decreed the truth doesn’t matter just the narrative of her and her equally dishonest colleagues-see Chapter D. 

They’ll look like sore losers even though they didn’t lose-the game hasn’t even started.

FN: I’m sorry if you know your narrative is false but just keep cheerfully repeating it anyway you’re a liar. Full Stop.

UPDATE: It seems that even I was too charitable on Assange in this post in suggesting Assange was a real journalist in 2011. Wether he was or wasn’t he was already showing clear authoritarian tendencies in his support for the notorious anti Semite Israel Shamir.

UPDATE: Here’s an etymology of the DOJ deciding to bring a case against Assange. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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