Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 24, 2017 9:36 pm

Morty » Fri Nov 24, 2017 8:15 pm
There was precisely NO COLLABORATION between Trump Jr and Assange. Assange was propositioning Trump, TO NO AVAIL. No tax return "leaks," no posting as Australian ambassador to US.


Barrett Brown DISAGREES with you

As Brown pointed out in another tweet, it was all-caps exasperating that Assange was in this case “complaining about ‘slander’ of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.”



“Plainly,” he observed with bitterness, “the prospect of a Clinton in the White House was such an unimaginable nightmare scenario that all normal standards of truth and morality became moot and it became necessary to get people like Sebastian Gorka into the White House to establish order.”


YEA SEBASTIAN GORKA A FULL BLOWN NAZI
Image
Sebastian Gorka Made Nazi-Linked Vitezi Rend ‘Proud’ by Wearing Its Medal
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/seba ... ts-n742851


Image

Julian Assange’s Hatred of Hillary Clinton Was No Secret. His Advice to Donald Trump Was.

Robert MackeyNovember 15 2017, 1:09 p.m.
Last Updated: Friday, Nov. 17, 9:55 a.m.

The revelation that WikiLeaks secretly offered help to Donald Trump’s campaign, in a series of private Twitter messages sent to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr., gave ammunition to the group’s many detractors and also sparked anger from some longtime supporters of the organization and its founder, Julian Assange.

One of the most high-profile dissenters was journalist Barrett Brown, whose crowdsourced investigations of hacked corporate documents later posted on WikiLeaks led to a prison sentence.

Brown had a visceral reaction to the news, first reported by The Atlantic, that WikiLeaks had been advising the Trump campaign. In a series of tweets and Facebook videos, Brown accused Assange of having compromised “the movement” to expose corporate and government wrongdoing by acting as a covert political operative.

Brown explained that he had defended WikiLeaks for releasing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, “because it was an appropriate thing for a transparency org to do.” But, he added, “working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting.”

He was particularly outraged by an Oct. 21, 2016 message, in which Assange had appealed to Trump Jr. to let WikiLeaks publish one or more of his father’s tax returns in order to make his group’s attacks on Hillary Clinton seem less biased. “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” the Assange-controlled @Wikileaks account suggested. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.”


A screenshot of a direct message from the WikiLeaks Twitter account to Donald Trump Jr.

As Brown pointed out in another tweet, it was all-caps exasperating that Assange was in this case “complaining about ‘slander’ of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.”

The journalist, an Intercept contributor, whose work had been championed by WikiLeaks, also shared a link to a Reddit AMA conducted two days after the election in which WikiLeaks staff, including Assange’s longtime collaborator Sarah Harrison, had denied point-blank that they had collaborated with the Trump campaign.



“The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter, or with Russia, are just groundless and false,” the staffers wrote then. “We were not publishing with a goal to get any specific candidate elected.”

It is not surprising that Brown felt personally betrayed by Assange, since, as he explained on Facebook Tuesday night, “I went to prison because of my support for WikiLeaks.” Specifically, Brown said, the charges against him were related to his role in “operations to identify and punish members of the government and members of private companies that had been exposed by Anonymous hackers of my acquaintance, via email hacks, as having conspired to go after Assange, to go after WikiLeaks.”

That sort of activism, dedicated to making public secret wrongdoing, Brown argued, is very different from “colluding with an authoritarian presidential campaign backed by actual Nazis while publicly denying it.”


“Plainly,” he observed with bitterness, “the prospect of a Clinton in the White House was such an unimaginable nightmare scenario that all normal standards of truth and morality became moot and it became necessary to get people like Sebastian Gorka into the White House to establish order.”

Before his private messages to Trump Jr. were leaked, Assange himself had categorically denied that he or WikiLeaks had been attacking Hillary Clinton to help elect Donald Trump. “This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election,” he wrote in a statement released on November 8 as Americans went to the polls.

Even though Assange had by then transformed the WikiLeaks Twitter feed into a vehicle for smearing Clinton, he insisted that his work was journalistic in nature. “The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks — an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself,” Assange wrote. “Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us,” he added. “It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment.”

The same morning, WikiLeaks tweeted an attack on Clinton for not having driven her own car during her decades of public service.



For Brown, and others who have been critical of Assange for using the platform of WikiLeaks to fight his own political and personal battles, his secret communication with the Trump campaign was damning because it revealed that he had been functioning more like a freelance political operative, doling out strategy and advice, than a journalist interested in obtaining and publishing information, concerned only with its accuracy.

James Ball, a former WikiLeaks volunteer who has described the difficulty of working for someone who lies so much, was also appalled by one post-election message to Trump Jr., in which WikiLeaks suggested that, as a form of payback, it would be “helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC.”


That request for payback, on December 16, 2016, came three weeks after Trump’s father had called on the British government to make his friend Nigel Farage its ambassador. “This should be it, game over, end of it, for anyone who tries to suggest Assange looks out for anyone except himself,” Ball observed on Twitter. “That’s his cause, and plenty of good people have been played, badly.”

There was also criticism from journalists like Chris Hayes of MSNBC, a network Assange accused of being, along with the New York Times, “the most biased source” in one note to Trump Jr. Pointing to a message from WikiLeaks sent on Election Day, advising Trump to refuse to concede and claim the election was rigged, Hayes asked how, exactly, offering that sort of political advice squared with the organization’s mission to promote transparency.


A screenshot of a Nov. 8, 2016 DM to Donald Trump Jr. from WikiLeaks.

Still, many of Assange’s most vocal supporters stuck with him, calling even secret communication with the Trump campaign to undermine Clinton entirely consistent with his vision of WikiLeaks as a sort of opposition research group, dedicated to “crushing bastards” by finding dirt in the servers of powerful individuals or organizations.

As Raffi Khatchadourian explained in a New Yorker profile of the WikiLeaks founder in 2010, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.” To Assange, Khatchadourian wrote, “Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.”

One steadfast Assange ally was Kim Dotcom, founder of the shuttered file-sharing site MegaUpload, who helped fuel a conspiracy theory that the DNC emails had not been hacked by Russia, but provided to WikiLeaks by a young Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who was subsequently murdered. Alluding to another entirely unsubstantiated allegation — that Clinton had once suggested killing Assange in a drone strike — Dotcom said that the WikiLeaks founder was merely part of a crowdsourced political operation that had successfully defeated the greater evil.



As it happens, one of the anti-Clinton rumors that WikiLeaks had urged Trump Jr. to “push” in an October 3, 2016 message was a tweet linking to that unsubstantiated allegation in an unsigned blog post citing anonymous sources. The blog post includes no documentation of the allegation, but the WikiLeaks tweet linking to it, which Trump Jr. told Assange he did share, included an excerpt from the blog post in which the type was styled to look like a leaked document.



As Jesse Singal reported for New York magazine the day after that tweet was posted, and quickly went viral, there was no reason to believe that anonymous blogger had any source at all for the claim. The post does reference one email sent to Clinton, which was not leaked but archived by the State Department, in which one of her advisers said that a memo had been prepared of “possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks.” But, as Singal explained: “‘non-legal’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘illegal’ — rather, it’s a fairly common term in government, and it can refer to basically anything that doesn’t directly involve the legal system. If you run Google searches over the websites of the White House or the State or Justice Departments, for example, those searches will yield a handful of hits in which the U.S. government speaks openly of ‘nonlegal’ this or that, none of which are open admissions of lawbreaking.”

Earlier in the campaign, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed had also shared video from 2010 of a Fox News pundit, Bob Beckel, calling for Assange’s assassination, with a caption that incorrectly identified him as a “Hillary Clinton strategist.”



Beckel did not work for Clinton. He served in the State Department during the Carter administration, three decades before Clinton was secretary of state, and then ran Walter Mondale’s failed campaign for the presidency in 1984.

While WikiLeaks has undoubtedly facilitated the release of information that is both true and important, it is Assange’s Trump-like willingness to traffic in such unsubstantiated rumors, conspiracy theories, and innuendo not supported by evidence that undermines his claim to be a disinterested publisher, not a political operative.

This willingness to traffic in false or misleading information was very much in evidence during his work on behalf of Trump, and it is a consistent feature of Assange’s advocacy for other people and causes.

During the final week of the Brexit campaign last year, Assange tried to undermine the credibility of a witness to the savage murder of a pro-European Union member of parliament, Jo Cox. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Brexit supporters like Assange were concerned that a wave of sympathy for the murdered MP could sway the vote. So they set out to contest evidence that the killing had been politically motivated.

To that end, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed drew attention to the fact that one witness to the killing — who said he had heard the attacker shout “Britain First!” — might have belonged to a racist political group, the British National Party, whose membership rolls WikiLeaks had obtained. Within hours of the murder, WikiLeaks also shared a link to a conspiratorial post from the pro-Brexit Breitbart U.K., which speculated that the witness might have lied about what he heard as part of a feud among far-right racist groups.



The next day, British police confirmed that the attacker told the arresting officers he was a “political activist” and had indeed shouted pro-Brexit phrases, including “Britain First,” during the murder.

More recently, during the separatist protests in Catalonia he supported, Assange was forced to delete several fake or misleading images he had shared on Twitter — including one photograph he mistakenly said showed the head of Spanish military police kissing a flag at a demonstration, and another of Spanish police officers struggling with Catalans, which had been digitally altered to insert a Catalan independence flag.




A screenshot of a fake image Julian Assange shared and later deleted.

In the final months of the 2016 presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed promoted not just its new publications, but also frequently referred to tabloid rumors — like old chestnuts about Hillary Clinton’s supposed “role in the death of White House counsel Vince Foster” — and wild conspiracy theories about her campaign chair taking part in bloody satanic rituals.





We know now that, from late September on, Assange was also privately using that account to urge the candidate’s son to hype the mostly anodyne emails stolen from the account of campaign chair, John Podesta, as crucial evidence of Clinton’s unfitness for office. And it certainly looks like the campaign took his advice.

On October 12, 2016, just 15 minutes after Assange told Trump Jr. that a new batch of Podesta emails had been released, with “many great stories the press are missing,” his father tweeted a complaint accusing “the dishonest media” of ignoring “incredible information provided by WikiLeaks.”



In the same message, Assange urged Trump Jr. to share a link he provided to the email database — wlsearch.tk — so “you guys can get all your followers digging through the content.” Two days later, Trump Jr. shared that link.



Despite the constant claims from Assange and the Trumps that the emails stolen from Democrats implicated Clinton in scandal and corruption, it is important to keep in mind that the WikiLeaks method of encouraging Trump supporters and Reddit trolls to scour the documents for evidence of malfeasance did not, in fact, uncover any such evidence.

Instead, the hacked emails were used to reverse-engineer preposterous conspiracy theories, like the imaginary pedophilia scandal called Pizzagate, which WikiLeaks was still treating as real two months after the election.



This is the real tragedy and menace of the public and private collaboration of WikiLeaks with Trump. An organization with a sterling reputation for providing the public with accurate information about secret government and corporate activities was used to launder conspiracy theories that helped elect a racist, sexual predator president of the United States.

That might be a terrific result for people like Julian Assange, who see a dysfunctional, discredited White House as a way to undermine what they see as the real evil empire. For Americans condemned to live under Trump, particularly the most marginalized who, as Noam Chomsky has observed, will suffer the most from his cruelty, it is a far more troubling outcome.

Update: Nov. 16, 2017, 8:55 a.m.

Some supporters of Julian Assange have argued that the October 21 direct message that so infuriated Barrett Brown — in which Assange argued that it would be good for the Trump campaign to allow WikiLeaks to publish one or more of Donald Trump’s tax returns — merely showed the publisher trying to obtain private material of public interest. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the proposal, explicitly presented as a way for WikiLeaks to seem to be less “pro-Trump,” would have compromised the organization’s principles, by disguising material released by a political campaign as a leak obtained from a whistleblower.

It is also important to remember what was happening in the news at that time. Three weeks before WikiLeaks solicited Trump’s tax information, an anonymous source mailed three pages from Trump’s 1995 tax return to The New York Times, which published an analysis showing that Trump had used entirely legal means to avoid paying federal taxes. Had the Trump campaign provided WikiLeaks with another old return, it is possible that the organization could have published tax information that would not have damaged Trump politically, but would have misled its readers into believing that the organization was working to undermine Trump as well as Clinton.

After Trump took office, a page from his 2005 tax return, showing that he had paid millions in taxes that year, was mailed anonymously to David Cay Johnston. The reporter speculated that the source could have been Trump himself, seeking to undercut the widespread assumption that there is embarrassing information contained in the more recent tax returns he broke with precedent to keep secret. “Donald,” Johnston told Rachel Maddow, “has a long history of leaking material about himself when he thinks it’s in his interest.”

It is also worth noting that this offer to help Trump came less than two weeks after The Washington Post had thrown the campaign into crisis, by revealing that the candidate had boasted of sexual assault in comments recorded during the taping of an “Access Hollywood” episode in 2005. The recording caught Trump saying that, “when you’re a star,” you can “do anything” to women, even “grab them by the pussy.” WikiLeaks released its first batch of emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, less than an hour after that report was published.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/15/wik ... y-clinton/
[/quote]


Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Morty » Fri Nov 24, 2017 11:35 pm

From Atlantic article (last post on p23)
“Over the last several months, we have worked cooperatively with each of the committees and have voluntarily turned over thousands of documents in response to their requests,” said Alan Futerfas, an attorney for Donald Trump Jr. “Putting aside the question as to why or by whom such documents, provided to Congress under promises of confidentiality, have been selectively leaked, we can say with confidence that we have no concerns about these documents and any questions raised about them have been easily answered in the appropriate forum.” WikiLeaks did not respond to requests for comment.


So this recent turn of events is the result of a partisan political leak being exploited by Julia Ioffe and The Atlantic? Are Julia Ioffe and the Atlantic doing the exact thing that Barrett Brown condemns Assange for doing?

It's ultimately a perspective thing, I think. Assange has determined via released/leaked emails that Hillary Clinton has much blood on her hands - in a just world would be prosecuted as a war criminal for her promotion and advocacy for military intervention in Libya. This guides his behaviour to some extent.
Julia Ioffe, The Intercept, and Barrett Brown seem to be either unaware of this information, are grossly forgetful, or have come to the conclusion that Hillary's actions did not more or less directly lead to much loss of life and ongoing chaos in Libya. That's on their heads.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 25, 2017 12:36 am

You know that Assange is not an American citizen ...right?

Does this fact escape you?

You seem to be unaware of this information


Trump previously said that the United States has “no role” in Libya.....he lies ...he lies a lot ...he lies a whole fuckin lot
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ ... -0023.html



US air strikes kill 17 ISIL fighters in Libya
Six US air strikes on an ISIL desert camp in Libya killed 17 fighters and destroyed three vehicles, the first American attack in Libya since President Donald Trump took office in January.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/a ... 05704.html


US strikes Libya for first time under Trump
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/24/politics/ ... index.html


In Libya Strike, Military Shows New Lethal Powers Under Trump
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/ar ... nder-trump


Trump's Libya Quagmire
The presumptive Republican nominee tries to draw a contrast between himself and Hillary Clinton, but both of them supported U.S. involvement in both Libya and Iraq.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... re/485870/


Some Americans do not like Nazis in the White House or those who help put them there..

Assange: Trump-tied firm sought WikiLeaks' help before election
By MATTHEW NUSSBAUM 10/25/2017 01:51 PM EDT Updated 10/25/2017 05:12 PM EDT

One of the Trump campaign's top data firms sought to connect with Julian Assange before the 2016 election, the Wikileaks founder said on Twitter on Wednesday.

“I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November last year] and can confirm that it was rejected by WikiLeaks,” Assange wrote.

...

“We have confirmed the approach and rejection only. Not the subject,” Assange later added on Twitter.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/ ... ica-244164


Robert Mercer 7 Billion Reasons to Steal an Election
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40573
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Morty » Sat Nov 25, 2017 1:29 am

seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:36 pm wrote:You know that Assange is not an American citizen ...right?



Yes. What's your point?
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 25, 2017 1:32 am

COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP



btw bush left a big mess in Iraq and Afghanistan


You seem to be unaware of this information
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Morty » Sat Nov 25, 2017 1:56 am

He likes to refer to "1st amendment rights" on a regular basis, but when push comes to shove (he is under the impression that he's in a battle to evade extradition to the US and a probable lengthy jail sentence) he probably won't be given the benefit of constitutional protections the same way a US citizen would, and by the same token, I wouldn't have thought he's bound by US laws to the same extent as a US citizen. So what if he's trying to influence central figures in a US election?

Is there a crime of "collusion" on the books in the US? Claiming to be an unbiased journalist and not actually behaving in an unbiased manner is not in itself a crime. It's actually the norm, as Julia Ioffe would be able to tell you in an honest moment.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Morty » Sat Nov 25, 2017 1:57 am

I'm happy for Bush to go first at the war crimes tribunal.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:06 am

I really don't care what happens to Assange.... he betrayed his friends .....I just want trump held accountable for his crimes and he and his family of grifters will be soon enough


You seem to be unaware of this information

Others consider Assange to have brought WikiLeaks, its ostensible principles, and its advocates into disrepute


Several members of the board, including Snowden, have grown disenchanted with WikiLeaks. Snowden has for some time considered it to have strayed far from its laudatory transparency and accountability missions,


“Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped,” Snowden tweeted. “But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.” The mild rebuke drew a sharp response from Assange: “Opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton.”


hmmm I guess Assange wanted something from trump

seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 17, 2017 7:16 pm wrote:EXCLUSIVE: The Freedom of the Press Foundation has routed half a million dollars to WikiLeaks. But Julian Assange’s embrace of Trump split the group’s board, which includes Edward Snowden, and now it’s on the verge of a major break

The free press group’s impending split with Assange is a microcosm of a broader anxiety over him amongst his erstwhile allies, now that WikiLeaks has made common cause with extreme right-wing forces, principally Trump and Putin


“Suddenly the voice of WikiLeaks seemed to be all about questioning one candidate—Hillary Clinton.” When the group’s tone began to resemble that of Nazi publications’, a source said, “something is wrong”

Snowden, sources close to him tell The Daily Beast, has felt for a long time that Assange has taken WikiLeaks far from a positive, constructive vision of what Snowden believes WikiLeaks could—or should—be

“When the guy in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, who is normally of the extreme left, is echoing Nazi publications, something is wrong”

After the 2016 election, when Trump’s fortunes had clearly turned, WikiLeaks floated to Trump Jr. the trial balloon of convincing Australia to appoint Assange as its next U.S. ambassador


“This is the final mark of someone who’s in it for himself,” says journalist James Ball, who once worked for WikiLeaks, of Julian Assange. “He’s a sad man in a broom cupboard”



SPLIT

Free Press Group Ready to Cut Off WikiLeaks


The Freedom of the Press Foundation routed half a million dollars to WikiLeaks. But Assange’s embrace of Trump split the group’s board, and now it’s on the verge of a major break.

KEVIN POULSEN
SPENCER ACKERMAN
11.16.17 9:29 PM ET

In the heat of the presidential election campaign last year, Xeni Jardin, a journalist and free speech advocate, developed a sickening feeling about WikiLeaks.

Jardin had been a supporter of the radical transparency group since at least 2010, when it published hundreds of thousands of U.S. military and State Department documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. In 2012, Jardin was a founding member of the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit established as a censorship-proof conduit for donations to WikiLeaks after PayPal and U.S. credit card companies imposed a financial blockade on the site.

But during the election season, Jardin noticed WikiLeaks veering violently off its original mission of holding governments and corporations to account. Beginning in July of last year, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ driving force, began releasing a cache of stolen email from the Democratic National Committee, and injecting WikiLeaks’ influential Twitter feed with the kind of alt-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories once reserved for Breitbart and InfoWars.

“Suddenly the voice of WikiLeaks seemed to be all about questioning one candidate—Hillary Clinton—and doing so in a way that was designed to benefit the other,” Jardin recalled to The Daily Beast. “The tone also seemed to echo some of the language on the far right. So when the guy in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, who is normally of the extreme left, is echoing Nazi publications, something is wrong.”

Her misgivings eventually led to a tense confrontation with Assange and touched off a year-long debate among the directors at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has handled around $500,000 in individual donations for WikiLeaks over the last five years. Now the foundation acknowledges it’s on the brink of ending its assistance to WikiLeaks, on the grounds that the financial censorship Assange faced in 2012 is no longer in place.

“At our last board meeting in October 2017, a consensus arose that we could not find any evidence of an ongoing blockade involving PayPal, Visa, or Mastercard,” wrote Trevor Timm, co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in a statement to The Daily Beast. “We decided we would therefore formally notify WikiLeaks that unless they could demonstrate that a blockade was still in effect, we would no longer provide a mechanism for people to donate to them.”

***

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The practical effect of the move is minimal—WikiLeaks donors in America may no longer be able to claim a tax write-off. The symbolic import is much larger. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is something of a Justice League for the online privacy, transparency, civil liberties, whistleblower, and press-rights communities. Its board of directors includes Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower; Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers; open-internet pioneer John Perry Barlow; Citizenfour filmmaker Laura Poitras and her fellow Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, the two journalists to whom Snowden provided his trove; the actor/activist John Cusack; Electronic Frontier Foundation activism director Rainey Reitman; technologist Micah Lee; and journalist/activist Timm, who founded the group with Reitman. (See the disclosures at the end of this article.)

Several members of the board, including Snowden, have grown disenchanted with WikiLeaks. Snowden has for some time considered it to have strayed far from its laudatory transparency and accountability missions, sources familiar with his thinking have told The Daily Beast.

The foundation’s impending split with Assange is a microcosm of a broader anxiety over him amongst his erstwhile allies now that WikiLeaks has made common cause with extreme right-wing forces, principally Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Some consider WikiLeaks’ transparency mission to dwarf Assange’s personal crusades and transgressions—which go beyond politics and into allegations of sexual assault. Others consider Assange to have brought WikiLeaks, its ostensible principles, and its advocates into disrepute



“When the guy in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, who is normally of the extreme left, is echoing Nazi publications, something is wrong.”

WikiLeaks’ claims to be a transparency organization suffered a body blow on Monday night. The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe published portions of a Twitter direct-message conversation the @WikiLeaks account, an account controlled at least in part by Assange, held with Donald Trump Jr.

The correspondence lasted from at least September 2016 to July 2017. In a series of pitches to Trump’s son, @WikiLeaks provided the campaign with the guessed password of an anti-Trump political action committee. Just hours before Trump’s victory, @WikiLeaks pitched the son of the eventual president of the United States to refuse conceding the election in the event of a Trump loss and instead “CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred.” Doing so would have plunged the U.S. into a political crisis that pundits were warning could easily turn violent.



After the election, when Trump’s fortunes had clearly turned, WikiLeaks took a new approach: It floated to Trump Jr. the trial balloon of convincing Australia to appoint Assange as its next U.S. ambassador.

The outfit that once prided itself on promoting transparency and accountability was now stirring election chaos. “It’s hard to see what principled cause is advanced by advising a losing presidential candidate to question the outcome of a democratic election,” said Ben Wizner, a senior ACLU attorney who also represents Snowden. “It was not easy for even former defenders of WikiLeaks’ mission to see Assange as a regular guest on Sean Hannity’s show,” he added.


Many of WikiLeaks’ left-wing and libertarian supporters have struggled over the years to reconcile the idea of WikiLeaks with the reality; to maintain a principled stand for free speech and transparency without seeming to endorse the whole of Assange’s personal and professional behavior.

Each WikiLeaks defender has their own internal red line. In 2010, Assange’s plans to post Army field reports that included the names of Iraqi informants led several of WikiLeaks’ key staffers, including Assange’s second-in-command, to shut down the site’s infrastructure and resign.

Later, a rape allegation in Sweden, and Assange’s decision to take refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy rather than confront the case, cost him more support, particularly as he dodged a reckoning and portrayed himself as a political prisoner. (Assange claims he evaded the case for fear Sweden would extradite him to the U.S.) Last year, Assange’s wholesale dumping of stolen DNC emails drew criticism from Edward Snowden. “Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped,” Snowden tweeted. “But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.” The mild rebuke drew a sharp response from Assange: “Opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton.”

***

WikiLeaks’ support of Trump and the divisive rhetoric of the alt-right was the last straw for Jardin.

In July 2016, WikiLeaks began publishing the hacked emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. In October it started rolling out the emails taken from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. U.S. intelligence attributed both thefts to Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU.

But Assange didn’t content himself with the genuine news that emerged from the leaks. He supplemented it with occasional exaggerations and distortions that appeared calculated to appeal to Trump’s base. On July 22, for example, while Trump was bogged down in sexual assault allegations, Assange announced a “plot to smear @realDonaldTrump by planting fake ads for hot women in Craigslist.”

But the DNC email referenced in the tweet didn’t bear out WikiLeaks’ claim. Far from a “plot,” it was an internal proposal for a website that would highlight Trump’s record on gender issues.

In August 2016, Assange even fanned the right-wing conspiracy theory around slain Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich—a hoax that’s inflicted endless pain on Rich’s family—when he went out of his way in a television interview to imply that Rich was WikiLeaks’ source for the stolen DNC emails.

While WikiLeaks merged into the right lane, Donald Trump was increasingly drawing on the DNC and Podesta leaks on the stump, sometimes describing them accurately, sometimes not. And Trump was generous with his praise for WikiLeaks. “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” he declared at an Oct. 10 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Four days later in Charlotte, North Carolina: “The Hillary Clinton documents released by WikiLeaks make it more clear than ever just how much is at stake come November 8.” In the final month of the campaign, NBC reporters found, Trump referenced WikiLeaks 145 times

“Assange suggested Jardin praise Trump for ‘doing something useful’ by promoting WikiLeaks. ‘Is that a command?’ she shot back.”

Jardin, like many Americans, found Trump’s rallies deeply disturbing, with chants of “Lock Her Up,” protesters being ejected, and Trump describing his growing list of women accusers as liars. She was dismayed and angered to see WikiLeaks incorporated into the mix. She knew Assange’s embrace of Trumpism had been good for WikiLeaks’ bank account, bringing small donations back to the levels of the Chelsea Manning era for the first time in years, and it bothered her that a nonprofit she served was helping Assange reap that windfall.

She voiced some of her frustration in a tweet during the Charlotte rally. “Trump, his sons, and his surrogates are now dropping WikiLeaks into their anti-American rants like a hashtag,” Jardin commented. “Strangest of bedfellows.”

Assange was watching.


DOMINICK REUTER

AFP_H12QY

***

He responded in a series of direct messages to Jardin, at first referencing himself in the third person and the majestic plural, as he often does. “Since JA has never met or spoken to you we find it odd you should hold such a view,” read the message. “So what’s it based on?”

The messages went on to suggest Jardin praise Trump and his people for “doing something useful for once” by promoting WikiLeaks, “instead of, outrageously, suggesting that it is some form of anti-Americanism.”

“Hi there Julian. Is that a command?” Jardin shot back.

“If you can’t support the organization FPF [Freedom of the Press Foundation] was founded to support perhaps you should resign,” wrote Assange. After a pause, he repeated the suggestion. “You have a duty as a board member. If you can’t dispense it, perhaps you should resign.”

Knowing Assange’s reputation for vindictiveness, Jardin interpreted the messages as a personal threat.

She politely asked Assange not to contact her again, and then forwarded the exchange to the foundation’s board. “Oh my god,” replied Cusack, a friend of Jardin who’d joined the board at her invitation. “The only thing one can say is the pressure on him is incredible and everyone has a breaking point.” (Cusack declined to comment for this story; Assange did not immediately respond to a request to do so.)

The next month, nine days after Trump’s election victory, Freedom of the Press Foundation held its board meeting. Jardin brought up the issue of Assange, his messages to her, and the foundation’s continued support of WikiLeaks.

Much had changed since the foundation was formed. Today it has a $1.5 million annual budget and a staff of 15. Taking donations for WikiLeaks and other groups has become only a tiny part of the foundation’s work. In 2013, for example, the foundation took over development of SecureDrop, an open-source tool designed to make it safer for whistleblowers to submit information to reporters. Under the foundation’s stewardship, SecureDrop today is running in dozens of newsrooms, including The New York Times, TheWashington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg.

The question for the board at that post-election meeting was straightforward, if not simple: Should the foundation continue to process payments for WikiLeaks and Assange? Was there still a need, and was WikiLeaks still “a multi-national media organization and associated library,” as described on the foundation’s website, or had it become something else, something less journalistic, during the election?

“When the election reached its conclusion and WikiLeaks kept doing what it was doing publicly, I felt a sense of revulsion,” recalled Jardin, telling her story for the first time. “When our board meeting came up, I assumed that everybody else felt the same way.”

To Jardin’s dismay, they did not.

There was support and empathy on the board for Jardin, according to multiple sources, and a spectrum of perspectives on WikiLeaks. But Micah Lee was the only board member at the meeting to agree the time had come to cut ties. “Protecting free press rights for publishers we disagree with is important,” Lee told The Daily Beast, “but that doesn’t mean WikiLeaks should be able to harass our board members without consequences.”

While several on the board acknowledged that Assange had flown off the handle at Jardin, years of experience with the WikiLeaks founder had built up a certain emotional callus toward his histrionics. “At one point or another, we have all felt personally aggrieved by Julian,” Greenwald told The Daily Beast. Sympathy for Jardin over Assange’s DMs couldn’t become a reason for a free-press organization to take action.

“The contributions that WikiLeaks receives come from individual donors,” board member Rainey Reitman said in an interview. “We would be silencing readers of WikiLeaks who were trying to show their support.”

Similarly, WikiLeaks’ support for Trump could not become a reason for the foundation to cut off Assange. It would, several felt, set a dangerous precedent if the board tacitly affirmed that only some forms of published political content deserved press-freedom support. Such a move could risk undermining the Freedom of the Press Foundation.


HANDOUT

75022240

***

But there was substantial support for taking up a more pragmatic question, one that hearkened back to the very reason the Freedom of the Press Foundation came into existence in the first place: whether WikiLeaks still needed the foundation to route donations to it.

In 2012, WikiLeaks had been facing financial strangulation after PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard bent to congressional pressure and stopped accepting donations for the secret-spilling site, and for the German Wau Holland Foundation, which handled most of WikiLeaks’ finances. That financial censorship, effectively imposed by the U.S. government, but without the checks and balances of a judicial process, appeared no less ominous four years later.

By all evidence, though, that financial blockade dissolved years earlier, in 2013, after an Icelandic technology firm that processed payments for WikiLeaks won a lawsuit against the credit card companies. An archived copy of WikiLeaks’ donation page from just before the 2016 board meeting shows the organization once again accepting credit card and PayPal donations through Wau Holland, in addition to taking contributions through Freedom of the Press. WikiLeaks was no longer even claiming the blockade was still an issue.

BitCoin, too, has emerged as a popular conduit for WikiLeaks cash, and records indicate the group has received a total of 4,025 BTC through its public wallet address—roughly $29 million by current exchange rates.

Lee argued to his fellow board members that the rationale for supporting WikiLeaks had become obsolete. By the end of the meeting, the board had agreed to study the issue. “We resolved as a board to investigate this question to determine whether such a blockade still existed,” Timm said.

Jardin says she felt unsupported in the meeting, and four days later she told the foundation she was taking a leave of absence. Jardin is a cancer survivor, and she was then battling life threatening side-effects from treatment. “There is nothing like the threat of death to help you clarify what you spend your time on,” she says. On Dec. 2, she quietly resigned from the board, citing her health.

After Jardin stepped down, the board continued to chew over the issues she’d raised, albeit slowly. By the board’s last meeting late this summer, it determined that it couldn’t verify that the blockade against WikiLeaks still existed. The foundation drew up plans to tell WikiLeaks that if it couldn’t present evidence of a blockade, the Freedom of the Press Foundation would end its WikiLeaks donation channel—a decision that will mark a milestone for both organizations.

The foundation hastens to point out that Assange’s personal actions and politics are irrelevant to its decision. “Like every board, our members have a variety of opinions,” said Timm, “but our primary motivation as an organization has never been whether we agree with everything that WikiLeaks does or says.” But there’s no denying that some on the board have soured on WikiLeaks. Snowden, sources close to him tell The Daily Beast, has felt for a long time that Assange has taken WikiLeaks far from a positive, constructive vision of what Snowden believes WikiLeaks could or should be.

The foundation’s angst mirrors that of the larger community of former WikiLeaks supporters. The leaked messages between Assange and Trump Jr. recently prompted Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire backer of The Intercept, to tweet that they “disqualify” WikiLeaks from being considered a media organization. After Assange defended his election-chaos pitch as intended to “generate a transformative discussion about corrupt media, corrupt PACs and primary corruption,” Omidyar shot back: “Isn’t this an invitation to conspire to knowingly and falsely accuse election officials and a variety of people of fraud?”

James Ball worked for WikiLeaks before becoming a journalist with The Guardian and BuzzFeed U.K. It has become astonishing, he said, to watch someone who has thundered against journalists for unethical behavior turn around and pitch a potential source on securing an ambassadorship for himself.

What Ball called “the tragedy of WikiLeaks” is that transparency and accountability “are good principles, and lots of people have defended WikiLeaks because they believe in those principles and hoped [Assange] did, too. This is the final mark of someone who’s in it for himself,” Ball said. “He’s a sad man in a broom cupboard.”

For her part, Jardin takes no satisfaction in WikiLeaks’ potential expulsion, which she thinks comes at least a year too late.

“I don’t think that Julian Assange should be in solitary confinement,” says Jardin. “I feel awful for him, I bear him no ill will. But my loyalty is to my country. My loyalty is to my community… You can’t fight the kind of repression Trump represents and indirectly assist it.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/free-pres ... ia=desktop
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Morty » Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:33 am

James Ball worked for WikiLeaks before becoming a journalist with The Guardian and BuzzFeed U.K. It has become astonishing, he said, to watch someone who has thundered against journalists for unethical behavior turn around and pitch a potential source on securing an ambassadorship for himself.


James Ball seems to be unaware that Assange meant the ambassador pitch as nothing more than a jibe at other players on the scene. In the same frricking DM, in his next breath, Assange said “They won’t do it but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons.” But here they all are pillorying Assange for stooping so low attempting to further his career. I can't take them seriously.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 25, 2017 2:40 am

James Ball seems to be unaware that Assange meant the ambassador pitch as nothing more than a jibe at other players on the scene.


You do not know that

“Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped,” Snowden tweeted. “But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.” The mild rebuke drew a sharp response from Assange: “Opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton.”



Snowden
Ball
Xeni Jardin

Brown
Noam Chomsky
The Freedom of the Press Foundation
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Morty » Sat Nov 25, 2017 5:28 am

seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 25, 2017 4:40 pm wrote:
James Ball seems to be unaware that Assange meant the ambassador pitch as nothing more than a jibe at other players on the scene.


You do not know that


I don't know what you think I don't know. I am 100% certain Assange was zero serious about becoming Australia's next ambassador to US, if that's what you mean. He was trying to be like a sketch writer writing Trumps next Trumpian gag.



“Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped,” Snowden tweeted. “But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.” The mild rebuke drew a sharp response from Assange: “Opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton.”



Snowden
Ball
Xeni Jardin

Brown
Noam Chomsky
The Freedom of the Press Foundation


Fair comment from both Snowden and Assange.

If Assad were blockading Yemen, the Yankee bombs would be falling on Damascus right now. Instead the USA is aiding and abetting what amounts to genocidal acts. Snowdon needs to double down and put the criminality of the last half dozen US presidents (not bothering to go back any further) front and centre. What else has he go to do with his time?
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Elvis » Sat Nov 25, 2017 7:08 am

Morty wrote:
“If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” Assange’s account continued. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.”



But in the messages with Trump Jr., he noted, Assange was “complaining about ‘slander’ of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.”





This is sloppy. (They truncated the quote for starters - inserted a period where there was a comma in the original - not that it makes a huge difference, but it says something about the caliber of the reporting that they left out ", which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.") There was precisely NO COLLABORATION between Trump Jr and Assange. Assange was propositioning Trump, TO NO AVAIL. No tax return "leaks," no posting as Australian ambassador to US.



Yesh I'm disappointed in Jefferson Morley. His piece is a big "so what." I was going to buy his new book but now I think I'll skip it.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Jerky » Mon Nov 27, 2017 4:00 am

You mean he was JOKING about wanting an ambassadorship, and now people aren't getting the joke?

You mean like the way Wikileaks had a shell entity (which they pushed heavy via their social media) purposefully and in bad faith give the absolute worst possible, most literal read of EVERY SINGLE EMAIL from their ill-gotten trove of John Podesta's personal emails? And to blatantly lie about what those emails actually say?

Boo-fucking-hoo. My heart pumps piss for that Village of the Damned piece of shit.

Just check out: http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/

At #6 of the "most damaging wikileaks", Hillary's campaign wants "unaware" and "compliant" citizens. They write: "The Clinton campaign is literally conspiring to keep the population unaware of what is going on, and they admitted it in this email. Very scary ‘1984’ level thinking (group-think). If Hillary is the right choice for president and the truth is on her side, they should encourage their supporters to be aware and do research on both candidates."

Read the email in question, at https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599, and tell me if you think their take on what that email says is accurate... of if Wikileaks has taken someone's mournful, disturbed words about the state of contemporary polity and spun it into the notion that the person writing those words is one of the masterminds of said polity. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so ultimately consequential.

Then, at #7, they say "Top Hillary aides mock Catholics for their faith". They claim that "Top Clinton aides, John Halpin and Jennifer Palmieri" (both of whom are practicing Catholics, btw) "mock Catholics for their faith. They complain about the large number of Catholics in prominent positions. ... Palmieri when confronted about this revelation didn’t apologize." They agreed with a number of conservative commentators who called for Palmieri to quit or be fired.

The email in question can be read at https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/4364. Read it, and you'll see that it's obvious what Palmieri was talking about. Also, most of the old school R.I. participants will know what he was talking about... the particular, conservative, "Opus Dei" brand of angry white country club Catholicism best exemplified by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Rupert fucking Murdoch. Nothing Palmieri said was untrue, and only an anti-intellectual snowflake idiot would think it controversial. That Wikileaks counts it as the seventh most controversial "revelation" from their Podesta document dump tells you all you need to know about that absolutely morally bankrupt, over-and-done-with New Fascist International propaganda outlet.

I am reminded of Assange's reaction to the Catalan independence referendum in Spain. At the time, he declared haughtily from his cupboard in the Ecuadorian embassy that "the future of Western civilization is revealed" in these movements of breakaway from centralized power structures.

Of course, he doesn't feel quite the same about Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, or any other Soviet satellite state, all of which need to bow down to Putin and accept that Putin's gonna carve off chunks of their territory at will, just because.

Of course the fact that Russia provides backdoor support to Catalan's independence movement (just as they do to the far right and far left and whatever other destabilizing actors there are in whatever state Russia feels like fucking with at the time) probably has nothing to do with the huge presence of Russian organized crime in Spain, right?

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-puti ... in-2014-12

I mean, that would be like accusing Assange of being in Putin's hip pocket or something! Totally not true. Total conspiracy theory. Totally not so obvious that a deaf, dumb and blind person could see it.

"Wikileaks... NEVER BEEN WRONG, BRO!!! NO EVIDENCE OF RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE, BRO!!! MADDOW IS A MAD COW, BRO!!!"

Julian Assange deserves every bad thing that is about to happen to him... and worse. Far, far worse.

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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Sounder » Mon Nov 27, 2017 8:13 am

Of course, he doesn't feel quite the same about Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, or any other Soviet satellite state, all of which need to bow down to Putin and accept that Putin's gonna carve off chunks of their territory at will, just because.

Of course the fact that Russia provides backdoor support to Catalan's independence movement (just as they do to the far right and far left and whatever other destabilizing actors there are in whatever state Russia feels like fucking with at the time) probably has nothing to do with the huge presence of Russian organized crime in Spain, right?


I know, like Russia is sponsoring that color revolution stuff everywhere.

Impressive 'facts' and substantiation Jerky. You are a real anti-imperialist warrior.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby The Consul » Mon Nov 27, 2017 6:54 pm

Maybe he could be the pimpbastardor of the whore windows of Amsterdam.

Wait! Wait! I'm only joking!
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