CIA malware and hacking tools

There's not much there in terms of evidence or substance, so I'll skip that. But I would suggest that sometimes nations have conflicts with each other, and further suggest that Russia and the USA have one such hostile relationship - sometimes these hostilities take the form of interfering with each others plans and goals. I'd also point out that Russia has invaded a string of neighbors after coordinated cyber and information warfare campaigns, as well as the recent string of dead Russian diplomats who all purpotedly had contact with Michael Steele. Hopefully the idea that a country who is actively fights to disrupt the current world order may take steps to further this goal doesn't appear crazy to you, because that seems like a bizarre mischaracterization of some rather straightforward concepts.

>RT routinely gives airtime to all sorts of fringe characters that other stations don't, it doesn't mean those people work for, have "cut deals with" or are otherwise owned by Putin himself.

This is another criticism that is really odd to me, because again it's mischaracterizing what is happening. """ Russia’s propaganda efforts aren’t partisan per se, though in the US election their preferred candidate was Trump. “The Russians don’t care who they’re helping, whether it’s the left or right wing. There are no barriers, as long as it weakens the system,” says Meister. “What Russia wants is to further its own interests, and at the moment, right-wing parties tend to speak to those interests more than the left,” says Meister """ [http://www.cjr.org/special_report/putin_russia_propaganda_tr...]

So what I hear is "Russia is funding every extreme viewpoint they can find", for you to rebut with "Russia funds leftists and the right, therefore they're not against the united states" strikes me as nonsensical.

>As to "when did he piss off Russia", did you ever consider that maybe he doesn't get many leaks from there?

Again, you're not actually arguing against my point. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-out_(espionage)] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_of_influence]

> If someone leaked stuff to Wikileaks and then Assange sat on it for his own reasons, the leaker would just go somewhere else. It's not like there's a lack of outlets that would publish such info: any western newspaper would do it. Wikileaks came on the scene because western media proved that they would not publish leaked material that made the US administration look bad, as the NYT's handling of Iraq related matters made clear. It was only after Wikileaks gave leakers another outlet that Anglospheric newspapers started to get the balls to publish government secrets, knowing full well that if they didn't Assange would use his own channels to do it for them.

You're trying to blur the lines between what happened when wikileaks was founded vs today. To make it much simpler, Pussy Riot is a very vocal anti-Putin group, who put it very plainly: """ A member of Russian punk band Pussy Riot says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange directly collaborates with Moscow.

“But Julian Assange, he openly works with [Russia],” Nadya Tolokno told The Daily Beast in an interview Thursday. "It’s not a secret. He’s connected with the Russian government, and I feel that he’s proud of it.

“I generally support the work that WikiLeaks is doing, but I’m not that thrilled about his decisions that are unethical, in my view, concerning his connections to the Russian government.” Tolokno said she visited Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London two years ago, saying their meeting convinced her WikiLeaks has ties to the Kremlin.

“He couldn’t deny it,” said Tolokno, whose full name is Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. "He often works with the Russian propaganda machine, and he doesn’t try to hide it.

“Julian Assange doesn’t try to hide that fact because he hosts at the Ecuadorian Embassy the editor-in-chief of the Russian propaganda team, Russia Today, and he has projects with them,” she added.

Tolokno added she confronted Assange about advancing Russian interests ahead of America’s.

“I understood his position: He’s in a state of war with the American government,” she said. "He’s smart and charismatic and will use any means to destroy the American government.

“And we had a conversation if it was really the ethical thing to do that with the hands of another government [Russia] which is, in fact, much worse and a real authoritarian government.” """ [http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/303172-puss...]

So they'd probably use off the shelf software and mitigate risks in other ways.

(Ex: not bringing smartphones to sensitive meetings)