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For someone who has not followed Assange news for a long time, what is the general accusation of his crimes? Is it just that he published secret material that he received from other sources?
Realistically, he simply pissed off members of the ruling class of the US. Their presence has become significantly more obvious in recent years.
Other than that, I'd say it's mostly a 'show me the man, I'll show you the crime' sort of thing.
If Greenwald suggest to Snowden in Dec 2012 that he should steal more, is comrade Greenwald complicit We all know Assange not only encouraged but participated. Snowden is a thief and liar who encouraged others to leak in his capacity at fpf. Complicit. Snowden and Assange are traitors, in the non legal definition
Assange is not even a US citizen. How can he be a traitor?
I honestly have very little sympathy for Assange at this point. The entire organization either appears to have been a honey pot or front for foreign election interference.
This is a badly uninformed opinion
You don't have to start OUT as a honeypot or a tool of foreign intelligence. It would be a pretty lousy intelligence service that had to start with pre-existing cooperation and alliance. Much better to work at twisting things, and then rely on rationalization and perhaps back it up with threat and intimidation. There's nothing new about any of this, it's just done with flair, ingenuity and determination. Or has been: I think there's a limit to how far that can go.
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I think you’re overconfident in what you believe to be true based on the evidence that exists. The Russian bit can be politically inconvenient for you and yet also be true.
Extraordinary claims (Trump colludes with Russians, Russians hack DNC) requires extraordinary evidence. In over 5 years, this has not been presented.
The Mueller report goes into specific detail or you can listen to the lawfare blog podcast that goes through it.
“Collusion” is a poorly defined term, the report found their actions didn’t rise to the level of criminal conspiracy, but there was plenty of evidence that the campaign was interested in support and responded to it (“collusion”).
Donald Trump Jr. just didn’t realize Russia was interested in getting the Magnitsky act revoked when he took the meeting and he was disappointed when the Russians didn’t have the “emails” (from the private server, not the DNC emails). The Russians thought they could manipulate their self-imposed orphan adoption ban issue, but DTJ didn’t care about orphans.
American intelligence agencies (or any intelligence agency) are not going to provide you with the precise methods they use to determine where the attack came from.
I suspect no evidence will meet your extraordinary standard because you’re only looking for evidence that supports an existing position based primarily on political motivated reasoning and cognitive bias.
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> At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent.…
Lanier's smart, isn't he? It sounds like he was ahead of the curve, here.
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The claims are not extraordinary. The Trump Tower meeting [0] is clear evidence Trump campaign members' interest in colluding with foreign agents. Donald Trump personally had a fig leaf of deniability about that meeting but in interviews [1] he expressed his willingness to collude. The Trump campaign, at minimum Paul Manafort, colluded with agents of Russia [2]. I'm not going to research how strong the public evidenc…
Before you continue with a flood of poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify, the claim that a President colludes with a foreign power is extraordinary.
A. He wasn't president at the time.
B. While it's natural to assume that a candidate is aware of, and is ultimately responsible for, everything his campaign does, I've distinguished between his campaign colluding and Trump personally colluding.
C. Everything that has already been made public about the campaign makes further claims that are less well documented not extraordinary.
Allow me to spoon-feed an important part to you. Don Jr. publicly released emails about the Trump Tower meeting, those are real and not circumstantial evidence in his desire to collude and others in the campaign attended the meeting with foreknowledge of this. Google 'don jr "i love it"' and there are a zillion news stories about them, I don't know how you missed them at the time. An NPR story linked to a complete PDF [0] of what Don Jr released. Here's the beginning of a NY Times story [1] about them:
> The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.
> The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
> If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.
> He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
[0] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3892196/Donald-Trump-Jr-Email-Exchange.pdf
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.htmlI honestly have very little sympathy for Assange at this point. The entire organization either appears to have been a honey pot or front for foreign election interference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because we are still humans and fallible. Did you look at what Wikileaks revealed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Leaks I don't think you realize the scale of what is happening. These aren't some cute human mistakes or tax evasion. We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ... And yes - lots of it targets the US gov, maybe time to rethink what the US (and others) gov is and…
> This is why the reasoning that Wikileaks helps dictatorships is absurd. I never wrote that nor implied it. I wrote and I maintain that wikileaks deals more blows to democracies than dictatorships and that it's because of the very nature of democracies (edit: notwithstanding the whole anti-US bias of Assange). I don't know how to make my point clearer: - Wikileaks's leaks are mainly about democracies, not dictatorsh…
This is clearly a political attack on someone who has exposed some uncomfortable truths. Even if Assange is a criminal, which I don't think he is, there's no excuse for holding him in the manner which they are, treating him worse than the worst criminals.
Finally it's been shown that the rape accusations were an orchestrated smear campaign as well.