09-02-2018, 04:27 PM
I think it's becoming apparent what a fraud Julian Assange is: the now-documented plotting between Assange and Don Trump Jr and Roger Stone, the refusal to leak hacked Russian secrets. People who've made this guy a "transparency" hero need to take a second look.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wiki...-campaign/
WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign
The leak organization ignored damaging information on the Kremlin to focus on Hillary Clinton and election-related hacks.
BY JENNA MCLAUGHLIN | AUGUST 17, 2017, 3:09 PM
In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records. WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents at least 68 gigabytes of data that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.
The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks's side of the conversation.
"As far as we recall these are already public," WikiLeaks wrote at the time.
"WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin," the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.
(The account is widely believed to be operated solely by Assange, the group's founder, but in a Twitter message to FP, the organization said it is maintained by "staff.")
In 2014, the BBC and other news outlets reported on the cache, which revealed details about Russian military and intelligence involvement in Ukraine. However, the information from that hack was less than half the data that later became available in 2016, when Assange turned it down.
"We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services," the source who provided the messages wrote to FP. "Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse."
The Russian cache was eventually quietly published online elsewhere, to almost no attention or scrutiny.
In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of potentially damaging emails about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign, information the U.S. intelligence community believes was hacked as part of a Kremlin-directed campaign. Assange's role in publishing the leaks sparked allegations that he was advancing a Russian-backed agenda.
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Back in 2010, Assange vowed to publish documents on any institution that resisted oversight.
WikiLeaks in its early years published a broad scope of information, including emails belonging to Sarah Palin and Scientologists, phone records of Peruvian politicians, and inside information from surveillance companies. "We don't have targets," Assange said at the time.
But by 2016, WikiLeaks had switched course, focusing almost exclusively on Clinton and her campaign.
Approached later that year by the same source about data from an American security company, WikiLeaks again turned down the leak. "Is there an election angle? We're not doing anything until after the election unless its [sic] fast or election related," WikiLeaks wrote. "We don't have the resources."
Anything not connected to the election would be "diversionary," WikiLeaks wrote.
"WikiLeaks schedules publications to maximize readership and reader engagement," WikiLeaks wrote in a Twitter message to FP. "During distracting media events such as the Olympics or a high profile election, unrelated publications are sometimes delayed until the distraction passes but never are rejected for this reason."
WikiLeaks's relationship with Russia started out as adversarial. In October 2010, Assange and WikiLeaksteased a massive dump of documents that would expose wrongdoing in the Kremlin, teaming up with a Russian news site for the rollout. "We have [compromising materials] about Russia, about your government and businessmen," Assange told a Russian newspaper.
"We will publish these materials soon," he promised.
"Russians are going to find out a lot of interesting facts about their country," WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said at the time.
In November 2010, WikiLeaks began to release documents from its cache provided by Chelsea Manning, which included cables from U.S. diplomats around the world, including Russia.
WikiLeaks partnered with the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, but only a handful of stories were published out of almost a quarter of a million files from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Novoya Gazeta paidfor exclusive access to the documents, according to John Helmer, a foreign correspondent in Moscow writing for Business Insider.
WikiLeaks says there was no financial aspect to the publishing partnership with Novaya Gazeta, which did not respond to a request for comment. "We do not have insight into the publication decisions of [Novaya Gazeta]," WikiLeaks told FP.
Meanwhile, Assange's position on Russia was evolving. Assange in 2012 had his own show on the Kremlin-funded news network RT, and that same year, he produced episodes for the network where he interviewed opposition thinkers like Noam Chomsky and so-called "cypherpunks."
Questions about Assange's links to Russia were raised last year, when the Daily Dot reported that WikiLeaks failed to publish documents that revealed a 2 billion euro transaction between the Syrian regime and a government-owned Russian bank in 2012. Details about the documents appear in leaked court records obtained by the Daily Dot, which were placed under seal by a Manhattan federal court.
A WikiLeaks spokesperson told the Daily Dot that no emails were removed from what the organization published. The spokesperson also suggested the Daily Dot was "pushing the Hillary Clinton campaign's neo-McCarthyist conspiracy theories about critical media."
Assange believes that U.S. officials hoping to damage his reputation leaked the court records, according to the messages provided to FP.
"There's a passing claim that the 500 pages' comes from the US government's investigation into Wikileaks," one message from WikiLeaks reads. "If true, the US government appears to be leaking data on the Wikileaks investigation, which fabricated or angled to help HRC. Huge story that everyone missed."
WikiLeaks again told FP that "the story is false" but did not elaborate.
When Novaya Gazeta reported in April 2016 on the 11.5 million documents known as the Panama Papers, which exposed how powerful figures worldwide hide their money overseas, Assange publicly criticized the work. He suggested that reporters had "cherry-picked" the documents to publish for optimal "Putin bashing, North Korea bashing, sanctions bashing, etc." while giving Western figures a pass.
In fact, news outlets involved in publishing leaks reported on a number of Western figures, including then-British Prime Minister David Cameron.
"For me it was a surprise that Mr. Assange was repeating the same excuse that our officials, even back in Soviet days, used to say that it's all some conspiracy from abroad," Roman Shleynov, a Russian investigative reporter, said in an interview with the New York Times.
WikiLeaks says Assange "didn't" specifically challenge Novaya Gazeta or the other news outlets that worked on the Panama Papers, despite Assange's public statements to the contrary.
"There should be more leaks from Russia," Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former German spokesman for WikiLeaks, said in an interview with France 24 in March. He suggested that since WikiLeaks's readers were mostly English-speaking, there wasn't enough demand.
By June 2016, Assange had threatened to dump files on Clinton that would be damaging to her campaign prospects. A month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails out of the Democratic National Committee preceding the massive dumps in October of emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In late August 2016, when WikiLeaks's Clinton disclosures were in full swing, Assange said he had information on Trump but that it wasn't worth publishing. (In a message to FP, WikiLeaks now says the organization "received no original documents on the campaign that did not turn out to be already public.")
"The problem with the Trump campaign," Assange said at the time, "is it's actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth every second day."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...ks/545738/
[FONT=&]The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks
The transparency organization asked the president's son for his cooperationin sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia's ambassador to the United States.
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[/FONT][FONT=&]This story was updated on November 13 at 10:28 pm
Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year's presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee's oldest son and campaign surrogate. "A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch," WikiLeaks wrote. "The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is putintrump.' See About' for who is behind it. Any comments?" (The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.)
The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. "Off the record I don't know who that is, but I'll ask around," he wrote on September 21, 2016. "Thanks."
The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.'s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a longand largely one-sidedcorrespondence between WikiLeaks and the president's son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.'s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump's tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.
"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.
The messages were turned over to Congress as part of that body's various ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. American intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of engaging in a deliberate effort to boost President Donald Trump's chances while bringing down his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. That effortand the president's response to ithas spawned multiple congressional investigations, and a special counsel inquiry that has led to the indictment of Trump's former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, for financial crimes.
It's not clear what investigators will make of the correspondence, which represents a small portion of the thousands of documents Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer says he turned over to them. The stakes for the Trump family, however, are high. Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia's powerful prosecutor general, is already reportedly a subject of interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, as is the White House statement defending him. (Trump Jr. was emailed an offerof "information that would incriminate Hillary," and responded in part, "If it's what you say I love it.") The messages exchanged with WikiLeaks add a second instance in which Trump Jr. appears eager to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton, despite its provenance.
Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to "ask around." According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.
WikiLeaks played a pivotal role in the presidential campaign. In July 2016, on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee's servers that spring. The emails showed DNC officials denigrating Bernie Sanders, renewing tensions on the eve of Clinton's acceptance of the nomination. On October 7, less than an hour after the Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, Wikileaks released emails that hackers had pilfered from the personal email account of Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta.
On October 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote again. "Hiya, it'd be great if you guys could comment on/push this story," WikiLeaks suggested, attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to "just drone" WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
"Already did that earlier today," Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. "It's amazing what she can get away with."
Two minutes later, Trump Jr. wrote again, asking, "What's behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?" The day before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted, "Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks."
WikiLeaks didn't respond to that message, but on October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr. "Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications," WikiLeaks wrote. (At a rally on October 10, Donald Trump had proclaimed, "I love WikiLeaks!")
"Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us," WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump's followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories. "There's many great stories the press are missing and we're sure some of your follows [sic] will find it," WikiLeaks went on. "Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4."
Trump Jr. did not respond to this message. But just 15 minutes after it was sent, as The Wall Street Journal's Byron Tau pointed out, Donald Trump himself tweeted, "Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!"
Two days later, on October 14, 2016, Trump Jr. tweeted out the link WikiLeaks had provided him. "For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/," he wrote.
After this point, Trump Jr. ceased to respond to WikiLeaks's direct messages, but WikiLeaks escalated its requests.
"Hey Don. We have an unusual idea," WikiLeaks wrote on October 21, 2016. "Leak us one or more of your father's tax returns." WikiLeaks then laid out three reasons why this would benefit both the Trumps and WikiLeaks. One, The New York Times had already published a fragment of Trump's tax returns on October 1; two, the rest could come out any time "through the most biased source (e.g. NYT/MSNBC)."
It is the third reason, though, WikiLeaks wrote, that "is the real kicker." "If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality," WikiLeaks explained. "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." It then provided an email address and link where the Trump campaign could send the tax returns, and adds, "The same for any other negative stuff (documents, recordings) that you think has a decent chance of coming out. Let us put it out."
Trump Jr. did not respond to this message.
WikiLeaks didn't write again until Election Day, November 8, 2016. "Hi Don if your father loses' we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurredas he has implied that he might do," WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35pm, when the idea that Clinton would win was still the prevailing conventional wisdom. (As late as 7:00pm that night, FiveThirtyEight, a trusted prognosticator of the election, gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.) WikiLeaks insisted that contesting the election results would be good for Trump's rumored plans to start a media network should he lose the presidency. "The discussion can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption, etc.," WikiLeaks wrote.
Shortly after midnight that day, when it was clear that Trump had beaten all expectations and won the presidency, WikiLeaks sent him a simple message: "Wow."
Trump Jr. did not respond to these messages either, but WikiLeaks was undeterred. "Hi Don. Hope you're doing well!" WikiLeaks wrote on December 16 to Trump Jr., who was by then the son of the president-elect. "In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to [Washington,] DC."
WikiLeaks even imagined how Trump might put it: "That's a real smart tough guy and the most famous australian [sic] you have!' or something similar," WikiLeaks wrote. "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." (On December 7, Assange, proclaiming his innocence, had released his testimony in front of London investigators looking into accusations that he had committed alleged sexual assault.)
In the winter and spring, WikiLeaks went largely silent, only occasionally sending Trump Jr. links. But on July 11, 2017, three days after The New York Times broke the story about Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia's powerful prosecutor general, WikiLeaks got in touch again.
"Hi Don. Sorry to hear about your problems," WikiLeaks wrote. "We have an idea that may help a little. We are VERY interested in confidentially obtaining and publishing a copy of the email(s) cited in the New York Times today," citing a reference in the paper to emails Trump Jr had exchanged with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who had helped set up the meeting. "We think this is strongly in your interest," WikiLeaks went on. It then reprised many of the same arguments it made in trying to convince Trump Jr. to turn over his father's tax returns, including the argument that Trump's enemies in the press were using the emails to spin an unfavorable narrative of the meeting. "Us publishing not only deprives them of this ability but is beautifully confounding."
The message was sent at 9:29 am on July 11. Trump Jr. did not respond, but just hours later, he posted the emails himself, on his own Twitter feed.
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http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wiki...-campaign/
WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign
The leak organization ignored damaging information on the Kremlin to focus on Hillary Clinton and election-related hacks.
BY JENNA MCLAUGHLIN | AUGUST 17, 2017, 3:09 PM
In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records. WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents at least 68 gigabytes of data that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.
The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks's side of the conversation.
"As far as we recall these are already public," WikiLeaks wrote at the time.
"WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin," the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.
(The account is widely believed to be operated solely by Assange, the group's founder, but in a Twitter message to FP, the organization said it is maintained by "staff.")
In 2014, the BBC and other news outlets reported on the cache, which revealed details about Russian military and intelligence involvement in Ukraine. However, the information from that hack was less than half the data that later became available in 2016, when Assange turned it down.
"We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services," the source who provided the messages wrote to FP. "Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse."
The Russian cache was eventually quietly published online elsewhere, to almost no attention or scrutiny.
In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of potentially damaging emails about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign, information the U.S. intelligence community believes was hacked as part of a Kremlin-directed campaign. Assange's role in publishing the leaks sparked allegations that he was advancing a Russian-backed agenda.
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Back in 2010, Assange vowed to publish documents on any institution that resisted oversight.
WikiLeaks in its early years published a broad scope of information, including emails belonging to Sarah Palin and Scientologists, phone records of Peruvian politicians, and inside information from surveillance companies. "We don't have targets," Assange said at the time.
But by 2016, WikiLeaks had switched course, focusing almost exclusively on Clinton and her campaign.
Approached later that year by the same source about data from an American security company, WikiLeaks again turned down the leak. "Is there an election angle? We're not doing anything until after the election unless its [sic] fast or election related," WikiLeaks wrote. "We don't have the resources."
Anything not connected to the election would be "diversionary," WikiLeaks wrote.
"WikiLeaks schedules publications to maximize readership and reader engagement," WikiLeaks wrote in a Twitter message to FP. "During distracting media events such as the Olympics or a high profile election, unrelated publications are sometimes delayed until the distraction passes but never are rejected for this reason."
WikiLeaks's relationship with Russia started out as adversarial. In October 2010, Assange and WikiLeaksteased a massive dump of documents that would expose wrongdoing in the Kremlin, teaming up with a Russian news site for the rollout. "We have [compromising materials] about Russia, about your government and businessmen," Assange told a Russian newspaper.
"We will publish these materials soon," he promised.
"Russians are going to find out a lot of interesting facts about their country," WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said at the time.
In November 2010, WikiLeaks began to release documents from its cache provided by Chelsea Manning, which included cables from U.S. diplomats around the world, including Russia.
WikiLeaks partnered with the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, but only a handful of stories were published out of almost a quarter of a million files from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Novoya Gazeta paidfor exclusive access to the documents, according to John Helmer, a foreign correspondent in Moscow writing for Business Insider.
WikiLeaks says there was no financial aspect to the publishing partnership with Novaya Gazeta, which did not respond to a request for comment. "We do not have insight into the publication decisions of [Novaya Gazeta]," WikiLeaks told FP.
Meanwhile, Assange's position on Russia was evolving. Assange in 2012 had his own show on the Kremlin-funded news network RT, and that same year, he produced episodes for the network where he interviewed opposition thinkers like Noam Chomsky and so-called "cypherpunks."
Questions about Assange's links to Russia were raised last year, when the Daily Dot reported that WikiLeaks failed to publish documents that revealed a 2 billion euro transaction between the Syrian regime and a government-owned Russian bank in 2012. Details about the documents appear in leaked court records obtained by the Daily Dot, which were placed under seal by a Manhattan federal court.
A WikiLeaks spokesperson told the Daily Dot that no emails were removed from what the organization published. The spokesperson also suggested the Daily Dot was "pushing the Hillary Clinton campaign's neo-McCarthyist conspiracy theories about critical media."
Assange believes that U.S. officials hoping to damage his reputation leaked the court records, according to the messages provided to FP.
"There's a passing claim that the 500 pages' comes from the US government's investigation into Wikileaks," one message from WikiLeaks reads. "If true, the US government appears to be leaking data on the Wikileaks investigation, which fabricated or angled to help HRC. Huge story that everyone missed."
WikiLeaks again told FP that "the story is false" but did not elaborate.
When Novaya Gazeta reported in April 2016 on the 11.5 million documents known as the Panama Papers, which exposed how powerful figures worldwide hide their money overseas, Assange publicly criticized the work. He suggested that reporters had "cherry-picked" the documents to publish for optimal "Putin bashing, North Korea bashing, sanctions bashing, etc." while giving Western figures a pass.
In fact, news outlets involved in publishing leaks reported on a number of Western figures, including then-British Prime Minister David Cameron.
"For me it was a surprise that Mr. Assange was repeating the same excuse that our officials, even back in Soviet days, used to say that it's all some conspiracy from abroad," Roman Shleynov, a Russian investigative reporter, said in an interview with the New York Times.
WikiLeaks says Assange "didn't" specifically challenge Novaya Gazeta or the other news outlets that worked on the Panama Papers, despite Assange's public statements to the contrary.
"There should be more leaks from Russia," Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former German spokesman for WikiLeaks, said in an interview with France 24 in March. He suggested that since WikiLeaks's readers were mostly English-speaking, there wasn't enough demand.
By June 2016, Assange had threatened to dump files on Clinton that would be damaging to her campaign prospects. A month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails out of the Democratic National Committee preceding the massive dumps in October of emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In late August 2016, when WikiLeaks's Clinton disclosures were in full swing, Assange said he had information on Trump but that it wasn't worth publishing. (In a message to FP, WikiLeaks now says the organization "received no original documents on the campaign that did not turn out to be already public.")
"The problem with the Trump campaign," Assange said at the time, "is it's actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth every second day."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...ks/545738/
[FONT=&]The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks
The transparency organization asked the president's son for his cooperationin sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia's ambassador to the United States.
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- JULIA IOFFE
- NOV 13, 2017
- POLITICS
[/FONT][FONT=&]This story was updated on November 13 at 10:28 pm
Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year's presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee's oldest son and campaign surrogate. "A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch," WikiLeaks wrote. "The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is putintrump.' See About' for who is behind it. Any comments?" (The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.)
The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. "Off the record I don't know who that is, but I'll ask around," he wrote on September 21, 2016. "Thanks."
The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.'s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a longand largely one-sidedcorrespondence between WikiLeaks and the president's son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.'s cooperation. WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump's tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.
"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.
The messages were turned over to Congress as part of that body's various ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. American intelligence services have accused the Kremlin of engaging in a deliberate effort to boost President Donald Trump's chances while bringing down his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. That effortand the president's response to ithas spawned multiple congressional investigations, and a special counsel inquiry that has led to the indictment of Trump's former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, for financial crimes.
It's not clear what investigators will make of the correspondence, which represents a small portion of the thousands of documents Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer says he turned over to them. The stakes for the Trump family, however, are high. Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia's powerful prosecutor general, is already reportedly a subject of interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, as is the White House statement defending him. (Trump Jr. was emailed an offerof "information that would incriminate Hillary," and responded in part, "If it's what you say I love it.") The messages exchanged with WikiLeaks add a second instance in which Trump Jr. appears eager to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton, despite its provenance.
Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to "ask around." According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.
On October 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote again. "Hiya, it'd be great if you guys could comment on/push this story," WikiLeaks suggested, attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to "just drone" WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
"Already did that earlier today," Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. "It's amazing what she can get away with."
Two minutes later, Trump Jr. wrote again, asking, "What's behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?" The day before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted, "Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks."
WikiLeaks didn't respond to that message, but on October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr. "Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications," WikiLeaks wrote. (At a rally on October 10, Donald Trump had proclaimed, "I love WikiLeaks!")
"Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us," WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump's followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories. "There's many great stories the press are missing and we're sure some of your follows [sic] will find it," WikiLeaks went on. "Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4."
Two days later, on October 14, 2016, Trump Jr. tweeted out the link WikiLeaks had provided him. "For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/," he wrote.
After this point, Trump Jr. ceased to respond to WikiLeaks's direct messages, but WikiLeaks escalated its requests.
"Hey Don. We have an unusual idea," WikiLeaks wrote on October 21, 2016. "Leak us one or more of your father's tax returns." WikiLeaks then laid out three reasons why this would benefit both the Trumps and WikiLeaks. One, The New York Times had already published a fragment of Trump's tax returns on October 1; two, the rest could come out any time "through the most biased source (e.g. NYT/MSNBC)."
Trump Jr. did not respond to this message.
WikiLeaks didn't write again until Election Day, November 8, 2016. "Hi Don if your father loses' we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurredas he has implied that he might do," WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35pm, when the idea that Clinton would win was still the prevailing conventional wisdom. (As late as 7:00pm that night, FiveThirtyEight, a trusted prognosticator of the election, gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.) WikiLeaks insisted that contesting the election results would be good for Trump's rumored plans to start a media network should he lose the presidency. "The discussion can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption, etc.," WikiLeaks wrote.
Trump Jr. did not respond to these messages either, but WikiLeaks was undeterred. "Hi Don. Hope you're doing well!" WikiLeaks wrote on December 16 to Trump Jr., who was by then the son of the president-elect. "In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to [Washington,] DC."
WikiLeaks even imagined how Trump might put it: "That's a real smart tough guy and the most famous australian [sic] you have!' or something similar," WikiLeaks wrote. "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." (On December 7, Assange, proclaiming his innocence, had released his testimony in front of London investigators looking into accusations that he had committed alleged sexual assault.)
In the winter and spring, WikiLeaks went largely silent, only occasionally sending Trump Jr. links. But on July 11, 2017, three days after The New York Times broke the story about Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia's powerful prosecutor general, WikiLeaks got in touch again.
"Hi Don. Sorry to hear about your problems," WikiLeaks wrote. "We have an idea that may help a little. We are VERY interested in confidentially obtaining and publishing a copy of the email(s) cited in the New York Times today," citing a reference in the paper to emails Trump Jr had exchanged with Rob Goldstone, a publicist who had helped set up the meeting. "We think this is strongly in your interest," WikiLeaks went on. It then reprised many of the same arguments it made in trying to convince Trump Jr. to turn over his father's tax returns, including the argument that Trump's enemies in the press were using the emails to spin an unfavorable narrative of the meeting. "Us publishing not only deprives them of this ability but is beautifully confounding."
The message was sent at 9:29 am on July 11. Trump Jr. did not respond, but just hours later, he posted the emails himself, on his own Twitter feed.
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