Newly-leaked chat messages from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to staff and supporters reveal that the fugitive Internet activist preferred a Republican president over Hillary Clinton. The chats also express sympathy for Russian foreign policy objectives and contain anti-Semitic language.
The Intercept reports the chat messages were sent in the fall of 2015, when Donald Trump was polling at less than 30 percent and was locked in a virtual tie with neurosurgeon Ben Carson for the Republican presidential nomination and Hillary Clinton, although facing a tougher than expected challenge from democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), was already the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” Assange asserted in a private Twitter message to a group of supporters. “Dems + Media + liberals woudl [sic] then form a block to reign in their worst qualities. With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities, Dems + media + neoliberals will be mute.”
“She’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath,” Assange wrote of Clinton minutes later.
Assange’s opposition to Clinton appears largely based on the notion that it would be easier for the former secretary of state and US senator to start a war than it would be for a Republican president.
”GOP will generate a lot [of] opposition, including through dumb moves,” he wrote. “Hillary will do the same thing, but co-opt the liberal opposition and GOP opposition.”
“Hence, Hillary has greater freedom to start wars and has the will to do so,” Assange added, referring to Clinton’s hawkish support for US wars of choice in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria that have left nations in ruin and killed more than a million men, women and children.
Although the leaked messages show Assange believed that Clinton’s “role in the war in Libya is what should bring her down,” he also noted that “the GOP is too close to others who have benefited to exploit this.”
As it became more apparent that Clinton would secure the Democratic nomination after a string of Super Tuesday victories (her, and the DNC’s role, in rigging the process against Sanders would not be known until WikiLeaks revealed it later in the year), Assange hopefully expressed one way in which her presidential ambitions might be thwarted.
“Perhaps Hillary will have a stroke,” he wrote in one of the leaked messages.
Assange also expressed sympathy for Russian foreign policy objectives in the messages. He explained Moscow’s aversion to foreign NGOs by accusing them of forcing “invading ‘Western’ cultural practices like gays and the Internet” on the relatively traditional country. Russia, he argued, was “on the defensive and terrified as the the US produces its next generation weapons and enroaches [sic] inexorably” upon its territory and sphere of influence.
In a particularly ironic message given later revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and beyond, Assange lamented how “the US hacks the hell out of [Russia] and attempts to foment an Orange Revolution in an explicitly stated policy of regime change.”
Assange noted that compared to the United States, Russia is but a minor imperial power with modest strategic goals centered around protecting it from ongoing US and NATO provocation.
”Kalingrad [sic], Crimea and its only foreign naval base, Syria, are all under threat,” Assange wrote of Russia.
Western aggression, Assange opined, “pushes [Russia] to become more authoritarian because it thinks it may be overthrown by US subversion.”
Among the leaked chats are messages with anti-Semitic undertones. After Associated Press reporter Raphael Satter tweeted an article he co-authored about the damage caused by WikiLeaks’ publication of individuals’ private information, Assange wrote that “he’s always been a rat.”
“But he’s Jewish and engaged with the ((())) issue,” he added, using the neo-Nazi meme “echoes,” used to identify Jews online by placing their names inside triple parentheses. Assange has previously been accused of anti-Semitism for closely associating with Holocaust denier Israel Shamir.
Assange also dismissed sex crimes allegations leveled against him by multiple Swedish women as the machinations of a “highly profitable accusation industry.” The WikiLeaks founder is currently living in exile in the Ecuadorean embassy in London; he fears the rape accusations against him are politically motivated and part of a plot to ultimately extradite him from Britain to Sweden to the United States, where Donald Trump suggested in 2010 that he should be executed.
The US has reportedly prepared charges to seek Assange’s arrest for leaking classified US military and diplomatic cables — many of them provided by pardoned Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning — that revealed, among many other things, American war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
However, it remains to be seen whether the US will make a serious effort to prosecute Assange, whose organization Trump repeatedly praised during the 2016 presidential campaign for helping him defeat Clinton.
“I love WikiLeaks,” Trump gushed on October 10, 2016, hours after WikiLeaks began releasing thousands emails stolen from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. That document dump came just hours after the emergence of the infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump boasts about serially sexually assaulting women.