foreignpolicy.com/…
While this should surprise no one, it appears that an anonymous source that had been in contact with Assange for quite some time had been sending him multiple, damaging, Russia-related leaks dating from last year all the way back to at least 2014, and guess what?
He refused to publish them, giving dodgy excuse after excuse each time.
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.
He even turned down leaks that would have both exposed deep Magnitsky-style Russian extortion and brutality against people associated with Wikileaks, which if published by Assange would have helped to shake off ongoing suspicions that Wikileaks itself is an arm of the FSB:
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.
The anonymous source in question seems to have come to FP perhaps because they were frustrated with Assange’s strange and seemingly illogical behavior regarding anti-Russian and anti-Trump leaks. It’s almost as though Assange has a highly specific agenda.
Oh, right.
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.”
. . .
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.
. . .
“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.”
Emphasis is my own. The entire article puts it all into a more coherent picture (and it would be better if you read it rather than me pasting all the many relevant bits here), but in short, and from the point of view of FB and this particular leaker familiar with Assange’s apparent behavior, he either has had an implicit, strongly pro-Russian bias in just about all of his work since 2012, or is indeed, as those of us who don’t live in a one-dimensional alt-right Neo-Nazi bubble universe suspect, yet another cog in Putin’s international, havoc-wreaking money laundering/disinformation machine that helped to put The Great Divider in the White House last year oh so very deliberately.
His recent Twitter ramblings about the “Deep State” only add to all of that suspicion, frankly, that he is either an FSB puppet or one of the many millions of delusional far-right activists who have fallen totally under its unbreakable spell. I would in this case assume a scenario closer to the former than the latter, but he may actually just be that delusional.