As Julian Assange enjoys his first weekend of freedom in years, there appeared to be no question in the mind of his wife, Stella, about what the family’s priorities were.
The WikiLeaks co-founder would need time to recover, she told reporters after they were reunited in his native Australia, after a deal with US authorities that allowed him to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified defence documents.
What comes after that is one of the most intriguing questions for anyone familiar with how the site he founded in 2006 utterly changed the nature of whistleblowing. Will it return to its original mission?
James Harkin, the director of the London-based Centre for Investigative Journalism, (said) “In retrospect, it’s striking that everything WikiLeaks published was true – no small feat in the era of “disinformation” – but the tragedy is that much of its energy and ethos has now passed to blowhards and conspiracy theorists. Perhaps, in the light of our tepid new involvements in the Middle East and Ukraine, we need a new WikiLeaks.”
It is fair to remember, however, that his biggest bombshells were from the Iraq war, which was a decidedly Republican endeavor. But I do agree that he looked more and more like a Russian asset as time went on.
Those bombshells didn’t end the war.
His leak during the 2016 election changed the course of American history, and was directly coordinated with Russia. That was far more impactful.
To be clear, I think Assange definitely behaves as a russian asset - but democrats will do anything except admit that their candidates are awful. Leaks as mundane as the 2016 ones were capitalised on by Trump, of course - but it still shouldn’t have made a difference, and the race wasn’t as close as it was due to wikileaks.
Trying to motivate an increasingly disengaged and disappointed electorate by being the lesser of two evils simply isn’t good enough - and ‘useful idiots’ like Assange (although acting recklessly and causing damage) aren’t the reason Hillary lost, or that Trump has support.
That’s more a comment on how die-hard committed the political class is to perpetual war than anything else.
Also, while I don’t appreciate Trump being elected… the DNC seems committed to running some of the worst candidates they can find - the fact that there was information that damaging to Clinton that didn’t come out in the primaries is the part we should be mad at.
I think we should still be mad at foreign adversary nations colluding with one of our politcal parties and a not at all impartial “whistleblower” to turn the tide of a presidential election.
The emails themselves were barely relevant at all politically. Out of some 30k of them, 3 were found to be inappropriately controlled. Thats hardly an earth shattering discovery.
The spectacle that Assange, the GOP and Russia manufactured was the issue. It was a coordinated and targeted attack on our democracy, and he deserves to be derided for his outsized part in it.