
The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. And Wikileaks - glhaynes
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/?single_page=true
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notahacker
It's been abundantly obvious for a very long time that regardless of the noble
motivations of some people who have been involved in the project, Assange is a
partisan hack who's about as well-intentioned as weev and probably
surprisingly similar in his politics.

Though even I'm amazed his hubris actually went as far as asking to be
appointed as a foreign ambassador, and can't help but love the implication
that he or one of his closest confidants managed to talk Donald Trump Jr into
tweeting out incriminating emails. Not to mention the irony of Wikileaks'
being leaked against and its founder tweeting about not keeping any records of
the conversations...

We could probably still do with an impartial international clearing house for
leaked memos that isn't run by somebody who rejects the Surkov leaks because
it might deflect from him tweeting polls about the Presidential candidates'
heath or the remarkable insight that the Economist has a Rothschild on the
board.

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kbenson
Some of this can be read as Wikileaks fishing for information from the Trump
campaign, and saying what they need to get it. The Pandering and trying to
make Assange sound good is a bit off-putting, and strengthens my impression
that Wikileaks really _is_ a mouthpiece for Assange in all but name, but it
definitely doesn't look good for Wikileaks in general.

Edit: This seems to be suppressed on HN as of right now (not in the first four
pages of submissions), likely due to their automated systems that tramp down
things likely to turn into political flame-wars. Hopefully it somehow hits a
threshold to get out of that or gets moderator approval/boost, as this seems
like news worth discussing to me. Then again, I'm sure there are plenty of
people that would be happy to see it skip the front page entirely because they
don't like these kind of articles.

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glhaynes
As author Julia Ioffe notes on Twitter, the story has now been updated to note
that @realDonaldTrump tweeted about the release of Podesta's emails 15 minutes
after @Wikileaks wrote to @DonaldJTrumpJr about it.
[https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/930197548651999232](https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/930197548651999232)

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alva
No matter how you view Wikileaks, they are more than technically able and
would have known Twitter DM's are essentially public to USG. Adds an
interesting angle.

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glhaynes
"Leak us one or more of your father’s tax returns … If we publish them it will
dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality."

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eqmvii
Just this week I was involved in a comment thread where people defended
Wikileaks' impartiality.

This is a huge bombshell.

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r3bl
Wow. Just wow. This is unexpected even for the Wikileaks standard.

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Boothroid
Because of course, whoever is leaking this information is only doing it for
the noblest reasons.

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lbsnake7
I don't know if this line of thinking will get any play on this forum as I
have read people praising him constantly, but what does this mean for Snowden?
He was working for the NSA, stole secrets from his government and gave it to
reporters to distribute, and then sought and received asylum in Russia with
the help of WikiLeaks. If WikiLeaks is heavily connected to the Russian
government, at what stage can we say that Snowden effectively defected to
Russia?

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notahacker
tbh I'm not sure even if there was hard evidence of Assange as an intentional
Russian asset it would greatly change the complexion of Snowden's situation,
unless records were produced of him offering Snowden the support of the
government of Russia _before he released anything_. If anything, it might make
him more likely to have been duped into having little choice of destination to
flee to other than Russia.

The military's view Snowden defected as soon as he released classified info
and added to the charge sheet by fleeing to Russia isn't really contingent on
whose advice he took either.

And the published bits correspondence isn't really evidence of Assange being
particularly closely connected to the Russian government; if anything it's so
crass, self-absorbed and risky it points towards the opposite.

