2016 Postmortem

Wikileaks acted like a Trump SuperPac last year, are we supposed to forget that?

And wikileaks lost the moral high ground years ago. Assange is a russian stooge.

My personal view is this: I'm a liberal, so I'll assess the methods and means information was obtained. If I suspect information is cherry picked to manipulate perception of someone, that's bad enough - when that information was stolen, that makes it worse. If some of it could be fake, that's outright propaganda. A previous leak that was useful doesn't wash away Assange's other sins. The organization has changed since then, in fact since 2010 thereabouts.

"After Clinton claimed that Russian hackers had been the source of the leak, Assange deflected the allegation in part by pointing out that a low-level Democratic Party staffer, Seth Rich, had been murdered weeks earlier while walking home from a bar in Washington. Although police believe Rich was the victim of a botched robbery attempt, Assange hinted at a darker possibility: that Rich was murdered for sharing documents with WikiLeaks. “Our sources take risks,” Assange said ominously. (The Rich family criticized Assange for “pushing unproven and harmful theories about Seth's murder.”)

"Even so, Assange and the Trump campaign have lately seemed to be very much in sync, with WikiLeaks operating at times as a sort of extension of the alt-right press. After a televised forum in early September, when the Drudge Report speculated that Hillary Clinton had worn an earpiece, WikiLeaks posted an earpiece-related e-mail from Clinton aide Huma Abedin. There was no mention that on the same day, Clinton had visited the United Nations, where translation earpieces are the norm, nor that the Clinton campaign denied the allegation. When Clinton collapsed after a Sept. 11th memorial service, WikiLeaks tweeted a poll, which it later deleted, asking readers to vote on the most plausible theory for what had happened. The choices did not include the campaign’s explanation—dehydration and pneumonia—but did include three made-up ones: Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and, somewhat cryptically, “Allergies and personality.”"