How Julian Assange Turned WikiLeaks Into Trumps Best Friend: [View all]

This is from October 11 last year :

"Assange proceeded unhurriedly, quoting Voltaire and referencing postmodernism as he sketched out a "romantic ideal" of history "that perhaps doesn't belong to this time, but belongs to an older time, or perhaps a future time.” He declared that WikiLeaks was entering a new operational phase in which it would recruit volunteers via Twitter to do battle against the site’s many enemies. (Assange’s enemies list is long and varied, beginning with many of WikiLeaks' old collaborators, such as the New York Times and the Guardian, and also includes American tech companies, establishment liberals, and pretty much every sort of institution imaginable.) "We're going to need an army to defend us," he offered. "We will give an effective call to arms if the pressure increases." He spent some time promoting WikiLeaks books—on sale, at 40 percent off—and promised to publish new leaks in the near future.

Throughout the meandering presentation, the audience—including the hundreds of thousands watching Alex Jones and readers of the Drudge Report, which had promoted the event at the top of its homepage—impatiently waited for the promised blow to Clinton. “I understand there’s enormous expectation in the United States,” Assange said with a chuckle. He promised that WikiLeaks would indeed release information about the election, just not yet. "If we’re going to make a major publication in relation to the United States, we don’t do it at 3 a.m,” he said. By this point, it was around 4 a.m. in New York.

The drawn-out nonrevelation instantaneously reverberated across the Atlantic, where Jones interrupted his livestream and broke into verse, quoting the rapper Ludacris as he urged Assange to, “Move, bitch, get out the way / get out the way, bitch / get out the way.” Later, when a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter asked about Assange’s apparent affinity for Trump, he smirked.

“It’s an interesting question,” he said. “I feel a personal affinity for all human beings.”

Four years after his indoor life in the embassy began, Assange suffers from toothaches, chronic shoulder pain, poor posture, and depression. In September, Assange leaked his own medical report, in which he is quoted responding to a doctor’s question about his cluttered workspace by saying that he has stopped seeing physical things as distinct from one another, or experiencing the concept of time. “Nothing is before or after,” he tells the doctor in existential dismay. The report’s takeaway from this seemingly desperate statement: “Individuals whose movement is restricted can experience a slow unravelling of their cognitive faculties.”

Assange released these records in September, at least in part as a sort of troll aimed at Clinton amid her struggles to rebut Republican criticisms that she was too ill for the presidency. The stunt delighted a growing cohort of hard-core Trump supporters and surprised many of Assange’s old allies on the activist left. After all, Trump’s vision of returning America to an old-timey muscular greatness represents, in many ways, the antithesis of Assange’s world view.

WikiLeaks has long sought expanded privacy rights and a diminished role for the U.S. abroad—strongly opposing secret wiretaps, drone strikes, and the Guantánamo Bay prison facility. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has suggested “closing up the internet,” expanding extrajudicial killings, and making Gitmo—a longtime WikiLeaks bête noir—a permanent and expanded institution. Assange started his hacktivism career in the late 1980s and has expressed admiration for the antinuclear activists of that era; Trump has often wondered, out loud, if we shouldn’t consider using nuclear weapons more often.

None of this has seemed particularly to trouble Assange, who has mined the leaked Democratic National Committee e-mails, as well as publicly available e-mails from Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, for any meme-worthy tidbit to reinforce the case against her candidacy. He has used these finding to give cover to thinly sourced theories about Clinton’s health—in late August, he dug up an e-mail that showed that Clinton once received information about a Parkinson’s disease drug—and inventing new anti-Clinton theories out of whole cloth.

"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.”

Then, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released about 2,000 private e-mails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, just minutes after the leak of Trump’s vulgar remarks caught on video in 2005. Was this an effort to blunt the damage to the Republican candidate while arming him ahead of the second debate? Podesta thought so. “Mr. Assange wanted to change the subject,” he told reporters. “He didn’t succeed in doing it.” The next week, with Trump still reeling, Assange released several additional batches of Podesta’s e-mails, promising more.

Longtime allies have generally been horrified by these developments, with friends and supporters suggesting that Assange has been so intent on playing the media that he may be in danger of losing control. “I’m not sure what to make of this turn to the alt-right,” says John Kiriakou, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was imprisoned for telling ABC News that the government had tortured suspected terrorists. Among fellow whistleblowers and their friends, Kiriakou says, “There’s no consensus other than maybe Julian is just going nuts.” (Harrison disputes this, but not entirely. “There are big psychological pressures,” she says. “It’s difficult for him.”)

On the other hand, Assange is devilishly smart, a point that even his fiercest critics are quick to concede, and is operating with limited options. And the 2016 election has been crazy enough that a tacit alliance with Trump might not just be nuts—it might be rational."

How Julian Assange Turned Wikileaks into Trump's Best Friend

So let's not be naive. This is not the work of an individual who prioritizes transparency above all things but someone who is now prepared to boldly target his "enemies", principles be damned.