Yes and no; technically they’re an independent entity but they’ve been used as useful idiots by Russian intelligence so many times at this point they’re effectively Russian
No, the whole “Wikileaks is a Russian asset” story is a farce used to unjustly discredit them, since they’ve published some extremely damning documents.
It might be because RT gave Assange his talk show on state run tv, RT claimed WikiLeaks as a partner, Assange dumped the 2016 emails after Trump’s “Russia if your listening” statement, or because after Assange claimed the hacker that provided WikiLeaks with those 2016 emails wasn’t Russian, he was.
If you step back and squint, it kind of looks like he was working with Russia because of all the work with Russia.
I mean, that’s not entirely true. Yeah, there has been a long history of US based organizations, particularly governmental ones, trying to stop Wikileaks, capture Snowden, and generally just punish whistleblowers so brutally is deters anyone else from doing it.
But that doesn’t mean that as the years went on, the mission of Wikileaks changed as they seemed to adopt a particular goal that wasn’t just “shining a light on corruption.”
So it’s not as simple as “it’s a Russian asset” and it’s not as simple as “they’re being smeared for spilling govt secrets.” It’s a mixture of the two, but not only, and not entirely.
The Clinton emails were first released by the State Department under FOIA. (WikiLeaks were first to publish the different archives of the Podesta email leak and the DNC email leak.) Both WL and the Wall Street Journal each made the Clinton emails into a searchable database.
WikiLeaks has never had to retract a single document or story.
Isn’t Wikileaks Russian?
So they were already cc’d on them.
Yes and no; technically they’re an independent entity but they’ve been used as useful idiots by Russian intelligence so many times at this point they’re effectively Russian
nope.
No, the whole “Wikileaks is a Russian asset” story is a farce used to unjustly discredit them, since they’ve published some extremely damning documents.
It might be because RT gave Assange his talk show on state run tv, RT claimed WikiLeaks as a partner, Assange dumped the 2016 emails after Trump’s “Russia if your listening” statement, or because after Assange claimed the hacker that provided WikiLeaks with those 2016 emails wasn’t Russian, he was.
If you step back and squint, it kind of looks like he was working with Russia because of all the work with Russia.
Assange’s show was produced independently and then licensed to RT, among other broadcasters.
I mean, that’s not entirely true. Yeah, there has been a long history of US based organizations, particularly governmental ones, trying to stop Wikileaks, capture Snowden, and generally just punish whistleblowers so brutally is deters anyone else from doing it.
But that doesn’t mean that as the years went on, the mission of Wikileaks changed as they seemed to adopt a particular goal that wasn’t just “shining a light on corruption.”
So it’s not as simple as “it’s a Russian asset” and it’s not as simple as “they’re being smeared for spilling govt secrets.” It’s a mixture of the two, but not only, and not entirely.
You’re right, it does not mean the mission of WikiLeaks changed. It clearly hasn’t. They still have never had to retract a single document or story.
But weren’t some of the Clinton email leaks proven to be planted?
Ah, I was confusing the fact that the right wing internet trolls planted faked emails among the Wikileaks dump. Misremembered
Totally. It is a complete farce.