Charges undermine Assange denials of hacked email origins
Justice Dept. indictment of Russians casts doubt on WikiLeaks founder’s assertion
WASHINGTON — At the beginning of 2017, one of Julian Assange’s biggest media boosters traveled to the WikiLeaks founder’s refuge inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and asked him where he got the leaks that shook up the U.S. presidential election only months earlier.
Fox News host Sean Hannity pointed straight to the purloined emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
“Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta’s emails, can you tell the American people 1,000 percent you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?”
“Yes,” Assange said. “We can say — we have said repeatedly — over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.”
The Justice Department’s indictment Friday of 12 Russian military intelligence officers undermines those denials. And if the criminal charges are proved, it would show that WikiLeaks (referred to as “Organization 1” in the indictment) received the material from Guccifer 2.0, a persona directly controlled by Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, also known as GRU, and even gave the Russian hackers advice on how to disseminate it.
Whether Assange knew that those behind Guccifer 2.0 were Russian agents is not addressed in the indictment. But it seems unlikely that Assange, a former hacker who once boasted of having compromised U.S. military networks himself, could have missed the extensive coverage blaming the Kremlin for the DNC hack.
Assange told Hannity he exercised exclusive control over WikiLeaks’ releases.
“There is one person in the world, and I think it’s actually only one, who knows exactly what’s going on with our publications and that’s me,” Assange said.
On June 22, 2016, by which point the online publication Motherboard had already debunked Guccifer 2.0’s claim to be a lone Romanian hacker, WikiLeaks sent a typoridden message to the persona, saying that releasing the material through WikiLeaks would have “a much higher impact than what you are doing,” the indictment states.
“If you have anything hillary related we want it in the next (two) days pref(er)able because the DNC is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after,” says a message from July 6, 2016, referring to the upcoming Democratic National Convention and Clinton’s chief party rival, Bernie Sanders.
The exchange appears to point to a desire to undercut Clinton by playing up divisions within the Democratic camp.
“we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary … so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting,” the message says.
At that time in the campaign, there were simmering tensions between the supporters of Clinton and Sanders that would come to a head during the convention because of the hacked emails.
WikiLeaks and a lawyer for Assange, Melinda Taylor, did not return messages seeking comment on the indictment or the exchanges with Guccifer 2.0.