[VIDEO] Bombshell: Seth Rich, Slain DNC Staffer, Had Contact with WikiLeaks, say Multiple Sources
Posted: May 16, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, Chelsea Manning, Donald Trump, Embassy of Ecuador, Espionage Act of 1917, Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange, London, Smart TV, United States Department of Justice, WikiLeaks 2 CommentsAssange has not returned a series of recent emails from Fox News about Rich. MacFadyen, who was considered a mentor by Assange, died of lung cancer on Oct. 22 at age 76.
D.C. police have announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s killer. Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman has offered a separate $130,000 reward.
Rich had been at Lou’s City Bar a couple of miles from his home until about 1:15 a.m. He walked home, calling several people along the way. He called his father, Joel Rich, who he missed because he had gone to sleep. He talked with a fraternity brother and his girlfriend, Kelsey Mulka.
Around 4:17 a.m., Rich was about a block from his home when Mulka, still on the phone with him, heard voices in the background. Rich reassured her that he was steps away from being at his front door and hung up.
Two minutes later, Rich was shot twice. Police were on the scene within three minutes. Rich sustained bruising on his hands and face. He remained conscious, but died at a nearby hospital less than two hours later. Read the rest of this entry »
Unpacking the New CIA Leak: Don’t Ignore the Aluminum Tube Footnote
Posted: December 9, 2016 Filed under: Breaking News, Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, White House | Tags: Americans, CIA, Democratic National Committee, Direct election, Disinformation, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Investigation, Julian Assange, Mitch McConnell, propaganda, Putin, RUSSIA, WikiLeaks Leave a commentThis post will unpack the leak from the CIA published in the WaPo tonight.
emptywheel writes: Before I start with the substance of the story, consider this background. First, if Trump comes into office on the current trajectory, the US will let Russia help Bashar al-Assad stay in power, thwarting a 4-year effort on the part of the Saudis to remove him from power. It will also restructure the hierarchy of horrible human rights abusing allies the US has, with the Saudis losing out to other human rights abusers, potentially up to and including that other petrostate, Russia. It will also install a ton of people with ties to the US oil industry in the cabinet, meaning the US will effectively subsidize oil production in this country, which will have the perhaps inadvertent result of ensuring the US remains oil-independent even though the market can’t justify fracking right now.
The CIA is institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now, and has been in charge of their covert war against Assad.
This story came 24 days after the White House released an anonymous statement asserting, among other things, “the Federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election day,” suggesting that the Russians may have been deterred.
[Read the full text here, at emptywheel]
This story was leaked within hours of the time the White House announced it was calling for an all-intelligence community review of the Russia intelligence, offered without much detail. Indeed, this story was leaked and published as an update to that story.
Which is to say, the CIA and/or people in Congress (this story seems primarily to come from Democratic Senators) leaked this, apparently in response to President Obama’s not terribly urgent call to have all intelligence agencies weigh in on the subject of Russian influence, after weeks of Democrats pressuring him to release more information. It was designed to both make the White House-ordered review more urgent and influence the outcome.
So here’s what that story says.
In September, the spooks briefed “congressional leaders” (which for a variety of reasons I wildarseguess is either a Gang of Four briefing including Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Harry Reid or a briefing to SSCI plus McConnell, Reid, Jack Reed, and John McCain). Apparently, the substance of the briefing was that Russia’s intent in hacking Democratic entities was not to increase distrust of institutions, but instead to elect Trump.
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
[Read more at The Washington Examiner]
The difference between this story and other public assessments is that it seems to identify the people — who sound like people with ties to the Russian government but not necessarily part of it — who funneled documents from Russia’s GRU to Wikileaks.
Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.
[snip]
[I]ntelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees.
[Read the full analysis here, at emptywheel]
This is the part that has always been missing in the past: how the documents got from GRU, which hacked the DNC and John Podesta, to Wikileaks, which released them. It appears that CIA now thinks they know the answer: some people one step removed from the Russian government, funneling the documents from GRU hackers (presumably) to Wikileaks to be leaked, with the intent of electing Trump.
Not everyone buys this story. Mitch McConnell doesn’t buy the intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »
WikiLeaks Cancels Major Announcement Due to ‘Security Concerns’
Posted: October 2, 2016 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Global, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Arrest warrant, Democratic National Committee, Embassy of Ecuador, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton email controversy, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks 4 CommentsAssange may be deliberately stoking anticipation about the announcement.
Rick Moran writes:
…The hacking group WikiLeaks has cancelled a highly anticipated announcement set for Tuesday due to “security concerns.”
[Read the full story here, at PJ Media]
The announcement was set to be made…(read more)
Hillary Clinton on Assange “Can’t we just drone this guy” — report https://t.co/S7tPrl2QCZ pic.twitter.com/qy2EQBa48y
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 3, 2016
Wikileaks has abruptly canceled a much-anticipated announcement on Tuesday, according to NBC News. The announcement had been expected to be founder Julian Assange’s long-promised document dump on Hillary Clinton. NBC’s Jesse Rodriguez reported that the Tuesday announcement — which was to come from the balcony of London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has sought sanctuary for years – was canceled due to “security concerns”.
Wikileaks has not said when it will now make its “announcement”.
Assange appeared on Fox News last month, repeating his assertion that Wikileaks has damaging documents on Clinton and suggested…(read more)
“Security concerns”? In the middle of London? Assange may be deliberately stoking anticipation about the announcement. Or, he may fear for his life..(read more)
Hillary Clinton strategist Bob Beckel called for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange to be assassinated. #DNCLeak pic.twitter.com/9L2ixl24Er
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 10, 2016
How Russia Often Benefits When Julian Assange Reveals the West’s Secrets
Posted: August 31, 2016 Filed under: Breaking News, Censorship, Global, Politics, Russia | Tags: Agence France-Presse, Democratic National Committee, Democratic Party (United States), Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange, Public Broadcasting, United States, United States presidential election, WikiLeaks 1 CommentAmerican officials say Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks probably have no direct ties to Russian intelligence services. But the agendas of WikiLeaks and the Kremlin have often dovetailed.
Julian Assange was in classic didactic form, holding forth on the topic that consumes him — the perfidy of big government and especially of the United States.
Mr. Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, rose to global fame in 2010 for releasing huge caches of highly classified American government communications that exposed the underbelly of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and its sometimes cynical diplomatic maneuvering around the world. But in a televised interview last September, it was clear that he still had plenty to say about “The World According to US Empire,” the subtitle of his latest book, “The WikiLeaks Files.”
From the cramped confines of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum four years ago amid a legal imbroglio, Mr. Assange proffered a vision of America as superbully: a nation that has achieved imperial power by proclaiming allegiance to principles of human rights while deploying its military-intelligence apparatus in “pincer” formation to “push” countries into doing its bidding, and punishing people like him who dare to speak the truth.
Notably absent from Mr. Assange’s analysis, however, was criticism of another world power, Russia, or its president, Vladimir V. Putin, who has hardly lived up to WikiLeaks’ ideal of transparency. Mr. Putin’s government has cracked down hard on dissent — spying on, jailing, and, critics charge, sometimes assassinating opponents while consolidating control over the news media and internet. If Mr. Assange appreciated the irony of the moment — denouncing censorship in an interview on Russia Today, the Kremlin-controlled English-language propaganda channel — it was not readily apparent.
Now, Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks are back in the spotlight, roiling the geopolitical landscape with new disclosures and a promise of more to come.
[Read the full story here, at The New York Times]
In July, the organization released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails suggesting that the party had conspired with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to undermine her primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Assange — who has been openly critical of Mrs. Clinton — has promised further disclosures that could upend her campaign against the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump. Separately, WikiLeaks announced that it would soon release some of the crown jewels of American intelligence: a “pristine” set of cyberspying codes.
United States officials say they believe with a high degree of confidence that the Democratic Party material was hacked by the Russian government, and suspect that the codes may have been stolen by the Russians as well. That raises a question: Has WikiLeaks become a laundering machine for compromising material gathered by Russian spies? And more broadly, what precisely is the relationship between Mr. Assange and Mr. Putin’s Kremlin?
Those questions are made all the more pointed by Russia’s prominent place in the American presidential election campaign. Mr. Putin, who clashed repeatedly with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, has publicly praised Mr. Trump, who has returned the compliment, calling for closer ties to Russia and speaking favorably of Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea. Read the rest of this entry »
Media Orgs Donate to Clinton Foundation Then Downplay Clinton Foundation Scandal
Posted: August 29, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Clinton Foundation, Government of the United Kingdom, Julian Assange, London, WikiLeaks 1 CommentDespite these ongoing scandals, Clinton’s close yet questionable ties to media outlets such as Google, CNN, PBS and the New York Times have seemed to pay off.
Liz Crokin reports: Hillary Clinton and her media allies have been working overtime to put out numerous fires that continue to pop up and spread during the final weeks of her campaign for president. Recently, the flames have gotten more difficult to smother as reports of Clinton’s frail health have bled into the mainstream media, despite the unanimous and unilateral decision by the MSM to treat anyone who even raises a question as akin to a Holocaust denier (On Sunday night, for example, the Huffington Post fired contributor David Seaman and deleted his columns simply for linking to a Hillary health video that’s been viewed 4 million times.)
Julian Assange stoked more flames when he suggested a murdered DNC worker was the Wikileaks source for the DNC hack. Most recently, the Associated Press released a blockbuster story concluding that more than half of the people Clinton met with as Secretary of State gave donations to the Clinton Foundation.
Despite these ongoing scandals, Clinton’s close yet questionable ties to media outlets such as Google, CNN, PBS and the New York Times have seemed to pay off. These entities have gone out of their way to censor negative stories about Clinton, particularly ones involving the Clinton Foundation. There’s one common thread though these media outlets suppressing harmful Clinton stories all share: they’ve donated to the Clinton Foundation.
On Aug. 23 the Associated Press broke the story citing that more than half the people outside of the government that Clinton met with as she served as Secretary of State gave money to the Clinton Foundation, either personally or through companies or groups. The AP report concluded that 85 out of 154 people she met with from the private sector either donated to her charity or pledged commitments. The AP drew this conclusion by reviewing some of Clinton’s schedule from when she was Secretary of State. They obtained these records after a federal judge ordered the release of them stemming from a lawsuit they filed against the State Department in 2015. (The AP is reporting that the State Department won’t finish releasing the rest of Clinton’s schedule till after the presidential election despite their request for it by October 15.) This bombshell, compounded with Clinton’s use of a private server as Secretary of State, is fueling allegations that she was involved in a pay-to-play operation. This story has been suppressed by Google in its searches as it has done in the past with stories that paint Clinton in a negative light. Read the rest of this entry »
Ghost in the Machine: Julian Assange Promises More Damaging Revelations to Come
Posted: July 26, 2016 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, Politics, Russia | Tags: Dmitry Peskov, Julian Assange, Kremlin, Moscow, Moscow Kremlin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, RUSSIA, Sukhoi Su-24, Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks Leave a commentWikileaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday his whistleblowing website might release “a lot more material” relevant to the US electoral campaign.
“Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are.”
Assange was speaking in a CNN interview following the release of nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by suspected Russian hackers.
However, Assange refused to confirm or deny a Russian origin for the mass email leak, saying Wikileaks tries to create ambiguity to protect all its sources.
“It raises questions about the natural instincts of Clinton that when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera.”
“Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are,” Assange told CNN. Read the rest of this entry »
Reddit Revolt: ‘AMA’ Moderator Sacked the Day After a Disastrous Jesse Jackson Q&A
Posted: July 3, 2015 Filed under: Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Embassy of Ecuador, Jesse Jackson, Julian Assange, London, Reddit, Southbank Centre, Tim Berners-Lee, Twitter, United States, World Wide Web, World Wide Web Foundation Leave a commentReddit is in Meltdown
Allum Bokhara writes: The hugely popular link-sharing site is in a state of virtual lockdown after the volunteers who run some of the site’s biggest communities (known as “subreddits”) went on the digital equivalent of a general strike. This followed the sacking of Victoria Taylor, a popular site admin, after a Reddit Q&A with the Rev. Jesse Jackson went badly for the activist preacher.
“The collective shutdown has rendered Reddit virtually unusable. In the space of a single evening, over 100 subreddits with tens of millions of subscribers have gone dark.”
High-traffic subreddits dedicated to movies, gaming, videos, history, science and art have been voluntarily locked by their moderators as an act of protest against the decision, which they saw as a symptom of an increasingly overbearing management that takes its users and volunteer moderators for granted.
“It’s another blow for interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, with users dubbing her ‘Chairman Pao’ ever since the June crackdown.”
The collective shutdown has rendered Reddit virtually unusable. In the space of a single evening, over 100 subreddits with tens of millions of subscribers have gone dark. Users are now flocking to Reddit’s competitors, such as Frizbee and Voat, the latter of which is struggling to accommodate its latest spike in traffic.
This is not the first time Reddit has seen a revolt against its management. Around mid-June, users waged a week-long rebellion against the site management after Reddit shut down a number of “politically incorrect” subreddits. But this is the first time that so many big moderators have simultaneously shut down their subreddits.
It’s another blow for interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, with users dubbing her “Chairman Pao” ever since the June crackdown.
[Read the full story here, at Breitbart]
The current revolt was triggered by the sacking of Victoria Taylor, a veteran administrator on the site who specialized in arranging high-profile Reddit Q&As, known as “Ask Me Anything” or “AMA” sessions. Ask Me Anythings are probably Reddit’s best-known feature and are known for featuring world-famous guests including Barack Obama, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Julian Assange. Read the rest of this entry »
WikiLeaks Releases More of ObamaTrade Draft Altering Healthcare, Halting Medicare Reform
Posted: June 10, 2015 Filed under: Law & Justice, Politics | Tags: Arnold S. Relman, Foreign trade of the United States, Health care in the United States, Investor-state dispute settlement, Julian Assange, Minister of State for Trade, Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, Pharmaceutical industry, Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership, United States Leave a commentCongress wouldn’t be able to reform Medicare
Alex Swoyer reports: The Healthcare Annex, according to WikiLeaks, “seeks to regulate state schemes for medicines and medical devices. It forces healthcare authorities to give big pharmaceutical companies more information about national decisions on public access to medicine, and grants corporations greater powers to challenge decisions they perceive as harmful to their interests.”
“The inclusion of the Healthcare Transparency Annex in the TPP serves no useful public interest purpose. It sets a terrible precedent for using regional trade deals to tamper with other countries’ health systems and could circumscribe the options available to developing countries seeking to introduce pharmaceutical coverage programs in the future.”
Dr. Deborah Gleeson, who gave professional review and analysis to WikiLeaks said, “The purported aim of the Annex is to facilitate ‘high-quality healthcare’ but the Annex does nothing to achieve this. It is clearly intended to cater to the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.” Gleeson added, “Nor does this do anything to promote ‘free trade.’”
[Read the full text here, at Breitbart]
“The inclusion of the Healthcare Transparency Annex in the TPP serves no useful public interest purpose. It sets a terrible precedent for using regional trade deals to tamper with other countries’ health systems and could circumscribe the options available to developing countries seeking to introduce pharmaceutical coverage programs in the future,” noted Gleeson. Read the rest of this entry »
Daniel Greenfield: The Sydney Hostage-Taker, Rapist, Murderer and Terrorist, Should Never Have Been in Australia
Posted: December 15, 2014 Filed under: Breaking News, Global, Politics, War Room | Tags: Australia, Bexley North, Iran, Julian Assange, Lindt & Sprüngli, Marriott International, New South Wales, New South Wales Police Force, Operation Slipper, Sexual assault, Sheikh Haron, Sydney 2 CommentsSheikh Haron moved to Australia from Iran in 1996. During that time he was involved in murder, sexual assault and support for terrorism in the most blatant ways possible.
In two decades, he wasn’t expelled from the country despite a laundry list of crimes and horrible behavior like sending Jihadist letters to the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
The core problem is that Haron and all the others like him should…
1. Never have been allowed into Australia
2. Should have been forcibly deported after their first crime, their first act of support for terrorism
The media’s official narrative is that Sheikh Haron is mentally ill. Just another lone wolf. Just more workplace violence. There’s no point in even wasting time debating that. Read the rest of this entry »
‘One cannot critique the surveillance state without critiquing the rest of the existing political apparatus’
Posted: January 26, 2014 Filed under: Censorship, Law & Justice, Think Tank | Tags: Edward Snowden, Future of Freedom Foundation, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, Justin Raimondo, McCarthyism, Sean Wilentz, Sheldon Richman, United States Leave a commentBig Government Fans Rally Around the Surveillance State
Sheldon Richman writes: If I understand Princeton historian Sean Wilentz correctly, progressives ought not to be grateful to Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Glenn Greenwald for exposing government spying because they are not card-carrying progressives. (“Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?”) Apparently they have either hung out with libertarians, praised or supported a libertarian, or said something sympathetic to some part of the libertarian philosophy — which cancels out anything they might have gotten credit for. (Wilentz is no stickler for consistency, since he criticizes Greenwald for taking libertarian positions now and also for making anti-immigration statements in the past. So is he too libertarian, Professor, or not libertarian enough? For an analysis of Wilentz’s McCarthyite tactics, see Justin Raimondo.)
The problem for Wilentz is that when guys like these disclose that the government conducts comprehensive surveillance in ways that would have made O’Brien drool, it puts the entire progressive agenda in jeopardy.
Obama, Holder, Journalists, and Their Sources
Posted: August 31, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere, War Room | Tags: Attorney general, Bradley Manning, Eric Holder, Espionage Act of 1917, James Risen, Julian Assange, Sterling, WikiLeaks Leave a commentIn October, DreamWorks plans to release “The Fifth Estate,” an international thriller about WikiLeaks. The director is Bill Condon, who made two of the “Twilight” vampire movies; Benedict Cumberbatch plays Julian Assange. Sure to follow are studio imaginings of the Edward Snowden affair, which looked script-ready the minute the N.S.A. contractor surfaced in Hong Kong with a hard drive full of secrets and a baby face lined with stubble.
Assange and Snowden style themselves as philosopher-rebels in the age of Big Data, and, over all, their disclosures of state secrets have served the public interest. But the glamorization of their radicalism is a distraction. In American courthouses this summer, a vitally important, yet much more subdued, struggle over the First Amendment’s scope is taking place between the Obama Administration and the press. At issue is whether the Administration will fulfill a recent pledge to end its heavy-handed pursuit of professional journalists’ sources.