Help make Julian Assange Australia’s US ambassador, WikiLeaks …

WikiLeaks tried to have Julian Assange installed as the Australian ambassador to the US after Donald Trumps election, a new leak of private correspondence from inside the Trump circle has revealed.

On Tuesday the Atlantic magazine reported Donald Trump Jr, the presidents son, was in contact with WikiLeaks via Twitter direct messages during the final stages of the 2016 election. Copies of the correspondence were handed to congressional investigators by Trump Jrs lawyers and then obtained by the Atlantic.

Trump Jr subsequently tweeted a transcript of what he said was the entire exchange.

It reveals WikiLeaks and Trump Jr sought information from each another and details a string of increasingly bold suggestions made by WikiLeaks to Trump Jr, including asking for the president-elect to tell Australia to appoint Assange ambassador to the US.

On 16 December, a month after Trumps election, WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr to have his father suggest Australia appoint Assange to the post in Washington, DC.

Hi Don. Hope youre doing well! WikiLeaks wrote to Trump Jr. In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC.

WikiLeaks went as far as suggesting wording for Trump: Thats a real smart tough guy and the most famous australian [sic] you have! or something similar, WikiLeaks wrote.

They wont do it but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons.

WikiLeaks also encouraged Trump Jr to leak his fathers tax returns to prevent them being published by a biased source such as the New York Times. If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality, WikiLeaks explained.

It also urged the Trump campaign to reject the results of the election as rigged, and in July told the presidents son to release emails detailing his contact with Russian figures during the campaign.

While most of the communication was one-sided, the exchanges between Trump Jr and WikiLeaks came at a highly sensitive moment. They took place only months before the election, at the height of WikiLeaks publication of hacked emails belonging to senior Democratic figures.

US intelligence agencies allege the leaks came from the Russian government, which Assange has denied.

On Twitter, Assange said he cannot confirm the alleged DMs and said the Atlantic story was edited and clearly does not have the full context.

However he also pointed to a tweet from his own account in July in which he said he had contacted Trump Jr to urge him to release emails relating to Trump Jrs meeting with a Russian lawyer he believed might have damaging information on the Clinton campaign.

Assange said the messages showed that WikiLeaks loves its pending publications and ignores those who ask for details.

Trump Jr. was rebuffed just like Cambridge Analytica. In both cases WikiLeaks had publicly teased the publications, he wrote.

Thousands of people asked about them. WikiLeaks can be very effective at convincing even high profile people that it is their interest to promote links to its publications.

WikiLeaks has such chutzpah that it allegedly tried to convince Trump Jr to leak his fathers tax returns & his own Russian lawyer meeting emails (he did). WikiLeaks appears to beguile some people into transparency by convincing them that it is in their interest.

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Assange has had a rocky relationship with the Australian government. In 2010 the former prime minister Julia Gillard described the release by WikiLeaks of classified documents from the US State Department as illegal, and after he was granted asylum by Ecuador in 2012 Australia was accused of abandoning him.

Last year the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, met Assanges lawyers after a United Nations report found Assange had been arbitrarily detained since his arrest in 2010.

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Help make Julian Assange Australia's US ambassador, WikiLeaks ...