Does Julian Assange Really Have an Email That Will Get …

Julian Assange, the founder and head of WikiLeaks, has laid his cards on the table: He views it as his mission to do what he can to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States of America. And his reasons arent just political, as Charlie Savage wrote earlier this week in the New York Times: In an interview with Robert Peston of ITV on June 12, Savage wrote, Assange suggested that he not only opposed her candidacy on policy grounds, but also saw her as a personalfoe.

Recently, the internet rumor mill has been circulating an enticing possibility for those rooting for an Assange takedown of Clinton: Assange says that he has, in his possession, an email or emails that will offer enough evidence thats the simple, two-word quote that is repeated over and over and over, everywhere for authorities to indict Clinton. If youGoogle Clinton Assange indictment,the headlines scream off the screen, each more excitable than the last:Democrat Scandal: Julian Assange Claims New Leaks Will Send Hillary Clinton to Prison Over Campaign to Destroy Bernie Sanders,BREAKING: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his next leak will virtually guarantee an indictment of Hillary Clinton,Julian Assange: My Next Leak Will Ensure Hillarys Arrest,and so on. (Disclosure: My brother does data analysis for the Clintoncampaign.)

Suffice it to say, this would be a big deal. If Hillary Clinton got indicted, it would virtually hand the election to Donald Trump. But after the millions of dollars Republican members of Congress spent investigating the Benghazi attacks, the yearlong FBI inquiry into Clintons use of a private, non-secure server for emails that led to that agencys director, James Comey,publicly reprimanding Clinton as extremely carelessbut declining to press charges, and the endless scrutiny of the Clinton Foundations finances, what could such an email possiblycontain?

Or maybe thats the wrong question to be asking. Based on my attempt to verify the quote in question, Assange may have never actually claimed to have such materials. Rather, this may have all been an out-of-control game of internet telephone, of rumormongering at its worst and least responsible, propagated by outlets hostile to Clinton and eventually reaching the pages of the top newspaper in the United States, theTimes, and one of the top papers in Canada, theNational Post. At the very least it appears that the most popular version of the blockbuster-emails story that Assange told ITV a future release will contain enough evidence to indict Clinton is false, despite having been endlessly echoed online. Assange did not make that claim in that interview, and while its hard to prove the total nonexistence of a two-word quote, theres no clear evidence he uttered that phrase in an interview atall.

Before explaining whats going on here, its important to make clear that Assangehassaid that WikiLeaks will be dumping juicy Clinton-related documentsin the future. But this is different, and less surprising, from the idea of Assanges explicitly mentioning a specific email or emails that could lead to a Clinton indictment. Its one thing to sayWere going to release emails that will make Hillary Clinton look bad, which WikiLeaks has done and will undoubtedly continue to do whenever it can, and its quite another to sayWere going to release emails that will land Hillary Clinton inprison.

The confusion that gave rise to the enough evidence rumor might stem from the fact that the ITV spot was a bit of a train wreck. Mostly, the interview has been spread around online viathis linkto a shortened version, but what appears to be the full, start-to-finish interview is here, with the Clinton portion coming in the last 3:30 orso:

As Savage notes in hisTimeswriteup, part of the reason this interview slipped under the radar when it first aired was because Mr. Peston appeared to mistakenly assume that WikiLeaks had obtained still-undisclosed emails from the private server Mrs. Clinton had used while secretary of state and kept cutting Mr. Assange off to ask about it. But those emails had actually already been published by the State Department as a result of the FBIs investigation into Clintons cybersecurity (or lack thereof) practices WikiLeaks just compiled them into an easy-to-search database. Thats why the interview is a bit hard to fully follow: As Savage writes, it now seems clearer that Mr. Assange was trying to talk about the Democratic National Committee emails, even as Peston was pressing him about server emails. He was giving a hint about the big reveals to come the emails that led to afair amount of Democratic embarrassment, and to the ouster of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chair of theDNC.

But on the question of whether Assange mentioned the possibility of a Clinton indictment in that interview, the answer is clear: Yes, he did, but in a very specific and not particularly explosive way. It comes at around the five-minute mark of the fullvideo:

We have accumulated a lot of material about Hillary Clinton we could proceed to an indictment. But because Loretta Lynch is the DoJ, head of the DoJ in the United States, appointed by Obama, Loretta Lynch is the person in charge of our case [meaning the governments investigation of WikiLeaks dissemination of classified government documents]. Shes not going to indict Hillary Clinton, thats not possible that could happen, but the FBI can push for concessions from the new Clinton government in exchange for its lack of indictment. But theres very strong material, both in the emails and in relation to the Clinton Foundation. For example, we published an email where Hillary Clinton is instructing her staff to remove the Classified header of a classified document and send it by a non-classified fax. So that just requires one more thing, which is to show that the document was actually sent. But she instructed her staff to violate those classification procedures in the United States.

Assange is claiming that one of the emails WikiLeaks had already published at that time (via the State Department releases) could potentially be indictment-worthy in the context of future evidence that hasnt yet emerged but that he finds that extremely unlikely. Hes making the common-sense observation that the Democrat-appointed attorney general is probably not looking to go out of her way to indict a Democratic former secretary of State who is running for President during the peak of a presidentialcampaign.

(Update: On Twitter, Savage points out that when you include Assanges words from immediately prior to what I excerpted, it sounds like hes saying something a bit different, though some interpretation is required with regard to the placement of the quotationmarks:

The FBI is going to go, We have accumulated a lot of material about Hillary Clinton we could proceed to an indictment. But because Loretta Lynch is the DoJ head of the DoJ in the United States, appointed by Obama Loretta Lynch is the person in charge of our case. Shes not going to indict Hillary Clinton, thats not possible that could happen. But the FBI can push for concessions from the new Clinton government in exchange for its lack of indictment.But theres very strong material, both in the emails and in relation to the Clinton Foundation

In this reading, our case again, per Savage on Twitter refers to the governments hypothetical case against Clinton, not against WikiLeaks. In listening to the interview, I had processed a pause in Assanges speech as him trailing off and switching his train of thought: The FBI is going to go We have accumulated I actually think Savages interpretation is more likely. If hes right, then it gets even harder to interpret this segment as Assange claiming there is still-unreleased material that will lead to Clintons indictment rather, hes imagining that the FBI believes it already has enough evidence to indict, but that investigators there realize that Lynchs allegiances make that a politicalimpossibility.)

Now, the full story of Clintons asking for the header to be removed is a bit murky, and there are potentially nonincriminating explanations. But setting aside the merits of Assanges legal analysis, there is no point in this clip, or the ITV segment on the whole, when he claims specifically that he is sitting on unreleased material that will likely lead to Clintons indictment, or when he uses the phrase enough evidence to describe the contents of a leak-to-come. Plus, that claim makes no sense in the full context of the clip: If he was anticipating an indictment, why would he be talking about his hopes for the FBI to extract concessions from a new Clinton government? Yet the interview has been presented, thousands of times now if you factor in the internets bottom-feeders, as proof that Assange is going to be releasing some bombshell materials that pose a serious legal threat to Clinton. (An email to WikiLeaks seeking comment bouncedback.)

The enough evidence quote turns out to be rather ghostly almost every time it is mentioned online, its either attributed to the ITV interview or disconnected from any sourcing whatsoever. Trying to track it down leads deep down a dark internet rabbit hole. In a Russia Today segment posted to YouTube Wednesday, for example, the host leads off by saying that Julian Assange is now preparing to release more leaked emails, and this time he says they will, quote, provide enough evidence to indict Hillary Clinton. The host doesnt provide the source of the quote (or make it clear where it leaves off). If you then Google Assange and the exact phrase enough evidence, one top Google News result the top result for me is a National Post article from Tuesday which references a Democracy Now interview. Quoting from that interview, the Post articlenotes:

In relation to sourcing, I can say some things, Assange told the host. (A), we never reveal our sources, obviously. Thats what we pride ourselves on. And we wont in this case, either. But no one knows who our source is. Assange has said the release Friday was the first in a series and the new emails would provide enough evidence to indict Clinton. In a June interview with Britains ITV, Assange said the same, warning there was enough evidence to indict Clinton if the U.S. government had the courage to do so. [emphasis mine]

What does has said mean here? To which interview is it referring? Again, we have the unusual situation of a direct quote being provided with no specific attribution. As the slippery phrasing hints, enough evidence didnt come from the Democracy Now segment that transcript doesnt contain the words enough, evidence, or indict, and only mentions arrested in the context of the as-yet-unresolved sexual-assault charges leveled against Assange in 2010. The quote is just floating there, alone andmysterious.

Theres a similar issue with an article by David Sanger, the Times chief Washington correspondent, which was publishedMonday:

Julian Assange, who founded WikiLeaks, argued to Richard Engel of NBC in an interview broadcast Monday that there is no proof of that whatsoever that Russia was behind the original hacking. We have not disclosed our source, and of course, this is a diversion thats being pushed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Mr. Assange also said another round of emails to be released would provide enough evidence to indict her, but her campaign manager, Robby Mook, said, He says a lot of things, so Im not, Im not going to pay attention to that.

The attribution isnt totally clear, but the simplest interpretation, based on the also said phrasing, is that Assange made the enough evidence comment to Engel. But if you watch the full interview posted on NBC.com, theres no such moment.(I emailed with Sanger about this yesterday, and he said that quote came from the articles contributing reporter and that he would ask her about it. If I hear more, Ill update thisstory.)

Other mainstream outlets picked up the quote as well: Julian Assange has pronounced that there are more hacked emails to come from his group, including ones that willprovide enough evidenceto see Hillary Clinton arrested,wrote Reasons Nick Gillespieon Tuesday, linking to the ITV spot. (I took it from a headline that linked to the interview, but I had not watched the interview, which is not good journalism, to be sure, said Gillespie when I asked him about his post.)A New YorkNewsdayeditorial published Mondayhad it slightly differently and got the date of the interview wrong: in an interview with Britains ITV earlier this month, Assange predicted that [the private-server emails] would provide enough evidence to derail hercampaign.

So where did this two-word quote ostensibly uttered by Assange originate? It appears, but cant be definitively proven, that it first popped up the day after the ITV interview in June, in blog posts covering that interview published by Zero Hedge and Russia Today. Zero Hedge, a popular economics- and finance-focused conservative blog that is very Clinton-averse and, to phrase it diplomatically, has not always had an intensely intimate relationship with the concept of careful fact-checking, published an item headlined Julian Assange Warns WikiLeaks Will Publish Enough Evidence To Indict Hillary Clinton. The post in question didnt actually show where in the ITV interview Assange said that, because he didnt say that. (Wednesday, Zero Hedge followed up with a post which noted that One month ago, when Wikileaks Julian Assange told ITVs Richard Peston that he would publish enough evidence to indict Hillary Clinton, few took him seriously. If people didnt take the quote seriously, there was good reason for it.) As for Russia Today, its article about the ITV interview had the very similar headline Wikileaks will publish enough evidence to indict Hillary Clinton, warns Assange, and like the Zero Hedge article it provided no evidence of that actualquote.

The RT and Zero Hedge posts exploded across the internet shortly after they went up, gaining traction via typically high-share-count sites like U.S. Uncut (In a recent interview with ITV, Assange said the whistleblowing website will soon be leaking documents that will provide enough evidence for the Department of Justice to indict the presumptive Democratic nominee) and TruthDig, and were also posted to popular conservative forums like FreeRepublic and Lucianne.com, helping the rumor to spread still further. One YouTube video on the subject got more than 260,000 views. The original article and almost all the follow-up postings all made the same error: They all claimed that Assange said in the ITV interview that a future WikiLeaks release would provide enough evidence direct quote to indictClinton.

The case that RT and/or Zero Hedge launched this rumor isnt bulletproof, but its fairly strong. If you do a Google search over a date range that only goes to June 10, 2016 a couple days before the ITV interview theres no sign of anyone reporting this direct quote before then. Technically, there are some hits, but all the links I clicked on pointed to content which was indexed incorrectly and had actually been published later, or which was otherwiseirrelevant.

Again: Its very, very hard to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a given person never used a given two-word phrase in reference to a particular situation. But typically, if a public figure makes a remark and news outlets snip a couple words from it, it takes about ten seconds, thanks to Google, to determine the context and read the full sentence in question. As far as I can tell, having checked both Google and Nexis, no one seems to have posted the full sentence from which Assanges enough evidence remark was plucked, and over and over and over, those writing about or reporting on that quote have linked to an interview in which it simply doesnt occur. This is extremely unusual.

If this is, in fact, a false rumor, it isnt hard to see why it went viral. One of the many reasons people spread rumors without fact-checking them is wish-fulfillment: people who hate Clinton really, really want to see her indicted (if not shot for the supposed treason she has committed). But its still strange and disturbing, even by circa-2016 standards of viral rumors, that a direct quote that doesnt show up anywhere could so effortlessly penetrate the Clinton/WikiLeaks conversation, from the webs most tin-foil-hatted blogs all the way up to the New York Times.

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Does Julian Assange Really Have an Email That Will Get ...