Last week, The Guardian published a "bombshell" front-page story asserting, without producing any evidence, that Julian Assange had secretly met the recently convicted former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in 2013, 2015 and 2016. The Guardian's attack on Assange came only days after it was confirmed that he has been indicted some time ago, under seal, and that the U.S. will seek his extradition from the U.K. The story was published just hours before a hearing brought by media groups trying to stop the U.S. government from keeping its attempts to extradite Assange secret.

The story went viral, repeated uncritically by many media outlets around the world, including Newsweek. This falsely cast Assange into the center of a conspiracy between Putin and Trump. The Guardian even had the gall to post a call to its readers to donate to protect "independent journalism when factual, trustworthy reporting is under threat."

These three meetings with Manafort did not happen.

As The Guardian admitted, the Embassy's visitor logs show no such visits. The Guardian claims they saw a separate internal document written by Ecuador's Senain intelligence agency that lists "Paul Manaford [sic]" as one of several well-known guests.'

Manafort, through his spokesman, has stated: This story is totally false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him.

It appears The Guardian editors tried to backpedal from the original story with post-publication stealth edits, but theyhavenot issued a correction or apology.

The journalists who wrote this story must surely know that guests who enter the embassy must be registered in logs, as pointed out by the former first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy from 2010 to July 2018.

Ecuadorian intelligence has spent millions of dollars on setting up security cameras inside its embassy in London to monitor Julian Assange and his visitors. The Guardian has previously published still shots from those cameras. However, in the case of the claimed Manafort visit, they apparently demanded no such verification.

They also overlooked the simple fact that millions of pounds have been spent over the years by the Metropolitan police and secret services on monitoring the entrances of the embassy 24/7.

This is part of a series of stories from The Guardian, such as its recent claim of a "Russia escape plot" to enable Assange to flee the embassy, which is not true.

What do these stories have in common? They all give the U.K. and Ecuador political cover to arrest Assange and for the U.S. to extradite him. Any journalists worth their salt should be investigating who is involved in these plots.

Julian Assange gestures as he speaks to the media from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, on May 19, 2017. Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Mike Pompeo, when he was CIA director, said the U.S. was "working to take down" WikiLeaks. This was months after WikiLeaks released thousands of files on the CIA, the "largest leak of CIA documents in history," called Vault 7. The Guardian seems determined to link Assange to Russia, in full knowledge that such claims are prejudicial in the context of Mueller's probe in the U.S. and the Democratic National Committeelawsuit against WikiLeaks.

Numerous commentators have criticized The Guardian for its coverage of Assange. Glenn Greenwald, former columnist for The Guardian, writes that the paper has "...such a pervasive and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign him." Another former Guardian journalist, Jonathan Cook, writes: "The propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with Trump, and Trump's supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race."

Hours before The Guardian published its article, WikiLeaks received knowledge of the story and "outed" it, with a denial, to its 5.4 million Twitter followers. The story then made the front page, and The Guardian asserted they had not received a denial prior to publicationas they had failed to contact the correct person.

A simple retraction and apology will not be enough. This persecution of Assange is one of the most serious attacks on journalism in recent times.

Kristinn Hrafnsson is an Icelandic investigative journalist who has worked with WikiLeaks since 2009, as spokesperson for the organization from 2010 to 2016 and editor-in-chief since September 2018.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.

See the rest here:
The Persecution of Julian Assange: WikiLeaks Editor Says ...

The Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred of evidence. It did what it is designed to do, says Jonathan Cook.

By Jonathan CookJohanthan-Cook.net

It is welcome that finally there has been a little pushback, including from leading journalists, toThe Guardians long-running vilification of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.

Reporter Luke Hardings latest article,claimingthat Donald Trumps disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly visited Assange in Ecuadors embassy in London on three occasions, is so full of holes that even hardened opponents of Assange in the corporate media are strugglingto stand by it.

Faced with the backlash,The Guardianquickly and very quietly rowed backits initial certainty that its story was based on verified facts. Instead, it amended the text, without acknowledging it had done so, to attribute the claims to unnamed, and uncheckable, sources.

The propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with Trump, and Trumps supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.

The Guardians latest story provides a supposedly stronger foundation for an existing narrative: that Assange and Wikileaks knowingly published emails hacked by Russia from the Democratic partys servers. In truth, there isno public evidencethat the emails were hacked, or that Russia was involved. Central actors have suggested instead that the emails were leaked from within the Democratic party.

Nonetheless, this unverified allegation has been aggressively exploited by the Democratic leadership because it shifts attention away both from its failure to mount an effective electoral challenge to Trump and from the damaging contents of the emails. These show that party bureaucrats sought torig the primariesto make sure Clintons challenger for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, lost.

To underscore the intended effect of the Guardians new claims, Harding even throws in a casual and unsubstantiated reference to Russians joining Manafort in supposedly meeting Assange.

Manafort hasdeniedthe Guardians claims, while Assange hasthreatened to sue The Guardian for libel.

The emotional impact ofThe Guardian is to suggest that Assange is responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more significantly, it bolsters the otherwiserisible claimthat Assange is not a publisher and thereby entitled to the protections of a free press, as enjoyed byThe Guardian or The New York Times but the head of an organization engaged in espionage for a foreign power.

The intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the Wikileaks organization, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That, in turn, will make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital cause he represents: the use of new media to hold to account the old, corporate media and political elites through the imposition of far greater transparency.

The Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when Ecuadors rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his rights to use digital media.

It will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange onself-serving bail violation chargesand extradites him to the US. And it will pave the way for the US legal system to lock Assange up for a very long time.

For the best part of a decade, any claims by Assanges supporters that avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in the embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the Guardian.

Even when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in 2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily and unlawfully detained by the UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN report. Seehereandhere.

Now Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An administrative error this month revealed that the US justice department hadsecretly filed criminal chargesagainst Assange.

The problem forThe Guardian, which should have been obvious to its editors from the outset, is that any visits by Manafort would be easily verifiable without relying on unnamed sources.

Glenn Greenwald is far from alone innotingthat London is possibly the most surveilled city in the world, with CCTV cameras everywhere. The environs of the Ecuadorian embassy are monitored especially heavily, with continuous filming by the UK and Ecuadorian authorities and most likely by the US and other actors with an interest in Assanges fate.

The idea that Manafort or Russians could have wandered into the embassy to meet Assange even once without their trail, entry and meeting being intimately scrutinized and recorded is simply preposterous.

According to Greenwald: If Paul Manafort visited Assange at the Embassy, there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof demonstrating that this happened.The Guardian providesnone of that.

Former British ambassador Craig Murray alsopoints outthe extensive security checks insisted on by the embassy to which any visitor to Assange must submit. Any visits by Manafort would have been logged.

In fact,The Guardian obtainedthe embassys logs in May, and has never made any mention of either Manafort or Russians being identified in them. It did not refer to the logs in its latest story.

Murray:

The problem with this latest fabrication is that [Ecuadors President] Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these Russians are in the visitor logs What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence agency who were in charge of the security would not know the identity of these alleged Russians.

It is worth noting it should be vitally important for a serious publication likeThe Guardian to ensure its claims are unassailably true both because Assanges personal fate rests on their veracity, and because, even more importantly, a fundamental right, the freedom of the press, is at stake.

Given this, one would have expectedThe Guardians editors to have insisted on the most stringent checks imaginable before going to press with Hardings story. At a very minimum, they should have sought out a response from Assange and Manafort before publication. Neither precaution was taken.

I worked forThe Guardian for a number of years, and know well the layers of checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through before publication. In that lengthy process, a variety of commissioning editors, lawyers, backbench editors and the editor herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist on cuts to anything that could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.

And yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a green light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a range of well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.

That at the very least hints thatThe Guardian thought they had insurance on this story. And the only people who could have promised that kind of insurance are the security and intelligence services presumably of Britain, the United States and / or Ecuador.

It appearsThe Guardian has simply taken this story, provided by spooks, at face value. Even if it later turns out that Manafort did visit Assange,The Guardian clearly had no compelling evidence for its claims when it published them. That is profoundly irresponsible journalism fake news that should be of the gravest concern to readers.

Despite all this, even analysts critical ofThe Guardians behavior have shown a glaring failure to understand that its latest coverage represents not an aberration by the paper but decisively fits with a pattern.

Glenn Greenwald, who once had an influential column inThe Guardian until an apparent, though unacknowledged, falling out with his employer over the Edward Snowden revelations, wrote a series of baffling observations aboutThe Guardians latest story.

First, hesuggestedit was simply evidence ofThe Guardians long-standing (and well-documented) hostility towards Assange.

The Guardian, an otherwise solid and reliable paper, has such a pervasive and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign him.

It was also apparently evidence of the papers clickbait tendencies:

They [Guardian editors] knew that publishing this story would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets would hyperventilate over it, and that theyd reap the rewards regardless of whether the story turned out to be true or false.

And finally, in a bizarre tweet, Greenwald opined, I hope the story [maligning Assange] turns out true apparently because maintenance ofThe Guardians reputation is more important than Assanges fate and the right of journalists to dig up embarrassing secrets without fear of being imprisoned.

What this misses is that The Guardians attacks on Assange are not exceptional or motivated solely by personal animosity. They are entirely predictable and systematic. Rather than being the reason forThe Guardian violating basic journalistic standards and ethics, the papers hatred of Assange is a symptom of a deeper malaise inThe Guardian and the wider corporate media.

Even aside from its decade-long campaign against Assange,The Guardian is far from solid and reliable, as Greenwald claims. It has been at the forefront of the relentless, and unhinged, attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for prioritizing the rights of Palestinians over Israels right to continue its belligerent occupation. Over the past three years,The Guardian has injected credibility into the Israel lobbys desperate efforts to tar Corbyn as an anti-semite. Seehere,hereandhere.

Similarly,The Guardian worked tirelessly to promote Clinton and undermine Sanders in the 2016 Democratic nomination process another reason the paper has been so assiduous in promoting the idea that Assange, aided by Russia, was determined to promote Trump over Clinton for the presidency.

The Guardians coverage of Latin America, especially of populist leftwing governments that have rebelled against traditional and oppressive U.S. hegemony in the region, has long grated with analysts and experts. Its especial venom has been reserved for leftwing figures like Venezuelas Hugo Chavez, democratically elected but official enemies of the U.S., rather than the regions rightwing authoritarians beloved of Washington.

The Guardian has been vocal in the so-called fake news hysteria, decrying the influence of social media, the only place where leftwing dissidents have managed to find a small foothold to promote their politics and counter the corporate media narrative.

The Guardian has painted social media chiefly as a platform overrun by Russian trolls, arguing that this should justify ever-tighter restrictions that have so far curbed critical voices of the dissident left more than the right.

Equally,The Guardian has made clear who its true heroes are. Certainly not Corbyn or Assange, who threaten to disrupt the entrenched neoliberal order that is hurtling us towards climate breakdown and economic collapse.

Its pages, however, are readily available to the latest effort to prop up the status quo from Tony Blair, the man who led Britain, on false pretenses, into the largest crime against humanity in living memory the attack on Iraq.

That humanitarian intervention cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and created a vacuum that destabilized much of the Middle East, sucked in Islamic jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and contributed to the migrant crisis in Europe that has fueled the resurgence of the far-right. None of that is discussed inThe Guardian or considered grounds for disqualifying Blair as an arbiter of what is good for Britain and the worlds future.

The Guardian also has an especial soft spot for blogger Elliot Higgins, who,aided byThe Guardian, has shot to unlikely prominence as a self-styled weapons expert. Like Luke Harding, Higgins invariably seems ready to echo whatever the British and American security services need verifying independently.

Higgins and his well-staffed website Bellingcat have taken on for themselves the role of arbiters of truth on many foreign affairs issues, taking a prominent role in advocating for narratives that promote U.S. and NATO hegemony while demonizing Russia, especially in highly contested arenas such as Syria.

That clear partisanship should be no surprise, given that Higgins now enjoys an academic position at, and funding from, the Atlantic Council: a high-level, Washington-based think-tank founded to drum up support for NATO and justify its imperialist agenda.

Improbably,The Guardian has adopted Higgins as the poster-boy for a supposed citizen journalism it has sought to undermine as fake news whenever it occurs on social media without the endorsement of state-backed organizations.

The truth isThe Guardianhas not erred in this latest story attacking Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify him. With this story, it has done what it regularly does when supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake it simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative.

Its job is to shore up a consensuson the leftfor attacks on leading threats to the existing, neoliberal order: whether they are a platform like WikiLeaks promoting whistle-blowing against a corrupt western elite; or a politician like Corbyn seeking to break apart the status quo on the rapacious financial industries or Israel-Palestine; a radical leader like Hugo Chavez who threatened to overturn damaging and exploitative U.S. dominance of Americas backyard; or social media dissidents, whove started to chip away at the elite-friendly narratives of corporate media, includingThe Guardianitself.

The Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred of evidence. It did what it is designed to do.

This article originally appeared on jonathan-cook.net. Republished with permission from the author.

Jonathan Cook is a freelance journalist based in Nazareth. He blogs athttps://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/.

Read the original post:
The Guardian's Vilification of Julian Assange

Last year Jeff Sessions, the former US attorney general, said arresting Mr Assange was a priority.

In November a filing error revealed that Mr Assange faced charges in the US - although it was not clear what those charges were.

Many speculate they would be connected to the release of classified information, and Mr Assange fears a long prison sentence in the US for what his supporters say is publishing information in the public interest.

"The suggestion that as long as the death penalty is off the table, MrAssange need not fear persecution is obviously wrong," said Mr Pollack.

"No one should have to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information.

"Since such charges appear to have been brought against MrAssange in the United States, Ecuador should continue to provide him asylum."

Mr Assange fled to the embassy when he was wanted for questioning in Sweden about sexual assault allegations. He always maintained his innocence and Swedish authorities later said they had dropped their extradition request.

More here:
Julian Assange rejects UK-Ecuador deal for him to leave the ...

Ecuadors president has ramped up pressure on Julian Assange to leave his countrys embassy in London, saying that Britain had provided sufficient guarantees that the WikiLeaks founder wont be extradited to face the death penalty abroad.

Lenin Morenos comments in a radio interview suggest that months of quiet diplomacy between the UK and Ecuador to resolve Assanges situation is bearing fruit at a time when questions are swirling about the former Australian hackers legal fate in the US.

The road is clear for Mr. Assange to take the decision to leave, Mr Moreno said, referring to written assurances he said he had received from Britain.

Mr Moreno didnt say he would force Assange out, but said the activists legal team is considering its next steps.

Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy since 2012, when he was granted asylum while facing allegations of sex crimes in Sweden that he said were a guise to extradite him to the US.

But his relations with his hosts have soured to the point that Mr Moreno earlier this year cut off his access to the internet, purportedly for violating the terms of his asylum by speaking out on political matters.

Assange in turn sued, saying his rights as an Ecuadorean he was granted citizenship last year as part of an apparent attempt to name him a diplomat and ferry him to Russia were being violated.

The mounting tensions has drawn Mr Moreno closer to the position of Britain, which for years has said it is barred by law from extraditing suspects to any jurisdiction where they would face capital punishment.

RELATED: Ecuador and UK working to end stand-off over Assange

RELATED: Assange wants Australia to stand up to Trump

But nothing is preventing it from extraditing him to the US if prosecutors there were to pledge not to seek the death penalty.

Assange has long maintained the he faces charges under seal in the US for revealing highly sensitive government information on his website. Those fears were heightened when U.S. prosecutors last month mistakenly referenced criminal charges against him in an unrelated case. There have been strong reports that Assange is indeed facing unspecified charges under seal, but US prosecutors have so far provided no official confirmation.

See the original post here:
Julian Assange: Wikileaks founder set to leave embassy

WASHINGTON In mid-May 2017, Paul Manafort, facing intensifying pressure to settle debts and pay mounting legal bills, flew to Ecuador to offer his services to a potentially lucrative new client the countrys incoming president, Lenn Moreno.

Mr. Manafort made the trip mainly to see if he could broker a deal under which China would invest in Ecuadors power system, possibly yielding a fat commission for Mr. Manafort.

But the talks turned to a diplomatic sticking point between the United States and Ecuador: the fate of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In at least two meetings with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Moreno and his aides discussed their desire to rid themselves of Mr. Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, in exchange for concessions like debt relief from the United States, according to three people familiar with the talks, the details of which have not been previously reported.

They said Mr. Manafort suggested he could help negotiate a deal for the handover of Mr. Assange to the United States, which has long investigated Mr. Assange for the disclosure of secret documents and which later filed charges against him that have not yet been made public.

Within a couple of days of Mr. Manaforts final meeting in Quito, Robert S. Mueller III was appointed as the special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters, and it quickly became clear that Mr. Manafort was a primary target. His talks with Ecuador ended without any deals.

There is no evidence that Mr. Manafort was working with or even briefing President Trump or other administration officials on his discussions with the Ecuadoreans about Mr. Assange. Nor is there any evidence that his brief involvement in the talks was motivated by concerns about the role that Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks played in facilitating the Russian effort to help Mr. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, or the investigation into possible coordination between Mr. Assange and Mr. Trumps associates, which has become a focus for Mr. Mueller.

Mr. Manafort and WikiLeaks have both denied a recent report in The Guardian that Mr. Manafort visited Mr. Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

But the revelations about Mr. Manaforts discussions in 2017 about Mr. Assange in Quito underscore how his self-styled role as an international influence broker intersected with the questions surrounding the Trump campaign.

And the episode shows how after Mr. Trumps election, Mr. Manafort sought to cash in on his brief tenure as Mr. Trumps campaign chairman even as investigators were closing in.

The Ecuadoreans continued to explore the possibility of Chinese investment, but with the United States Justice Department and intelligence agencies stepping up their pursuit of Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks, Mr. Morenos team increasingly looked to resolve their Assange problem by turning to Russia.

In the months after Mr. Moreno took office, the Ecuadorean government granted citizenship to Mr. Assange and secretly pursued a plan to provide him a diplomatic post in Russia as a way to free him from confinement in the embassy in London. (That plan was ultimately dropped in the face of opposition from British authorities, who have said they will arrest Mr. Assange if he leaves the embassy.)

Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort, said that it was Mr. Moreno not Mr. Manafort who broached the issue of Mr. Assange and his desire to remove Julian Assange from Ecuadors embassy. Mr. Manafort listened but made no promises as this was ancillary to the purpose of the meeting, said Mr. Maloni, adding, There was no mention of Russia at the meeting.

Late last year, Mr. Muellers team charged Mr. Manafort with a host of lobbying, money laundering and tax violations in connection with his consulting work for Russia-aligned interests in Ukraine before the 2016 election. Mr. Manafort was convicted of some of the crimes and pleaded guilty to others as part of an agreement to cooperate with prosecutors. But prosecutors said last week that he violated the deal by repeatedly lying to them. Mr. Manafort remains in solitary confinement in a federal detention center in Alexandria, Va., waiting for a judge to set a sentencing date.

The trip to Ecuador was part of a whirlwind world tour that represented the last gasps of Mr. Manaforts once lucrative career.

In those final months, Mr. Manafort pitched officials from a range of governments facing a variety of challenges, from Puerto Rico to Ecuador to Iraqi Kurdistan to the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Manafort, who served on the board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation in the Reagan administration, presented himself as a liaison to the new Trump administration and, in some cases, as a broker for arranging investments from a fund associated with the state-owned China Development Bank.

In Quito, he told Mr. Morenos team that he could arrange a major cash infusion from the Chinese fund in the Ecuadorean electric utility, and could ease any potential concerns from the Trump administration about such an investment, according to people involved in arranging the meetings.

The week after the Quito trip, Mr. Manafort traveled to Hong Kong to meet with representatives from the China Development Banks fund to discuss the possible investment in Ecuador, as well as a proposal being pushed by Mr. Manafort to buy Puerto Ricos bond debt, possibly in exchange for ownership of the islands electric utility.

In both cases, Mr. Manafort assured the Chinese he could win support from Washington, despite Mr. Trumps oft-expressed qualms about China.

Brokering a deal to bring Mr. Assange to the United States could have been even more complicated. Not only had Mr. Assange not been charged at the time of Mr. Manaforts trip, but Mr. Assanges work was and remains a particularly fraught matter for Mr. Trump and his team.

Mr. Trump and his allies had cheered on WikiLeaks during the campaign, when it released troves of embarrassing internal emails and documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clintons campaign chairman. Since then, though, the United States intelligence agencies and Mr. Muellers team have made the case that the documents were stolen by Russian government agents, 12 of whom were charged by Mr. Mueller.

Mr. Assange had been pursued by Swedish prosecutors on a rape accusation from 2010. The Ecuadorean Embassy in London granted him asylum in the summer of 2012. That was under Mr. Morenos predecessor, Rafael Correa, whose political identity was based partly on his antagonism toward the United States. Swedish authorities abandoned their attempt to extradite him last year, which invalidated the warrant for his arrest.

During Mr. Correas last day in office, the Ecuadorean government wrote a letter repeating its requests to Britain to accept Mr. Assanges asylum status. The letter asserts that United States officials had left no doubt about their intention to persecute Mr. Assange with the aim of punishing him for alleged offenses.

Mr. Moreno had signaled during his campaign that he would like to wash his hands of Mr. Assange. And last December, Ecuador began carrying out the plan to move Mr. Assange to Russia as a diplomat, which would require him to become an Ecuadorean citizen.

In a citizenship interview at the embassy in London, Mr. Assange explained that he wanted to become a citizen because Ive been welcomed here for the last five years and I feel practically Ecuadorean, according to a written summary of the meeting.

Within 10 days, Mr. Assange was granted citizenship, according to documents released by Paola Vintimilla, an Ecuadorean lawmaker who opposes Mr. Assanges presence in the embassy. But a subsequent effort to grant Mr. Assange diplomatic status, and the immunity that would come with it, was rejected by the British government.

Go here to read the rest:
Manafort Discussed Deal With Ecuador to Hand Assange Over to ...

It is welcome that finally there has been a little pushback, including from leading journalists, to the Guardians long-running vilification of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.

Reporter Luke Hardings latest article, claiming that Donald Trumps disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly visited Assange in Ecuadors embassy in London on three occasions, is so full of holes that even hardened opponents of Assange in the corporate media are strugglingto stand by it.

Faced with the backlash, the Guardian quickly and very quietly rowed back its initial certainty that its story was based on verified facts. Instead, it amended the text, without acknowledging it had done so, to attribute the claims to unnamed, and uncheckable, sources.

The propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with Trump, and Trumps supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.

The Guardians latest story provides a supposedly stronger foundation for an existing narrative: that Assange and Wikileaks knowingly published emails hacked by Russia from the Democratic partys servers. In truth, there is no public evidence that the emails were hacked, or that Russia was involved. Central actors have suggested instead that the emails were leaked from within the Democratic party.

Nonetheless, this unverified allegation has been aggressively exploited by the Democratic leadership because it shifts attention away both from its failure to mount an effective electoral challenge to Trump and from the damaging contents of the emails. These show that party bureaucrats sought to rig the primaries to make sure Clintons challenger for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, lost.

To underscore the intended effect of the Guardians new claims, Harding even throws in a casual and unsubstantiated reference to Russians joining Manafort in supposedly meeting Assange.

Manafort has denied the Guardians claims, while Assange has threatened to sue the Guardian for libel.

Responsible for Trump

The emotional impact of the Guardian story is to suggest that Assange is responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more significantly, it bolsters the otherwise risible claim that Assange is not a publisher and thereby entitled to the protections of a free press, as enjoyed by the Guardian or the New York Times but the head of an organisation engaged in espionage for a foreign power.

The intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the Wikileaks organisation, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That, in turn, will make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital cause he represents: the use of new media to hold to account the old, corporate media and political elites through the imposition of far greater transparency.

The Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when Ecuadors right wing government under President Lenin Moreno forces Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his rights to use digital media.

It will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange on self-serving bail violation charges and extradites him to the US. And it will pave the way for the US legal system to lock Assange up for a very long time.

For the best part of a decade, any claims by Assanges supporters that avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in the embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the Guardian.

Even when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in 2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily and unlawfully detained by the UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN report. See here and here.

Now Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An administrative error this month revealed that the US justice department had secretly filed criminal chargesagainst Assange.

Heavy surveillance

The problem for the Guardian, which should have been obvious to its editors from the outset, is that any visits by Manafort would be easily verifiable without relying on unnamed sources.

Glenn Greenwald is far from alone in noting that London is possibly the most surveilled city in the world, with CCTV cameras everywhere. The environs of the Ecuadorian embassy are monitored especially heavily, with continuous filming by the UK and Ecuadorian authorities and most likely by the US and other actors with an interest in Assanges fate.

The idea that Manafort or Russians could have wandered into the embassy to meet Assange even once without their trail, entry and meeting being intimately scrutinised and recorded is simply preposterous.

According to Greenwald:

If Paul Manafort visited Assange at the Embassy, there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof demonstrating that this happened. The Guardian provides none of that.

Former British ambassador Craig Murray also points out the extensive security checks insisted on by the embassy to which any visitor to Assange must submit. Any visits by Manafort would have been logged.

In fact, the Guardian obtained the embassys logs in May, and has never made any mention of either Manafort or Russians being identified in them. It did not refer to the logs in its latest story.

Murray:

The problem with this latest fabrication is that [Ecuadors President] Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these Russians are in the visitor logs What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence agency who were in charge of the security would not know the identity of these alleged Russians.

No fact-checking

It is worth noting it should be vitally important for a serious publication like the Guardian to ensure its claims are unassailably true both because Assanges personal fate rests on their veracity, and because, even more importantly, a fundamental right, the freedom of the press, is at stake.

Given this, one would have expected the Guardians editors to have insisted on the most stringent checks imaginable before going to press with Hardings story. At a very minimum, they should have sought out a response from Assange and Manafort before publication. Neither precaution was taken.

I worked for the Guardian for a number of years, and know well the layers of checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through before publication. In that lengthy process, a variety of commissioning editors, lawyers, backbench editors and the editor herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist on cuts to anything that could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.

And yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a green light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a range of well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.

That at the very least hints that the Guardian thought they had insurance on this story. And the only people who could have promised that kind of insurance are the security and intelligence services presumably of Britain, the United States and / or Ecuador.

It appears the Guardian has simply taken this story, provided by spooks, at face value. Even if it later turns out that Manafort did visit Assange, the Guardian clearly had no compelling evidence for its claims when it published them. That is profoundly irresponsible journalism fake news that should be of the gravest concern to readers.

A pattern, not an aberration

Despite all this, even analysts critical of the Guardians behaviour have shown a glaring failure to understand that its latest coverage represents not an aberration by the paper but decisively fits with a pattern.

Glenn Greenwald, who once had an influential column in the Guardian until an apparent, though unacknowledged, falling out with his employer over the Edward Snowden revelations, wrote a series of baffling observations about the Guardians latest story.

First, he suggested it was simply evidence of the Guardians long-standing (and well-documented) hostility towards Assange.

The Guardian, an otherwise solid and reliable paper, has such a pervasive and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign him.

It was also apparently evidence of the papers clickbait tendencies:

They [Guardian editors] knew that publishing this story would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets would hyperventilate over it, and that theyd reap the rewards regardless of whether the story turned out to be true or false.

And finally, in a bizarre tweet, Greenwald opined, I hope the story [maligning Assange] turns out true apparently because maintenance of the Guardians reputation is more important than Assanges fate and the right of journalists to dig up embarrassing secrets without fear of being imprisoned.

Deeper malaise

What this misses is that the Guardians attacks on Assange are not exceptional or motivated solely by personal animosity. They are entirely predictable and systematic. Rather than being the reason for the Guardian violating basic journalistic standards and ethics, the papers hatred of Assange is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the Guardian and the wider corporate media.

Even aside from its decade-long campaign against Assange, the Guardian is far from solid and reliable, as Greenwald claims. It has been at the forefront of the relentless, and unhinged, attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for prioritising the rights of Palestinians over Israels right to continue its belligerent occupation. Over the past three years, the Guardian has injected credibility into the Israel lobbys desperate efforts to tar Corbyn as an anti-semite. See here, hereand here.

Similarly, the Guardian worked tirelessly to promote Clinton and undermine Sanders in the 2016 Democratic nomination process another reason the paper has been so assiduous in promoting the idea that Assange, aided by Russia, was determined to promote Trump over Clinton for the presidency.

The Guardians coverage of Latin America, especially of populist left wing governments that have rebelled against traditional and oppressive US hegemony in the region, has long grated with analysts and experts. Its especial venom has been reserved for left wing figures like Venezuelas Hugo Chavez, democratically elected but official enemies of the US, rather than the regions right wing authoritarians beloved of Washington.

The Guardian has been vocal in the so-called fake news hysteria, decrying the influence of social media, the only place where left wing dissidents have managed to find a small foothold to promote their politics and counter the corporate media narrative.

The Guardian has painted social media chiefly as a platform overrun by Russian trolls, arguing that this should justify ever-tighter restrictions that have so far curbed critical voices of the dissident left more than the right.

Heroes of the neoliberal order

Equally, the Guardian has made clear who its true heroes are. Certainly not Corbyn or Assange, who threaten to disrupt the entrenched neoliberal order that is hurtling us towards climate breakdown and economic collapse.

Its pages, however, are readily available to the latest effort to prop up the status quo from Tony Blair, the man who led Britain, on false pretences, into the largest crime against humanity in living memory the attack on Iraq.

That humanitarian intervention cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and created a vacuum that destabilised much of the Middle East, sucked in Islamic jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and contributed to the migrant crisis in Europe that has fuelled the resurgence of the far-right. None of that is discussed in the Guardian or considered grounds for disqualifying Blair as an arbiter of what is good for Britain and the worlds future.

The Guardian also has an especial soft spot for blogger Elliot Higgins, who,aided by the Guardian, has shot to unlikely prominence as a self-styled weapons expert. Like Luke Harding, Higgins invariably seems ready to echo whatever the British and American security services need verifying independently.

Higgins and his well-staffed website Bellingcat have taken on for themselves the role of arbiters of truth on many foreign affairs issues, taking a prominent role in advocating for narratives that promote US and NATO hegemony while demonising Russia, especially in highly contested arenas such as Syria.

That clear partisanship should be no surprise, given that Higgins now enjoys an academic position at, and funding from, the Atlantic Council, a high-level, Washington-based think-tank founded to drum up support for NATO and justify its imperialist agenda.

Improbably, the Guardian has adopted Higgins as the poster-boy for a supposed citizen journalism it has sought to undermine as fake news whenever it occurs on social media without the endorsement of state-backed organisations.

The truth is that the Guardian has not erred in this latest story attacking Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify him. With this story, it has done what it regularly does when supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake it simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative.

Its job is to shore up a consensus on the left for attacks on leading threats to the existing, neoliberal order: whether they are a platform like Wikileaks promoting whistle-blowing against a corrupt western elite; or a politician like Jeremy Corbyn seeking to break apart the status quo on the rapacious financial industries or Israel-Palestine; or a radical leader like Hugo Chavez who threatened to overturn a damaging and exploitative US dominance of Americas backyard; or social media dissidents who have started to chip away at the elite-friendly narratives of corporate media, including the Guardian.

The Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred of evidence. It did what it is designed to do.

UPDATE: Excellent background frominvestigative journalist Gareth Porter, published shortly before Hardings story, explains why the Guardians hit-piece is so important for those who want Assange out of the embassy and behind bars. Read Porters article here.

This article was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2018 at 9:33pm and is filed under Democrats, Disinformation, Jeremy Corbyn, Julian Assange, Media Bias, Media Censorship, President Hugo Chavez, Propaganda, Russia, Social media, UK Labour Party, UK Media, WikiLeaks.

Continue reading here:
Guardian ups its Vilification of Julian Assange | Dissident Voice

President Donald Trumps former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on multiple occasions, with the last meeting occurring a few months before WikiLeaks released hacked Democratic National Committee emails in the summer of 2016, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

Read the full Guardian report here.

Manafort met with Assange in 2013, 2015 and around March 2016, sources told The Guardian.Trump hired him at the end of March. The details of the meetings were unknown.

Manafort, in a statement issued through a representative, expressly denied meeting with Assange, called the story totally false and deliberately libelous, and said his team was considering all legal options against The Guardian.

I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to Wikileaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or Wikileaks on any matter, Manafort said.

WikiLeaks denied the report in a tweet, saying it is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editors head that Manafort never met Assange.

On Monday, special counsel Robert Mueller, investigating Manafort as part of the larger probe into possible collusion between Trumps campaign and Russia, said Manafort lied to investigators, violating his recent plea deal.

According to The Guardian, Manaforts first meetings with Assange date back to 2012 and 2013, during his time as a pro-Russian lobbyist in Ukraine.

In August, a federal jury convicted Manafort for money laundering and tax evasion related to his lobbying work. A month later, he agreed to cooperate with Muellers investigators. But in court documents on Monday, Muellers team said Manafort recently violated the terms of the agreement by lying to federal prosecutors.

In response, Manaforts attorneys said the complaint is invalid.

Jonathan Ernst/ReutersFormer Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (right) secretly met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on multiple occasions, according to The Guardian.

Trump responded to the news Tuesday by lashing out at Mueller and accusing him of being a conflicted prosecutor gone rogue, and again proclaiming the investigation a Witch Hunt.

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly touted the hacked WikiLeaks emails, and in July 2016, called on Russia to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, referring to opponent Hillary Clintons emails on her personal server. The same day, Russian hackers targeted her personal email, according to the timeline established by Muellers indictments this summer.

This story has been updated with additional background and Manaforts and WikiLeaks response.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said a federal grand jury convicted Manafort in August. It was a federal jury, not grand jury, that convicted him.

See the original post here:
Paul Manafort Secretly Met With Julian Assange Multiple Times ...

If Julian Assange leaves the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, hell likely face criminal charges in the United States. We know this thanks to an inadvertent disclosure in a federal court filingthe result of a cut-and-paste blunder by prosecutors.

That the Justice Department is preparing charges against the WikiLeaks founder isnt exactly unexpectedhe did, after all, publish thousands of classified government documents, and allegedly has close ties to Russian intelligence (which Assange has repeatedly denied). But what is genuinely surprising is the degree to which the case against Assange mirrors a long-forgotten episode four decades agoand what that portends for the inevitable First Amendment clash it will cause.

Story Continued Below

It may not be possibleand the Trump administration may not be interested in tryingto pinpoint specific types of disclosures as criminal without eroding the free speech protections that American journalism relies on to hold government accountable. Depending on the charges against Assange, the case could require the government to distinguish between the lawful reporting of information in the public interest and the illegal theft and dissemination of government secrets, between the legitimate practice of journalism and criminal activities that advance the goals of democracys enemies.

This isnt the first time the U.S. has faced these kinds of questions. Four decades ago, CIA defector Philip Agee and his comrades went about leaking government secrets in books and in a magazine called CovertAction Information Bulletinwith remarkable similarities to the case of Assange and WikiLeaks.

Like Assange, Agee claimed First Amendment protections while disseminating classified information. He and his associates made no effort to hide their dedication to destroying American intelligence agencies ability to spy on or disrupt adversaries. Agee was seen by many Americans as a threat to national security, yet there was widespread fear that any attempt to stop himand especially his associates who had never held government jobsfrom publishing secrets would erode the independence of the press. He was accused of having close ties to foreign intelligence services. And just as Assange and WikiLeaks have conspicuously failed to target the abuses of Russias intelligence services, Agee and CovertAction ignored atrocities and human rights violations committed by communist governments.

Agees book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1975, revealed details of CIA covert operations in Latin America, including the identities of 250 of its undercover officers and the names of individuals they had recruited as informants. While Agee lived in self-imposed exile starting in 1978, he inspired and helped a small group of like-minded activists to publish CovertAction from an office in downtown Washingtons National Press Building.

An article in the inaugural issue of CovertAction called the CIA the Gestapo and SS of our time and asserted that exposure of its secret operationsand secret operativesremains the most effective way to reduce the suffering they cause. The magazine proposed a novel form of international cooperation in which opponents of the CIA would scour lists of Americans working as diplomats or on aid projects, identify likely CIA operatives based on telltale signs described by Agee, and send the information to CovertAction. The magazine promised to check the research and publish all the information it could confirm. It made clear its goals: destruction of the CIA and, ultimately, the installation of a pro-Soviet, communist government in Washington. From the start, it urged readers to collaborate in the struggle against the CIA, together with the struggle for socialism in the United States itself.

In the pages of CovertAction and several books co-written by its staff members, the covers of more than 2,000 undercover CIA officers were blown, and numerous agency operations around the world were exposed. The disclosures dealt a body blow to the agency, according to an article published in 1975 in Studies in Intelligence, a magazine published by the CIA for intelligence professionals.

CovertAction claimed that it had no connections with foreign intelligence agencies and that its ability to name names was based entirely on exploitation of open sources. State Department directories could, if carefully perused, reveal patterns or inconsistencies showing that someone who claimed to be a low-level diplomat was, in fact, a CIA officer. Some of the names revealed by Agee and his collaborators were obtained in this way, but CovertAction didnt restrict its activities to combing through dusty directories at the National Archives.

Information that leaked from the KGB after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, including notes smuggled out by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and the memoirs of former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, indicate that Agee operated in concert withand, in many cases, at the direction ofboth the KGB and Cuban intelligence. The KGB took credit for CovertAction, claiming in an internal memo Mitrokhin saw that the magazine was founded on the initiative of the KGB.

The KGB created a task force dedicated to supplying CovertAction with material that would harm the CIA. For example, in 1979, according to Mitrokhins notes, two KGB officers met Agee in Cuba and gave him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent. Some of this information was featured in CovertAction, including the identities of 16 CIA station or base chiefs on the continent. In addition to providing names of agency officers, Soviet intelligence gave the magazine a stream of classified documents that exposed CIA activities around the world.

Agee argued, dishonestly, that any allegation he was serving the KGB was a smear. At the time, there was no definitive evidence to refute Ageealthough his frequent visits to Fidel Castros Cuba provided circumstantial evidence that he was at least tolerated by communist intelligence services.

In the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, Agee and his collaborators became heroes to some Americans who had come to believe that government institutions, especially its intelligence services, were irredeemably evil. While this was a minority view, there was no obvious way to prevent CovertAction from naming names of undercover CIA officers: There is no Official Secrets Act in the United States, and the American free press has a rich tradition of using leaks of classified information to shine a light on nefarious government activities.

Though there was near universal disdain for Agee in Congress and on the editorial pages of American newspapers, when a bill was introduced in 1975 with the explicit goal of stifling Agee by criminalizing disclosures of the names of American covert operatives, the legislation floundered.

Similar unease abounded over the possibility of targeting the individuals on the editorial staff of CovertAction, who maintained that they were publishing educated guesses or secrets leaked by government employees. The publication claimed that it would be impossible to criminalize its disclosures without giving the government the ability to throw journalists in jail for revealing secrets like those contained in the Pentagon Papers.

Nevertheless, the movement to crack down on CovertAction was revitalized in 1980 after the home of the CIA station chief in Kingston, Jamaica, was raked by bullets. His identity and home address had been revealed by CovertAction two days before.

In January 1981, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was introduced in the U.S. House, with the aim of making it a federal crime to engage in a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States.

The New York Times, which had no sympathy for Agee or CovertAction, branded the retired CIA officer a villain for all seasons and said the outlets staff dont even pretend to distinguish between useful and questionable spy projects. Nonetheless, the Times warned in an editorial that the pending legislation strikes at every reporter and scholar who would publish facts that Government prefers to keep concealed. The Times and other newspapers engaged in a lively debate about the definition of journalism, whether CovertAction was entitled to First Amendment protections, and fears that any attempt to restrict publication of secrets would lead to unacceptable limits on legitimate news.

In the last analysis, a free and inquiring press is the most reliable check the citizens of our nation have against wrongdoing and bad judgment in government, since government, like any individual, is often reluctant to call attention to the errors of its own ways, Democratic Senator Joe Biden wrote in a Christian Science Monitor piece opposing the proposal. It is therefore a mistake for the Congress to pursue legislation which hinders the press from performing this vital function, as it has in this case.

Ultimately, a Democratic House and Republican Senate passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law at a June 1982 ceremony at CIA headquarters.

The New York Times editorialized that any legislation that attempted to prevent private citizens from publishing names of CIA operatives was fraught with danger for all journalists, and it called on the courts to wipe the law from the books.

Thirty-six years later, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is still the law. To date, two people have been convicted of violating it: John Kiriakou, a CIA officer who was convicted in 2013 of emailing the name of a CIA officer to a journalist, and Sharon Scranage, a CIA clerk who provided intelligence to a Ghanaian intelligence officer. The law was also invoked in the Valerie Plame case, when New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed as a result of an investigation of possible violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Miller refused to testify about sources the government believed had revealed the identity of Plame, a covert CIA officer whose husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a vocal opponent of the Bush administrations war in Iraq.

Conservative politicians jumped to Millers defense. Mike Pence, who at the time represented Indiana in the U.S. House, co-sponsored a media shield bill to protect reporters like Miller from prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Now is the time for Congress to reassert the First Amendment, freedom of the press, vigorously by enacting a federal media shield, Pence said on the floor of the House in 2006. Nothing less than the public's right to know is at stake. The bill died quietly, and it is difficult to imagine now-Vice President Pence endorsing similar legislation today.

There are important differences between Assange and Agee. Unlike Agee, Assange never worked for an intelligence agency and has not signed secrecy pledges. Agee said he was motivated by a midlife conversion to Marxism, while Assange hasnt attributed his actions to an ideology.

Despite these differences, the similarities in the First Amendment and national security issues are striking. This is especially true of the CovertAction staff, which didnt include former government officials who could be called to account for disclosing secrets theyd pledged to protect.

The blooper that tipped off the public to the Justice Departments case against Assange didnt indicate what crime he would be charged with. But unless the charges are wholly unconnected with the WikiLeaks disclosures, it is certain that prosecution of Assange would reprise the debates that raged over Agee and CovertAction that led to enactment of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The fear that the government will misuse its authority to crack down on dissent is even more widespread now.

And this time, with a president who routinely labels journalists enemies of the people, the argument over whether punishing those who publish national security leaks violates the First Amendment guarantee of a free press will likely have an even uglier, more stridently partisan tone.

Read the original:
The Forgotten Story of the Julian Assange of the 1970s ...

Paul Manafort arrives for a hearing at U.S. District Court on June 15, 2018 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Guardian today published a blockbuster, instantly viral story claiming that anonymous sources toldthe newspaper that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange at least three times in the Ecuadorian Embassy, in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016. Thearticle from lead reporter Luke Harding, who has a long-standing and vicious personal feud with WikiLeaks and is still promoting his book titled Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House presents no evidence, documents or other tangible proof to substantiate its claim, and it is deliberately vague ona keypoint: whether any of these alleged visits happened once Manafort was managing Trumps campaign.

For its part, WikiLeaksvehemently and unambiguously denies the claim. Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the papers reputation, the organization tweeted, adding: WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editors head that Manafort never met Assange. The group alsopredicted: This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the Hitler Diaries.'

(Manafort denies it the claim as well; see update below.)

While certain MSNBC and CNN personalities instantly and mindlessly treated the story as true and shocking, other more sober and journalistic voices urged caution and skepticism. The story, wrote WikiLeaks critic Jeet Heer of the New Republic, is based on anonymous sources, some of whom are connected with Ecuadorian intelligence. The logs of the embassy show no such meetings. The information about the most newsworthy meeting (in the spring of 2016) is vaguely worded, suggesting a lack of certitude.

There are many more reasons than the very valid ones cited by Heer to treat this story with great skepticism, which I will outline in a moment. Of course it is possible that Manafort visited Assange either on the dates the Guardian claims or at other times but since the Guardian presents literally no evidence for the reader to evaluate, relying instead on a combination of an anonymous source and a secret and bizarrely vague intelligence document it claims it reviewed (but does not publish), no rational person would assume this story to be true.

But the main point is this one: London itself is one of the worlds most surveilled, if not the most surveilled, cities. And the Ecuadorian Embassy inthat city for obvious reasons is one of the most scrutinized, surveilled, monitored and filmed locations on the planet.

In 2015, Wired reported that the UK is one of the most surveilled nations in the world. An estimated5.9 millionCCTV cameras keep watch over our every move, and that by one estimate people in urban areas of the UK are likely to be captured by about 30 surveillance camera systems every day. The World Atlas proclaimed that London is the most spied-on city in the world, and that on average a Londoner is captured on camera about 300 times daily.

For obvious reasons, the Ecuadorian Embassy in central London where Assange has been living since he received asylum in 2011 is subjected to every form of video and physical surveillance imaginable. Visitors to that embassy are surveilled, photographed, filmed and recorded in multiple ways by multiple governments at least including both the Ecuadorians and the British and almost certainly by other governments and entities. Not onlyare guests who visit Assange required to give their passports and other identification to be logged, butthey also pass through multiple visible cameras to say nothing of the invisible ones ontheir way to visit Assange, including cameras on the street, in the lobby of the building, in the reception area of the Embassy, and then in the rooms where one meets Assange.

In 2015, the BBC reportedthat Scotland Yard has spent about 10m providing a 24-hour guard at the Ecuadorean embassy in London since Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claimed asylum there, and that between June 2012 and October 2014, direct policing costs were 7.3m, with 1.8m spent on overtime.

Meanwhile, just a few months ago, the very same Guardian that now wants you to believe that a person as prominent as Manafort visited Assange withouthaving you see any video footage proving this happened, itself claimed that Ecuador bankrolled a multimillion-dollar spy operation to protect and supportJulian Assangein its central London embassy, employing an international security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and even the British police,

This leads to one indisputable fact: if Paul Manafort (or, for that matter, Roger Stone), visited Assange at the Embassy, there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof demonstrating that this happened. The Guardian provides none of that.

So why would any minimally rational, reasonable person possibly assume these anonymous claims are true rather than waiting to form a judgment once the relevant evidence is available? As President Obamas former national security aide and current podcast host Tommy Vietor put it: If these meetings happened, British intelligence would almost certainly have video of him entering and exiting, adding: seems dubious.

There are, as I noted, multiple other reasons to exercise skepticism with this story. To begin with, the Guardian, an otherwise solid and reliable paper, has such a pervasive and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign him. One of the most extreme of many instances occurred in late 2016 when the paper was forced to retract a remarkably reckless (but predictably viral) Ben Jacobs story that claimed, with zero evidence, that Assangehas long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.

Then there are the glaring omissions in todays story. As noted, every guest visiting Assange is logged in through a very intricate security system. While admitting that Manafort wasnever logged in to the embassy, the Guardian waves this glaring hole away with barely any discussion or attempt to explain it: Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports. Sources inEcuador, however, say Manafort was not logged.

Why would Manafort visit three times but never be logged in? Why would the Ecuadorian government, led by leftist Rafael Correa, allow life-long right-wing GOP operative Paul Manafort to enter their embassy three times without ever once logging in his visit? The Guardian has no answer. They make no attempt to explain it or even offer theories. They just glide over it, hoping that you wont notice what a massive hole in the story this omission is.

Its an especially inexcusable omission for the Guardian not to discuss its significance given that theGuardian itselfobtained the Embassysvisitors logs in May, and while treating those logs as accurate and reliable made no mention of Manaforts inclusion on them. Thats because his name did not appear there (nor, presumably, did Roger Stones).

The language of the Guardian story also raises all sorts ofquestions. Aside from an anonymous source, the Guardian claims it viewed a document prepared by the Ecuadorian intelligence service Senain. The Guardian does not publish this report, but instead quotes a tiny snippet that, as the paper put it, lists Paul Manaford [sic] as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions Russians.'

That claim that the report not onlyasserts Manafort visited Assange but mentions Russians' is a ratherexplosive claim. What doesthis reportsay about Russians? What is the context of the inclusion of this claim? The Guardian does not bother to question, interrogate or explain any of this. It just tosses the word Russians into its article in connection with Manaforts alleged visits to Assange, knowing full well that motivated readers will draw the most inflammatory conclusions possible, thus helping to spread the Guardians article all over the internet and generate profit for the newspaper, without bothering to do any of the journalistic work to justify the obvious inference they wanted to create with this sloppy, vague and highly manipulative paragraph.

Beyond that, there are all sorts of internecine battles being waged inside the Ecuadorian Government that provide motive to feed false claims about Assange to the Guardian. Senain, the Ecuadorian intelligence service that the Guardian says showed it the incriminating report, has been furious with Assange for years, ever since WikiLeaks published files relating to the agencys hacking and malware efforts. And as my May interview with former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa revealed, there are all sorts of internal in-fighting within the government over WikiLeaks, and the most hostile anti-Assange elements have been regularly dumping anti-Assange material with Harding and the Guardian, knowing full well that the papers years-long, hateful feud with WikiLeaks ensures a receptive and uncritical outlet.

In sum, the Guardian published a story today that it knew would explode into all sorts of viral benefits for the paper and its reporters even though there are gaping holes and highly sketchy aspects to the story.

It iscertainly possible that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself secretly visited Julian Assange in the Embassy. Its possible that Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un joined them.

And if any of that happened, then there will be mountains of documentary proof in the form of videos, photographs, and other evidence proving it. Thus far, no such evidence has been published by the Guardian. Why would anyone choose to believe that this is true rather than doing what any rational person, by definition, would do: wait to see the dispositive evidence before forming a judgment?

The only reason to assume this is true without seeing such evidence is because enough people want it to be true. The Guardian knows this. They knew that publishing this story would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets would hyperventilate over it, and that theyd reap the rewards regardless of whether the story turned out to be true or false. It may be true. But only the evidence, which has yet to be seen, will demonstrate that one way or the other.

Update, 4:05 pm, November 27:

Manafort vehemently denies any meeting with Assange or WikiLeaks, issuing a statement on the Guardians report that reads:

This story is totally false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to Wikileaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or Wikileaks on any matter. We are considering all legal options against the Guardian who proceeded with this story even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.

Original post:
If Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange ... - theintercept.com

Donald Trumps former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trumps campaign, the Guardian has been told.

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 during the period when he was made a key figure in Trumps push for the White House.

In a statement, Manafort denied meeting Assange. He said: I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter.

It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

Manafort, 69, denies involvement in the hack and says the claim is 100% false. His lawyers initially declined to answer the Guardians questions about the visits.

In a series of tweets WikiLeaks said Assange and Manafort had not met. Assange described the story as a hoax.

Manafort was jailed this year and was thought to have become a star cooperator in the Mueller inquiry. But on Monday Mueller said Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI, despite agreeing to cooperate two months ago in a plea deal. According to a court document, Manafort had committed crimes and lies on a variety of subject matters.

His defence team says he believes what he has told Mueller to be truthful and has not violated his deal.

Manaforts first visit to the embassy took place a year after Assange sought asylum inside, two sources said.

A separate internal document written by Ecuadors Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian lists Paul Manaford [sic] as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions Russians.

According to the sources, Manafort returned to the embassy in 2015. He paid another visit in spring 2016, turning up alone, around the time Trump named him as his convention manager. The visit is tentatively dated to March.

Manaforts 2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes, one source said, adding that the American was casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt.

Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports. Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged.

Embassy staff were aware only later of the potential significance of Manaforts visit and his political role with Trump, it is understood.

The revelation could shed new light on the sequence of events in the run-up to summer 2016, when WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails hacked by the GRU, Russias military intelligence agency. Hillary Clinton has said the hack contributed to her defeat.

The previously unreported Manafort-Assange connection is likely to be of interest to Mueller, who has been investigating possible contacts between WikiLeaks and associates of Trump including the political lobbyist Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr.

One key question is when the Trump campaign was aware of the Kremlins hacking operation and what, if anything, it did to encourage it. Trump has repeatedly denied collusion.

Earlier this year Mueller indicted 12 GRU intelligence officers for carrying out the hack, which began in March 2016.

In June of that year WikiLeaks emailed the GRU via an intermediary seeking the DNC material. After failed attempts, Vladimir Putins spies sent the documents in mid-July to WikiLeaks as an encrypted attachment.

According to sources, Manaforts acquaintance with Assange goes back at least five years, to late 2012 or 2013, when the American was working in Ukraine and advising its Moscow-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Why Manafort might have sought out Assange in 2013 is unclear. During this period the veteran consultant was involved in black operations against Yanukovychs chief political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, whom Yanukovych had jailed. Manafort ran an extensive lobbying operation featuring European former politicians.

He flew frequently from the US to Ukraines capital, Kiev usually via Frankfurt but sometimes through London, flight records seen by the Guardian show.

Manafort is currently in jail in Alexandria, Virginia. In August a jury convicted him of crimes arising from his decade-long activities in Ukraine. They include large-scale money laundering and failure to pay US tax. Manafort pleaded guilty to further charges in order to avoid a second trial in Washington.

As well as accusing him of lying on Monday, the special counsel moved to set a date for Manafort to be sentenced.

One person familiar with WikiLeaks said Assange was motivated to damage the Democrats campaign because he believed a future Trump administration would be less likely to seek his extradition on possible charges of espionage. This fate had hung over Assange since 2010, when he released confidential US state department cables. It contributed to his decision to take refuge in the embassy.

According to the dossier written by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, Manafort was at the centre of a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russias leadership. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Clinton, Steele wrote, whom Putin hated and feared.

In a memo written soon after the DNC emails were published, Steele said: The [hacking] operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.

As a candidate Trump warmly welcomed the dump of DNC emails by Assange. In October 2016 he declared: I love WikiLeaks. Trumps comments came after WikiLeaks released a second tranche of emails seized from the email account of John Podesta, Clintons campaign chairman.

The Trump White House subsequently sent out mixed messages over Assange and his legal fate. In 2017 and behind the scenes Assange tried to reach a deal with Trumps Department of Justice that might see him avoid US prison.

In May 2017, , Manafort flew to Ecuador to hold talks with the countrys president-elect Lenn Moreno. The discussions, days before Moreno was sworn in, and before Manafort was indicted were ostensibly about a large-scale Chinese investment.

However, one source in Quito suggests that Manafort also discreetly raised Assanges plight. Another senior foreign ministry source said he was sceptical Assange was mentioned. At the time Moreno was expected to continue support for him.

Last week a court filing released in error suggested that the US justice department had secretly charged Assange with a criminal offence. Written by the assistant US attorney, Kellen Dwyer, the document did not say what Assange had been charged with or when the alleged offence took place.

Originally posted here:
Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian ...