The revelation that WikiLeaks secretly offered help to Donald Trumps campaign, in a series of private Twitter messages sent to the candidates son Donald Trump Jr., gave ammunition to the groups many detractors and also sparked anger from some longtime supporters of the organization and its founder, Julian Assange.
One of the most high-profile dissenters was journalist Barrett Brown, whose crowdsourced investigations of hacked corporate documents later posted on WikiLeaks led to a prison sentence.
Brown had a visceral reaction to the news, first reported by The Atlantic, that WikiLeaks had been advising the Trump campaign. In a series of tweets and Facebook videos, Brown accused Assange of having compromised the movement to expose corporate and government wrongdoing by acting as a covert political operative.
Brown explained that he had defended WikiLeaks for releasing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, because it was an appropriate thing for a transparency org to do. But, he added, working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting.
He was particularly outraged by an Oct. 26, 2016 message, in which Assange had appealed to Trump Jr. to let WikiLeaks publish one or more of his fathers tax returns in order to make his groups attacks on Hillary Clinton seem less biased. If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality, the Assange-controlled @Wikileaks account suggested. That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it wont be perceived as coming from a pro-Trump pro-Russia source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.
A screenshot of a direct message from the WikiLeaks Twitter account to Donald Trump Jr.
As Brown pointed out in another tweet, it was all-caps exasperating that Assange was in this case complaining about slander of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.
The journalist, an Intercept contributor, whose work had been championed by WikiLeaks, also shared a link to a Reddit AMA conducted two days after the election in which WikiLeaks staff, including Assanges longtime collaborator Sarah Harrison, had denied point-blank that they had collaborated with the Trump campaign.
The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter, or with Russia, are just groundless and false, the staffers wrote then. We were not publishing with a goal to get any specific candidate elected.
It is not surprising that Brown felt personally betrayed by Assange, since, as he explained on Facebook Tuesday night, I went to prison because of my support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, Brown said, the charges against him were related to his role in operations to identify and punish members of the government and members of private companies that had been exposed by Anonymous hackers of my acquaintance, via email hacks, as having conspired to go after Assange, to go after WikiLeaks.
That sort of activism, dedicated to making public secret wrongdoing, Brown argued, is very different from colluding with an authoritarian presidential campaign backed by actual Nazis while publicly denying it.
Plainly, he observed with bitterness, the prospect of a Clinton in the White House was such an unimaginable nightmare scenario that all normal standards of truth and morality became moot and it became necessary to get people like Sebastian Gorka into the White House to establish order.
Before his private messages to Trump Jr. were leaked, Assange himself had categorically denied that he or WikiLeaks had been attacking Hillary Clinton to help elect Donald Trump. This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election, he wrote in a statement released on November 8 as Americans went to the polls.
Even though Assange had by then transformed the WikiLeaks Twitter feed into a vehicle for smearing Clinton, he insisted that his work was journalistic in nature. The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself, Assange wrote. Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us, he added. It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment.
The same morning, WikiLeaks tweeted an attack on Clinton for not having driven her own car during her decades of public service.
For Brown, and others who have been critical of Assange for using the platform of WikiLeaks to fight his own political and personal battles, his secret communication with the Trump campaign was damning because it revealed that he had been functioning more like a freelance political operative, doling out strategy and advice, than a journalist interested in obtaining and publishing information, concerned only with its accuracy.
James Ball, a former WikiLeaks volunteer who has described the difficulty of working for someone who lies so much, was also appalled by one post-election message to Trump Jr., in which WikiLeaks suggested that, as a form of payback, it would be helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC.
That request for payback, on December 16, 2016, came three weeks after Trumps father had called on the British government to make his friend Nigel Farage its ambassador. This should be it, game over, end of it, for anyone who tries to suggest Assange looks out for anyone except himself, Ball observed on Twitter. Thats his cause, and plenty of good people have been played, badly.
There was also criticism from journalists, like Chris Hayes of MSNBC, a network Assange accused of being, along with the New York Times, the most biased source in one note to Trump Jr. Pointing to a message from WikiLeaks sent on Election Day, advising Trump to refuse to concede and claim the election was rigged, Hayes asked how, exactly, offering that sort of political advice squared with the organizations mission to promote transparency.
A screenshot of a Nov. 8, 2016 DM to Donald Trump Jr. from WikiLeaks.
Still, many of Assanges most vocal supporters stuck with him, calling even secret communication with the Trump campaign to undermine Clinton entirely consistent with his vision of WikiLeaks as a sort of opposition research group, dedicated to crushing bastards by finding dirt in the servers of powerful individuals or organizations.
As Raffi Khatchadourian explained in a New Yorker profile of the WikiLeaks founder in 2010, Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. To Assange, Khatchadourian wrote, Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.
One steadfast Assange ally was Kim Dotcom, founder of the shuttered file-sharing site MegaUpload, who helped fuel a conspiracy theory that the DNC emails had not been hacked by Russia, but provided to WikiLeaks by a young Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who was subsequently murdered. Alluding to another entirely unsubstantiated allegation that Clinton had once suggested killing Assange in a drone strike Dotcom said that the WikiLeaks founder was merely part of a crowdsourced political operation that had successfully defeated the greater evil.
As it happens, one of the anti-Clinton rumors that WikiLeaks had urged Trump Jr. to push in an October 3, 2016 message was a tweet linking to that unsubstantiated allegation in an unsigned blog post citing anonymous sources. The blog post includes no documentation of the allegation, but the WikiLeaks tweet linking to it, which Trump Jr. told Assange he did share, included an excerpt from the blog post in which the type was styled to look like a leaked document.
While WikiLeaks has undoubtedly facilitated the release of information that is both true and important, it is Assanges Trump-like willingness to traffic in such unsubstantiated rumors, conspiracy theories, and innuendo not supported by evidence that undermines his claim to be a disinterested publisher, not a political operative.
While this tendency to disguise personal animus in the cloak of high-minded ideals was very much in evidence during his work on behalf of Trump, it is a consistent feature of Assanges advocacy for other people and causes.
During the final week of the Brexit campaign last year, Assange tried to undermine the credibility of a witness to the savage murder of a pro-European Union member of parliament, Jo Cox. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Brexit supporters like Assange were concerned that a wave of sympathy for the murdered MP could sway the vote. So they set out to contest evidence that the killing had been politically motivated.
To that end, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed drew attention to the fact that one witness to the killing who said he had heard the attacker shout Britain First! might have belonged to a racist political group, the British National Party, whose membership rolls WikiLeaks had obtained. Within hours of the murder, WikiLeaks also shared a link to a conspiratorial post from the pro-Brexit Breitbart U.K., which speculated that the witness might have lied about what he heard as part of a feud among far-right racist groups.
The next day, British police confirmed that the attacker told the arresting officers he was a political activist and had indeed shouted pro-Brexit phrases, including Britain First, during the murder.
More recently, during the separatist protests in Catalonia he supported, Assange was forced to delete several fake images he had shared on Twitter like one photograph of Spanish police officers struggling with Catalans, which had been digitally altered to insert a Catalan independence flag.
A screenshot of a fake image Julian Assange shared and later deleted.
In the final months of the 2016 presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed promoted not just its new publications, but also frequently referred totabloid rumors like old chestnuts about Hillary Clintons supposed role in the death of White House counsel Vince Foster and wild conspiracy theories about her campaign chair taking part in bloody satanic rituals.
We know now that, from late September on, Assange was also privately using that account to urge the candidates son to hype the mostly anodyne emails stolen from the account of campaign chair, John Podesta, as crucial evidence of Clintons unfitness for office. And it certainly looks like the campaign took his advice.
On October 12, 2016, just 15 minutes after Assange told Trump Jr. that a new batch of Podesta emails had been released, with many great stories the press are missing, his father tweeted a complaint accusing the dishonest media of ignoring incredible information provided by WikiLeaks.
In the same message, Assange urged Trump Jr. to share a link he provided to the email database wlsearch.tk so you guys can get all your followers digging through the content. Two days later, Trump Jr. shared that link.
Despite the constant claims, from Assange and the Trumps, that the emails stolen from Democrats implicated Clinton in scandal and corruption, it is important to keep in mind that the WikiLeaks method of encouraging Trump supporters and Reddit trolls to scour the documents for evidence of malfeasance did not, in fact, uncover any such evidence.
Instead, the hacked emails were used to reverse-engineer preposterous conspiracy theories, like the imaginary pedophilia scandal called Pizzagate, which WikiLeaks was still treating as real two months after the election.
This is the real tragedy and menace of the public and private collaboration of WikiLeaks with Trump. An organization with a sterling reputation for providing the public with accurate information about secret government and corporate activities was used to launder conspiracy theories that helped elect a racist, sexual predator president of the United States.
That might be a terrific result for people like Julian Assange, who see a dysfunctional, discredited White House as a way to undermine what they see as the real evil empire. For Americans condemned to live under Trump, particularly the most marginalized who, as Noam Chomsky pointed out, will suffer the most from his cruelty, it is less good.
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