Julian Assange

Julian Assange (born 1971) is an Australian journalist and free speech activist, best known as the founder of the controversial website Wikileaks, a repository of leaked corporate and government documents.

Assange was a hero of the American left when he published documents which discredited the Bush administration and aided the election of Barack Obama, but became a villain after the murder of Seth Rich. Assange published documents about the Obama administration's lies in the Benghazi massacre and exposed the Hillary Clinton email scandal. The American left then called him a tool of Russia.

Background

He was born to a travelling theater troupe. During his childhood, his mother divorced his father and married a new age singer, whom she eventually fled with Julian due to his being extremely abusive. His mother noted that he had a very opinionated view of right and wrong.

He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He wrote Strobe, the first free and open-source port scanner, and contributed to the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.

Prior to WikiLeaks, Assange was involved with an organization of computer hackers and was arrested for his involvement with the group in 1991. After the arrest, he became an independent programmer. Most of the software he produced was designed to keep whistleblowers and dissidents anonymous.

Assange has a son in Australia.

Activism and exile

As of November 18, 2010, there is a warrant out for his arrest in Sweden. Assange was previously investigated for rape, but the charges were ultimately dropped. However, there is an international warrant for Assange, as he is wanted for questioning in Sweden in relation to a rape investigation. On June 19, 2012, Ricardo Patiño, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum and that the Ecuadorian government was analyzing his request. At that time, Assange was in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. On August 16, Patiño announced that the Ecuadorian government was granting Assange political asylum. It is not clear how, if ever, Assange will be able to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy grounds.

His anarchistic hope is that faith in government will decline and individuals will take on more personal responsibilities for their lives. It is not clear how exposing classified documents of democratic countries will encourage people to become more responsible for their lives. He also implied in a piece for The Guardian newspaper that his sympathies lay towards Latin American liberation struggles, and that he grew up believing in Marxism-Leninism. Assange is an admirer of Rand Paul. He also makes clear he does his leaking specifically to denounce America as a world power, adhering to more anti-American views and explicitly desiring to humiliate America in front of its allies, contrary to Obama's claims that the world hated Bush instead of America itself. Ironically, several of the documents Assange leaked actually confirmed what most American war hawks stated regarding the War on Terror, such as the Taliban beheading prisoners as well as foreign allies appreciating American involvement.

Reactions

Secretary Hillary Clinton proposed, "Can't we just drone him?" House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said he would only speak with Assange "when he's in chains." Assange has always maintained that he did not receive Clinton and Podesta emails from Russian operatives, and put a $25,000 reward for the murder of whistleblower Seth Rich. This contradicts the fake news narrative of "Russian hacking the DNC."

While "Russian hacking" did occur in the 2016 Presidential election, more accurately "Russian attempted hacking of state election boards," evidence of "Russian hacking the DNC" has been debunked despite Rod Rosenstein, Adam Schiff, and their liberal media allies efforts to breath fresh life into the false narrative.

During the trial of Chelsea Manning, Gov. Sarah Palin called for Assange to be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders." Former Gov. Mike Huckabee remarked that those inside the U.S. Government who leaked information to Assange should be executed. One of President Obama's last acts of office was to commute Manning's sentence and release the him/her/them/the person. Many regarded Manning and Obama's actions as far-leftist treason.

Democrat's Russia hoax

In January 2017 Assange's legal team approached Adam Waldman to see if the new Trump administration would negotiate with the WikiLeaks founder, holed up in Ecuador's London embassy. Waldman met three times with Assange during January and February 2017 in London. The hope was that Waldman, a former Clinton Justice Department official, might navigate the U.S. law enforcement bureaucracy and find the right person to engage.

Waldman contacted Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr on behalf of Assange. They met in Washington DC on February 3, 3017. Within 24 hours of the Ohr meeting, Waldman was referred to Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of counterintelligence, David Laufman of the National Security Division.

Assange made clear that he would never compromise his sources, or stop publishing information, but was willing to consider concessions, like redactions or "risk mitigation." This was viewed as a positive sign by the US intelligence community, if not as a means of neutralizing or stopping WikiLeaks, at least controlling it.

A few days after the negotiations opened in mid-February, Waldman reached out to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner; Waldman wanted to see if the Senate Intelligence Committee wanted any contact with Assange. Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks’ source of the DNC emails.

Comey intervention

Sen. Mark Warner engaged with Adam Waldman over encrypted text messages, Warner then reached out to FBI Director Jimmy the Weasel Comey. Although the response to Assange's offer to help was positive among Department of Justice officials, Warner relayed Comey's response to Waldman: "stand down."

Waldman could not believe that Warner and Comey were sending a different message than the Department of Justice, so he went back to David Laufman, who assured him the negotiations were still on. Laufman's response when he heard Waldman was told to "stand down" was, "That's B.S. You are not standing down and neither am I."

"The constructive, principled discussions with DOJ that occurred over nearly two months were complicated by the confusing 'stand down' message," Waldman said. The double dealing sowed distrust in Assange's camp.

On April 7, 2017, Assange released Vault 7 with the specifics of some of the CIA malware used for cyber attacks. It had immediate impact: A furious U.S. government backed out of the negotiations, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo slammed WikiLeaks as a "hostile intelligence service."

Vault 7 included disclosure of a tool called “Marble Framework,” which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs — like Cyrillic, for example. The CIA documents also showed that the “Marble” tool had been employed in 2016.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which includes among members two former Technical Directors of the National Security Agency, has repeatedly called attention to its conclusion that the DNC emails were leaked — not “hacked” by Russia or anyone else.

Ex-CIA presidential briefer Ray McGovern noted the episode reveals

"a cynical decision to put U.S. intelligence agents and highly sophisticated cybertools at risk, rather than allow Assange to at least attempt to prove that Russia was not behind the DNC leak. The greater risk to Warner and Comey apparently would have been if Assange provided evidence that Russia played no role in the 2016 leaks of DNC documents."

Oleg Deripaska

Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, reported to be one of the sources in the Steele dossier and who provided some funding along with the FBI, the DNC, and Clinton campaign, visited Assange nine times over 2017. Deripaska is said to have provided the notorious 'pee-pee' allegations. Deripaska was anxious to cover up his role after Trump's election. Waldman is Deripaska's DC attorney.

A year later Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein indicted 12 Russian nationals, who would never stand trial, to restart the myth of Russian hacking the DNC. The indictment was intended to cover-up the corrupt activities of the Obama DOJ and Democrats as their collusion with Russia was exposed.

DOJ Cover-up

The January 7, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) alleged that Russia was trying to help Donald Trump. In its most essential form the ICA was the justification for “Spygate” i.e. Crossfire Hurricane and all of the preceding intelligence surveillance upon the Trump campaign. The ICA was the brain-trust of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey. While the majority of content was from the CIA, some of the content within the ICA was written by FBI Agent Peter Strzok who held a unique “insurance policy” interest in how the report could be utilized in 2017. NSA Director Mike Rogers would not sign up to the “high confidence” claims because he saw through the political motives of the report.

(JUNE 2019 – New York Times) [...] Mr. Barr wants to know more about the C.I.A. sources who helped inform its understanding of the details of the Russian interference campaign, an official has said. He also wants to better understand the intelligence that flowed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016.

During the final weeks of the Obama administration, the intelligence community released a declassified assessment that concluded that Mr. Putin ordered an influence campaign that “aspired to help” Mr. Trump's electoral chances by damaging Mrs. Clinton's. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. reported they had high confidence in the conclusion. The National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance, had a moderate degree of confidence. (read more)

Questioning the construct of the ICA is a smart direction to take for a Durham review or investigation. By looking at the intelligence community work-product, Durham could cut through a lot of the chatter and get to the heart of

U.S. Attorney John Durham investigated Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Strzok's motives. All of the downstream claims about Russian activity, including the Russian indictments promoted by Rosenstein and the Mueller team, are centered around origination claims of illicit Russian activity outlined in the ICA. This is exactly why actors within the DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Community needed to throw a bag over Julian Assange.

Assange could expose a complicit conspiracy between corrupt U.S. intelligence actors and a host of political interests who created a fraudulent Russia-collusion conspiracy with the central component of Russia “hacking” the DNC. If Assange were not controlled, he could show he received the DNC emails from a leaker, and not from a hack, the central component of the Russia interference narrative would collapse. The DOJ decision to target Assange protected multiple U.S. agencies and Robert Mueller.

As soon as Robert Mueller released his Russia report, the EDVA shut down Assange with the DOJ indictment; in a similar way the same DOJ shut down James Wolfe with a plea agreement.

U.S. indictment

On April 11, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment was unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia EDVA. The indictment was under seal since March 6, 2018.

On Tuesday April 15 more investigative material was released.The indictment has a Grand Jury date of December 2017. The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time. The grand jury indictment was sealed from March 2018 until after Mueller probe ended in April 2019.

The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.” John Solomon reported,

Julian Assange told a U.S. congressman on Tuesday he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents he published during last year’s election did not come from Russia and promised additional helpful information about the leaks in the near future.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is friendly to Russia and chairs an important House subcommittee on Eurasia policy, became the first American congressman to meet with Assange during a three-hour private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been holed up for years.

Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill.

“Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year’s presidential election,” Rohrabacher said, “Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.”

Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher said he had information to share privately with President Trump.

The FBI took keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange and quickly gathered specific evidence related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning for a grand jury by December 2017. Within three months the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018. The EDVA sat on the indictment while the Mueller probe ended.

On April 11, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed. The Mueller report was dependent on fake news allegations OF Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.

The Mueller report claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements.

The predicate for Robert Mueller's investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is John Brennan's early January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA); and the ICA claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor.

The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Peter Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining the Russia hacking narrative.

Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he has evidence it was not from a hack.

This Russian “hacking” claim is ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus.

See also

• Edward J. Snowden