Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/13/roger-stone-had-contact-with-w.html
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If he doesn’t end up in the slammer, I’d be satisfied if Stone spent the next decade stuck in the Russian consulate in Houston.
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Roger will fair well in the Federal Penitentiary.
[note sarcasm]
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At these times it’s always interesting to take a look back at how some people on this forum were talking about Assange just a few years ago.
Anyone ready to officially change their opinion on whether Assange and Wikileaks have been a net positive for Democracy?
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I thought Wikileaks was going to be a great service to humanity and, in a few cases it has been, but his behavior in the wake of the rape allegations soured me quickly. It quickly became clear that he was willing to wield Wikileaks as an instrument of his own narrative while eroding the credibility of whistleblowers and those who wish to bring the truth to light.
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Too many people equated Assange with Wikileaks (which is what he wanted). I only had to see the 2013 biopic on him and then follow up with some reading to see what an egomaniac the guy is. That this “champion of freedom” would ally himself with the likes of Putin and Stone on the basis of a grudge against Clinton makes sense in that light.
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I don’t see the significance of this. So Stone spoke with Assange. How is that news?
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It shows that the Trump campaign was directly, secretly colluding with Assange & Wikileaks regarding sensitive material provided to Wikileaks by Russian hackers.
That seems pretty relevant during a time when the Administration continues to deny any link to Russian election meddling.
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I’m not sure you can call Stone part of the Trump campaign. He’s pretty much always been an outsider who “advises” the extreme right. But the real issue is that he left the Trump campaign on August 8, 2015. Trump fired him but Stone said he quit. Either way, he was out before the spring 2016 timeline of these event and was back to working from the sidelines to promote the current fringe right candidate whomever that was going to be at election time.
It’s not exactly like the organization did much to counter that idea. We’ve got a President who has more skeletons in his closet than a Halloween party supply warehouse and Wikileaks has yet to drop ONE bombshell on Trump even though he’s been in office well over a year. No copies of his tax returns, no NDAs with porn stars, no secret communications with Russia, no shady business dealings, no hacks of RNC or Trump team servers, nada.
I cannot believe that Trump & Co. have evaded exposure on Wikileaks by being less corrupt or having better information security than the Obama administration or the DNC, so the most logical conclusion is that the organization has a pro-Trump/pro-Russia agenda.
Whatever potential for good Wikileaks may have once had it is now effectively just a tool of the Putin regime.
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Agreed. I believe there were offshoots using the software platform, but they haven’t amounted to much and there’s still far too much reverence for Assange in that community.
I put it in the larger context of what we’ve been seeing lately: all sorts of organisations being discredited because their founders and senior executives were entitled white male douchebags who put their own egos ahead of often worthy missions.
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Yes, and let’s go a step or two deeper with the logic.
It also means, as does much of the other evidence, that Republicans knew they could not win the election without help from outside the US… Use Occam’s razor: There were no organizations within the US to effectively take on and legitimately beat the Democrats. They had to find outsiders and disruptors in order to win.
And the next level after that is, once you’re in bed with the mob, what do you have to do to keep that fancy car, house and pool?
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Yes, of course, obviously.
I write that as a strong Trump detractor, to put it mildly.
Wikileaks did not smear the DNC or Podesta. They simply released objective facts. Now, that may breach privacy and decency and all the, but that is what journalists do every day, for a living. The present the public with secrets the powerful would rather keep.
If Podesta and the DNC did not want the release of their communications to be embarrassing, all they had to do was not communicate embarrassing things, or as my boss about NINE levels lower than they, and in a mere municipal government, put it: “Don’t ever put anything in an e-mail you would be embarrassed to read in the paper tomorrow.”
Very liberal journalists Matt Taibbi and Alex Pareene, in their very-badly-missed “TARFU report” podcast, “Alex, as a journalist, I was interested in those E-mails; were you, too, glad to read them?” . “Oh, yeah, obviously, leaks are what we live on”.
The fact that THIS leak had a bad fallout for liberals, well, sorry, guys. But do you blame Assange for passing it along, or Podesta for writing them in the first place?
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Are those real glasses, or the ones with the holographic eyes?
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I blame Assange for passing on SELECTIVE information from Putin’s spooks in an effort to help Trump win. I also blame Trump supporters for being dumb enough to be swayed by it.
Nothing Podesta or anyone else on Clinton’s team wrote was worse than the shit that comes out of Trump’s mouth every goddamn day.
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And whatever happened to that banking exposé?
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X-Ray Specs.
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IIRC, Daniel Domschiet-Berg (sp?), Wikileaks’ main tech guy, “suddenly” decided he didn’t like Assange anymore, locked/encrypted everything WL was holding (including all the banking stuff), deleted all the encryption keys, and took off to make his own leaks-type website that never actually leaked anything.
It looks very much like DDB took a payout to sabotage WL and make the bank info go away, including a book deal and I don’t know what all else. But it was suuuuuper fishy, to say the least, and he claimed it was all because Assange wasn’t nice to him, and something about Assange not getting on with his cat or… something like that (not joking).
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Not to mention, it’s real easy to lie and deceive without ever speaking an untruthful word, if you just carefully select what truths you tell. Or release to the public, as it were.
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A “transparency” org with closely studied opacity and ties to authoritarian regimes just feels like vindication to me at this point.
I never liked 'em.
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