Like Team Mueller’s indictment last July of Russian agents, the full report reveals questions about Wikileaks’ role that much of the media has been ignoring, writes Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News
As official Washington pores over the Gospel According to Saint Robert, an all-important fact about the Mueller report has gotten lost in the shuffle. Just as the Christian gospels were filled with holes, the latest version is too – particularly with regard to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
The five pages that the special prosecutor’s report devotes to WikiLeaks are essentially lifted from Mueller’s indictment last July of 12 members of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU. It charges that after hacking the Democratic National Committee, the GRU used a specially-created online persona known as Guccifer 2.0 to transfer a gigabyte’s worth of stolen emails to WikiLeaks just as the 2016 Democratic National Convention was approaching. Four days after opening the encrypted file, the indictment says, “Organization 1 [i.e. WikiLeaks] released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators [i.e. the GRU].”
Attorney General William Barr holding press conference on full Mueller report, April 18, 2019. (YouTube)
Mueller’s report says the same thing, but with the added twist that Assange then tried to cover up the GRU’s role by suggesting that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich may have been the source and by telling a congressman that the DNC email heist was an “inside job” and that he had “physical proof” that the material was not from Russian.
All of which is manna from heaven for corporate news outlets eager to pile on Assange, now behind bars in London. An April 11, 2019, New York Times news analysis, for instance, declared that “[c]ourt documents have revealed that it was Russian intelligence – using the Guccifer persona – that provided Mr. Assange thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee,” while another Times article published shortly after his arrest accuses the WikiLeaks founder of “promoting a false cover story about the source of the leaks.”
But there’s a problem: it ain’t necessarily so. The official story that the GRU is the source doesn’t hold water, as a timeline from mid-2016 shows. Here are the key events based on the GRU indictment and the Mueller report:
- June 12: Assange tells Britain’s ITV that another round of Democratic Party disclosures is on the way: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great. WikiLeaks is having a very big year.”
- June 14: The Democratic National Committee accuses Russia of hacking its computers.
- June 15: Guccifer 2.0 claims credit for the hack. “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks ,” he brags. “They will publish them soon.”
- June 22: WikiLeaks tells Guccifer via email: “Send any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing.”
- July 6: WikiLeaks sends Guccifer another email: “if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after.”Replies Guccifer: “ok . . . i ”
- July 14: Guccifer sends WikiLeaks an encrypted file titled “wk dnc link1.txt.gpg.”
- July 18: WikiLeaks confirms it has opened “the 1Gb or so archive” and will release documents “this week.”
- July 22: WikiLeaks releases more than 20,000 DNC emails and 8,000 other attachments.
According to Mueller and obsequious news outlets like the Times, the sequence is clear: Guccifer sends archive, WikiLeaks receives archive, WikiLeaks accesses archive, WikiLeaks publishes archive. Donald Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but Julian Assange plainly did. [Attorney General Will Barr, significantly calling WikiLeaks a publisher, said at his Thursday press conference: “Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy.”]
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announcing in 2018 the grand jury indictment of 12 GRU agents. (Wikimedia Commons)
Avoiding Questions
The narrative raises questions that the press studiously avoids. Why, for instance, would Assange announce on June 12 that a big disclosure is on the way before hearing from the supposed source? Was there a prior communication that Mueller has not disclosed? What about the reference to “new material” on June 22 – does that mean Assange already had other material in hand? After opening the Guccifer file on July 18, why would he publish it just four days later? Would that give WikiLeaks enough time to review some 28,000 documents to insure they’re genuine?
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“If a single one of those emails had been shown to be maliciously altered,” blogger Mark F. McCarty observes, “Wikileaks’ reputation would have been in tatters.” There’s also the question that an investigator known as Adam Carter poses in Disobedient Media: why would Guccifer brag about giving WikiLeaks“thousands of files” that he wouldn’t send for another month?
The narrative doesn’t make sense – a fact that is crucially important now that Assange is fighting for his freedom in the U.K. New Yorker staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian sounded a rare note of caution last summer when he warned that little about Guccifer 2.0 adds up. While claiming to be the source for some of WikiLeaks’ most explosive emails, the material he released on his own had proved mostly worthless – 20 documents that he “said were from the DNC but which were almost surely not,” as Khatchadourian puts it, a purported Hillary Clinton dossier that “was nothing of the sort,” screenshots of emails so blurry as to be “unreadable,” and so forth.
John Podesta: Target of a phishing expedition. (Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons)
While insisting that “our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party, Assange told Khatchadourian that the source was not Guccifer either. “We received quite a lot of submissions of material that was already published in the rest of the press, and people seemingly submitted the Guccifer archives,” he said somewhat cryptically. “We didn’t publish them. They were already published.” When Khatchadourian asked why he didn’t put the material out regardless, he replied that “the material from Guccifer 2.0 – or on WordPress – we didn’t have the resources to independently verify.”
No Time for Vetting
So four days was indeed too short a time to subject the Guccifer file to proper vetting. Of course, Mueller no doubt regards this as more “dissembling,” as his report describes it. Yet WikiLeaks has never been caught in a lie for the simple reason that honesty and credibility are all-important for a group that promises to protect anonymous leakers who supply it with official secrets. (See “Inside WikiLeaks: Working with the Publisher that Changed the World,” Consortium News, July 19, 2018.) Mueller, by contrast, has a rich history of mendacity going back to his days as FBI director when he sought to cover up the Saudi role in 9/11 and assured Congress on the eve of the 2003 invasion that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction pose “a clear threat to our national security.”
Mueller with President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, as he is being appointed FBI director. (White House)
So if the Mueller narrative doesn’t hold up, the charge of dissembling doesn’t either. Indeed, as ex-federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy observes in The National Review, the fact that the feds have charged Assange with unauthorized access to a government computer rather than conspiring with the Kremlin could be a sign that Team Mueller is less than confident it can prove collusion beyond a reasonable doubt. As he puts it, the GRU indictment “was more like a press release than a charging instrument” because the special prosecutor knew that the chances were zero that Russian intelligence agents would surrender to a U.S. court.
Indeed, when Mueller charged 13 employees and three companies owned by Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin with interfering in the 2016 election, he clearly didn’t expect them to surrender either. Thus, his team seemed taken aback when one of the alleged “troll farms” showed up in Washington asking to be heard. The prosecution’s initial response, as McCarthy put it, was to seek a delay “on the astonishing ground that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned.” When that didn’t work, prosecutors tried to limit Concord’s access to some 3.2 million pieces of evidence on the grounds that the documents are too “sensitive” for Russian eyes to see. If they are again unsuccessful, they may have no choice but to drop the charges entirely, resulting in yet another “public relations disaster” for the Russia-gate investigation.
None of which bodes well for Mueller or the news organizations that worship at his shrine. After blowing the Russia-gate story all these years, why does the Times continue to slander the one news organization that tells the truth?
Daniel Lazare is the author of “The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy” (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at Daniellazare.com.
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Please fix the link to DanielLazare dot com
Link to Daniellazare [dot] com is incorrectly pointing to Aniellazare [dot] com. Needs D.
I could share this on Facebook, like I have many other CN links, but the stupid and totally gratuitous attack on Scripture in the FIRST PARAGRAPH will lose nearly everyone that might read it from my Timeline, as well as a whole bunch of other people who might read it from other avenues.
Congratulations. Brain-dead move. Inexplicable from Mr. Lazare and any CN editors that might have reviewed this piece. I expect far better from this website.
Unless Assange was referencing the Podesta emails and not the DNC emails in the June 2016 interview. It seems far-fetched that Mueller would rely on a timeline in his indictments of the GRU that would be easily disproven, since we’ve known since July 2018 when DOJ says Wikileaks got the DNC emails: https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download If Wikileaks already had the DNC emails when Mueller says they got them, why haven’t they debunked it? Why not show an alternate date for receiving the emails?
I don’t think it is necessary to disprove every single element of the Russia-gate hysteria to establish its fundamental fraudulence and malignity, just as the reality of the invasion of Iraq being an utter obscenity wouldn’t have been materially altered by the discovery of a few chemical or biological weapons somewhere in the country in 2003.
But of course the Iraqi “WMD” inventory did turn out to be exactly zero – and Russia-gate may well end up being similarly perfect in its falsity.
Very informative piece by Daniel Lazare. Many thanks.
Queen Hillary said Trump was a Putin puppet, and that the Russians were hacking the DNC and giving info to wikileaks. Her dossier from the Kremlin via Christopher Steele and the FBI, Fusion GPS and the Ohrs, and Perkins Coie proves it to her genuflecting media and #resistance, as does the Trump Tower meeting that Fusion GPS set up.
She also noted that young Black males are Super predators without conscience and empathy, and they believe that too.
Once a politician starts believing their own lies, the delusion is an easy sell to accomplices in government who were expecting her to waltz into the Presidency. They would have been rewarded if she had won as expected; they are now covering their butts and doubling down to hold off the inevitable accountability.
Mueller’s entire “professional” career shows he is a hack malpracticer, a poltroon, a liar and a Deep State co-conspirator. All ideal qualities to be the Special Counsel for this concocted 3-yr-long regime change Trump drivel. It is almost breathtaking to consider that Hillary’s lie-alibi for being the sorest loser in American history combined with the Deep State Intelligence (duh!) Community’s dirty black op to build a back story to support a full-blown Hillary administration move on Russia should have mushroomed into this grotesque horrorshow that was able to snatch the brains of countless previously reasonably intelligent critical thinking people. I guess this is how religions and cults get started, based on tall tales, unprovable “beliefs” and the phantasmagorical promise of miracles. And, of course, there has been and still is a ton of money to be made on it.
An excellent discussion – and many thanks for citing one of my blogs. Here’s a new one pertaining to the Mueller report:
https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/heres-the-entire-discussion-of-seth-rich-in-the-mueller-report-87351711b7d2
And this one discusses a very recent interview of Bill Binney that should be of interest to Consortium News readers:
https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/bill-binney-states-that-the-nsa-has-32-pages-of-communications-between-seth-rich-and-julian-54a2df5a0e5b
Well if nothing else, the narrative as Mueller spins, seems to suggest Wikileaks was seeking out material from Guccifer whereas if Wikileaks was a Russian pawn, it would not have had to ask for the material, much less twice.
Respected NSA whistleblower Bill Binney has discussed the confirmed link between Seth Rich and Julian Assange in 2 interviews in the last month. This information should be being discussed everywhere https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/bill-binney-states-that-the-nsa-has-32-pages-of-communications-between-seth-rich-and-julian-54a2df5a0e5b
edutainment2 – Thank you for that. He has done a lot of interviews as of late, and I missed this particular one.
Respected!? Get a grip
Respected NSA whistleblower Bill Binney has discussed the confirmed link between Seth Rich and Julian Assange in 2 interviews in the last month. This information should be being discussed everywhere https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/bill-binney-states-that-the-nsa-has-32-pages-of-communications-between-seth-rich-and-julian-54a2df5a0e5b
Thank you
That would be a game changer and tragedy if there is something that they are hiding.
Thanks for this. It’s the first I’ve heard of direct evidence of contact between Rich and Assange.
Thank you , Mr. Lazare. At some point during the development of the Mueller investigation ( maybe its beginning) it would appear that the real focus became threefold: (1) Destroying Wikileaks; (2) Destroying Julian Assange; and (3) Putting confrontation with the Russian Federation back on the fast track it was on during the Obama administration. The total lack of real investigation into the so-called Russian “hack”, taken as an article of faith just as it was in the MSM, is a dead giveaway. By the time the report was turned in, mission # 3 had already been accomplished, with a vengeance. The astonishing behavior of the U.K. judiciary and political class, and the disgusting triumphal reaction of the politicians here, indicate they think #2 is in their grasp. The pressure on Wikileaks will continue to mount.
Face it, we all knew that the Clinton loyalists would reject any conclusion that contradicted their own. Human nature. The sheer recklessness of the accusations against Russia, presenting the risk of a catastrophic war, only drove more voters away from the Democrat Party. Presumably, Democrats will keep spinning this out at least until after the 2020 election.
The bottom line hasn’t changed. Most votes come down to economic issues. “It’s the economy, stupid.” The Clinton administration had split apart of the Dem voting base, middle class vs. poor, and the Obama years confirmed that this split is permanent. Democrats can’t or won’t come to terms with this fact.
I don?t understand why this source is not cited more often and more prominently in references to the original leak. Wordfence is a WordPress security company. It sells WordPress security plugins and sends out security bulletins to its customers. It did as thorough and as neutral an investigation of the “hack” as we are ever going to get: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/01/election-hack-faq/
Good piece.
Some of the arguments made here – as that of the impossibly brief time between the claimed receipt of hacked material and WikiLeaks’ publication, leaving no time for WikiLeaks to review many thousands of documents, something they always do – seem unassailable to me. It just could not happen that way.
Of course, we know from several independent experts in the recent past that the DNC material was unmistakably a leak, and not a hack, but the people in Washington, all busily promoting their various dark agendas, are not going to accept so simple and clarifying a fact.
The twists and turns in this whole story are just dizzying, as indeed they are meant to be. It is next to impossible to set out the full tale with proof which cannot be denied or contradicted by one side or the other.
Of course, that suggests a pattern, the pattern of intelligence operations.
And, of course, the United States, vis-à-vis the rest of the world, has been in the business of hiding what it is doing, spreading disinformation, and leaving confusion behind as it proceeds with its ferocious recent program of aggression. The Washington elites have all become practiced experts in it.
But now we can unmistakably see the same pattern being used inside the United States.
The United States never was, or even pretended to be, a democracy. Most of the Founders, being men of wealth and property, feared democracy. And in the course of America’s imperial march across the continent, democratic values and ethics never played any role. But this kind of activity, right at the heart of national political life, makes an even stronger statement.
It is a statement literally of the ruling establishment’s contempt for ordinary Americans and their right to have even the slightest understanding of events in which their government has been involved.
Just about every part of the power establishment has played a part in this – the corporate press, the Democrats, the Republicans, the FBI, the CIA, and loyal hangers-on like Britain’s MI6.
I see that as the key lesson to be learned from the entire set of events around “Russia-gate.” But I am equally sure that it will not come to be understood and absorbed into consciousness for the most part inside the United States.
The same forces will just continue their tug-of-war with all kinds of political posing and press noise that tells you almost nothing.
You see, that is simply the mentality of imperial rule.
The vicious struggle for renewed pre-eminence the United States has underway in the world – bombing in a dozen lands, supporting brutal dirty wars, assassinations, efforts to topple governments, including democratic ones, sanctions laid in every direction, new threats made weekly, and a ceaseless effort to impose American law everywhere (the essence of what Assange’s arrest really means) – simply leaves no room or inclination for honesty or openness in the imperial capital. Quite the opposite, indeed.
What a very sad state for America to have come to, but there cannot be the slightest doubt that it is the case. Every critically-minded person in the world not associated with, or benefitting from, the operation of America’s empire, understands this.
John Chuckman,
Well said. Thank you.
Good article by Daniel Lazare, too. Consortium News, the best source for truth in reporting.
I don?t understand why this source is not cited more often and more prominently in references to the original leak. Wordfence is a WordPress security company. It sells WordPress security plugins and sends out security bulletins to its customers. It did as thorough and as neutral an investigation of the “hack” as we are ever going to get: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/01/election-hack-faq/
The only thing coming out of Washington is lies and confusion. The MSM is the same. The simple truth is avoided like the plague. People like Assange, Manning, or Snowden who dare to speak the truth are treated like criminals.
The American people are being systematically lied to, and they don’t have a clue that it is happening. There is no awake and intelligent public to prevent what is unfolding. The worst kind of criminals are in charge of our government, media, and military. The sleeping masses are making their way down the dark mountain to the hellish outcome that awaits them.
“These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur
of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it
seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and
kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty
of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.”
Robinson Jeffers
Sad to see an article like this on this site. The DNC wasn’t hacked by anyone! The DNC papers was leaked by an insider that was “disgusted”. It was handed over to a person with contacts to Wikileaks in a “wooded area” in Washington, DC. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-russian-hacking-how-the-leaks-from-clinton-and-the-dnc-happened/5566625?print=1
Through this entire mess, one of the tragic lapses in truth has been the presumption of Mueller’s integrity. He’s been made out to be a saintly icon of Truth, Justice, and Fairness. And sadly, through the course of events, no one has challenged that. And it damn well needed to be challenged.
Here we see another example of Mueller’s contrived reputation for integrity. He could have spoken to Assange & Craig Murray. He could have secured and examined the DNC computer. He could have done any number of things that would have revealed the truth. The truth that contradicts the Deep State narrative of Guccifer and WikiLeaks theft of the DNC emails. But he did not. He chose to completely ignore the sources of genuine evidence.
Another indication of Mueller’s phony reputation for integrity can be found in the many phony terror plots against poor, desperate, and mentally-challenged black men that he and Comey cooked up — cartoonish plots and show trials — to restore the FBI’s “credibility” in the aftermath of their 9/11 failure.
The truth about Mueller and Comey is relatively straightforward. They are the Praetorian Guard for the ruling class. Comey, in that role, protected Hillary Clinton from accountability. That was his job, and he did it.
In the aftermath of the Trump electoral victory, Mueller was hired to take him down. Trump knew he was innocent, so for political reasons he allowed the investigation to play itself out, despite the damage to his effectiveness as President.
The evidence that Mueller was a political hitman is seen in: (1) the partisanship of the team he assembled, (2) his uncritical acceptance of the Deep State’s Guccifer 2.0/WikiLeaks narrative of the DNC email affair, despite ample and easily accessible evidence to the contrary, and finally (3) in the masterful way that he — Mueller — concluded that section of his report dealing with obstruction.
Regarding that last, Mueller refused the prosecutorial rule, and his prosecutorial duty, to either issue an indictment or shut the f… up. Instead of saying simply “no indictment”, and leaving it at that, he did the best he could to fulfill his mandate to take down Trump. Mueller purposefully left the matter open. That way, it would be left to Congress, which could then access the “evidence” in the report, and use it to pursue impeachment.
Mueller is just another masterful criminal accomplice of the Establishment and Deep State.
The Daily Mail article linked in the link famously alleges that Murray claimed that a hand-over occurred during his secret meeting in the “wooded area” near American University. However, I would note that none of the direct quotations in the article have him claiming this, and it also contradicts his public statements elsewhere, where he clearly states that this meeting occurred after the leaked materials were already safely with WikiLeaks, and describes the meeting as “administrative” only.
See particularly his interview with Scott Horton, December 2016, and my own comments on this site under the March 13 VIPS memo.
Please specify what it is in this article that you object to. All I see is Daniel Lazare demolishing the Mueller hacking narrative.
“But there’s a problem: it ain’t necessarily so.”
Exceptionalist tend to believe that others assign the same significance to them as the exceptionalist assign to themselves, and some of we the people hold these truths to be self-evident.
Consequently food in easily digestible morsels is quite popular and fast.
Mr. Nemtsov had difficulty keeping his hand in his pockets and his trousers on, so consequently had encouraged a wide pool of candidates to do him ill, facilitating on Mr. Nemtsov’s demise the production of the easily digestible morsel “Putin did and/or ordered it”.
Some in “The United States of America” tend to believe that others assign the same significance to them as exceptionalists assign to themselves, and some of we the people hold these truths to be self-evident, that when outcome varied from expectation facilitated the production of the easily digestible morsel “Putin did and/or ordered it”.
As in some factory processes of food production waste was minimised through re-use of re-cycled ingredients not all of which was specified in the list of contents.
Please, please, please.
What is the result, or current status, of the surprise appearance in court of reps of one of the Mueller-indicted “troll farms”???
not guilty
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/russian-firm-disclose-sensitive-us-government-info-court/story?id=59444605
Thanks, Mark.
The Democratic Party and the security agencies cannot afford to let go. Count on it going through 2020. Clearly, Trump understood what was going on and he was powerless to stop it. The game plan from the outset was to remove or neuter the elected President. The claim of collusion just provided a handle. When that fell apart, it became finding him guilty of obstructing “justice’ which meant he was trying to find a way to stop and illegal investigation. illegal because it was contrived.
It seems the favorite game of law enforcement in our country. Catch your prey in a lie, in obstructing justice, never mind the bogus nature of the original charge. Who was the first casualty. Flynn, not because he did anything wrong but he lied during the course of the entrapment.
Getting Trump by weakening him or impeaching him. Collusion was the first shot, then obstruction and charges not remotely related to collusion. What Mueller found on collusion was nil but he left the door open with his hint about obstruction of justice. Of course, he was allowed to take a phony shot at Russia interfering in the 2016 election which provided fuel for the farce as well.
Those who contrived and participated in this farce must be held to account for what they started and now have the chutzpah to continue.
History shows the powerful have a way of escaping, the President and his hench persons in 2003, the banks in 2007 and now those who are managing and participating in destroying the President and the Presidency. If the first and second had resulted in jail time, and likely the third, Washington might be a better place.
“Catch your prey in a lie, in obstructing justice, never mind the bogus nature of the original charge.”
Regular Americans are more familiar with it as being arrested for resisting arrest.
Even the FBI agents said Flynn didn’t lie
House Intel report: McCabe said agents who interviewed Flynn ‘didn’t think he was lying’
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/national-security/386323-house-intel-report-comey-mccabe-testified-that-the-two-agents-who%3famp
To answer the last question, the NYT , in Wikileaks, is outclassed and, intellectually, outgunned. So….it is jealousy. According to one of the Assange attorneys, the Mueller report intimates Wikileaks potentially involved with campaign finance violations with the Trump campaign. Seams odd, as Mueller certainly knew Wikileaks was cut of form Visa, MC, and all the rest to receive donations and ways for people to support them sometime ago. Yes, I am looking at you, “Freedom of the Press”, especially the IT guy at The Intercept.
I recall his name now. Micah Lee.