Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, is looking for payback from Donald Trump, a return of favours so to speak.
Julian Assange is hoping that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department will work out a deal so he can avoid extradition to the United States — even as Assange tried to blame former President Barack Obama for the PR faux pas that has put him in his current predicament.
“We had a major strategic victory in liberating Chelsea Manning,” Assange told Waleed Aly of The Project on Monday. “But, of course, saying I’m willing to accept extradition doesn’t mean I’m saying that I’m willing to be a complete idiot and throw all my lawyers away and so on.”
He added, “We are going to have a discussion with the DoJ about what that looks like. The ball is in their court.”
To me that sound a lot like, "I did my part, now pay up."
Although Assange had previously promised to accept extradition if Manning was released, he quickly reneged on that pledge.
In addition to claiming that Obama only granted clemency to Manning in order to “make life hard” for him, Assange told Aly that “in the end, Barack Obama – wanting, I guess, to look tough – said that my offer had nothing to do with Chelsea Manning being granted clemency, so there is no quid pro quo.”
Poor Julian. I think he crapped in his pants when WikiLeaks announced it wanted someone to leak Trump's tax returns before Julian managed to cut his deal.
Although Assange had previously promised to accept extradition if Manning was released, he quickly reneged on that pledge.
In addition to claiming that Obama only granted clemency to Manning in order to “make life hard” for him, Assange told Aly that “in the end, Barack Obama – wanting, I guess, to look tough – said that my offer had nothing to do with Chelsea Manning being granted clemency, so there is no quid pro quo.”
Poor Julian. I think he crapped in his pants when WikiLeaks announced it wanted someone to leak Trump's tax returns before Julian managed to cut his deal.
7 comments:
Assange, Snowden, Manning and the like have shown more balls than most of the media.
Governments and so-called journalists have been playing footsies for too long.
So if we want to point out the real weasels....
Snowden and Manning, I agree. Assange is riding on their coattails. Nice try, though. Thanks for playing.
Ya just lost me Mound. I thought I knew ya.
Give me a break. You have one habit that's kind of like Trump--a tendency to decide that if someone isn't on your fairly specific side, they're the enemy and a horrible person. Assange is on the side of journalism--not Trump, not Clinton, not me or you either. He releases stuff, and worries about how the cookie crumbles afterwards is not something he is willing to let stop him. That part is up to the public to decide. Do you really think that if someone had leaked him some juicy dirt about Trump he'd have suppressed it?
Sure, there's a side of me that wishes he would selectively put out information damaging to my foes and sit on the rest. But I'm certainly not going to call him a weasel for following a different calling from that.
I think it's pretty horrible, knowing what you know about the US, knowing what you know about how they tortured Chelsea Manning and puh-lenty of other people, that you treat this like some kind of game. Julian Assange has been sitting, effectively imprisoned, with not even exercise in a fucking yard, for years, because the Americans want to drag him off to some pestilential hole and at best put him naked in solitary, at worst waterboard him and stick electrodes in his genitals. So if you were him, you'd just hand yourself over to those psychos? Is that it? Christ.
And no, he's not riding on anyone's coattails. He put Wikileaks together, and it has leaked loads of important stuff over the years, some of which has become widely known, some of which hasn't. You can tell it has to be good both by the efforts that have been made to nobble him personally and by the way huge corporations like Paypal and so on have been willing to tarnish their reputations by blocking their use by Wikileaks in an attempt to financially strangle it.
Give your head a shake and come out of your snit.
I am not your favorite Anonymous person that you delete so don't think I am. But I am remaining anonymous. Purple library guy is correct. You Mound bring on your "snit" mode and no one can even make cute comments sorry to say, you don't get. Do you have a sense of humour?
Not today, Anon. I spent the day with an old friend who got a "get your affairs in order" leukemia diagnosis. That's serious. This blog isn't.
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