Assange Went Hard on Hillary, Limp on the Kremlin

A lot of people started smelling a rat when Julian Assange went a little bizarre during his latter years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.  Something wasn't right. Something else was going on.

Now it's reported that, while Julian Assange focused on dumping emails intended to damage Hillary Clinton's chances in the 2016 presidential election, he spiked a treasure trove of leaked documents damaging to the Kremlin.

In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records.

WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.

“We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services,” the source who provided the messages wrote to FP. “Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse.”

The Russian cache was eventually quietly published online elsewhere, to almost no attention or scrutiny.

In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of potentially damaging emails about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign, information the U.S. intelligence community believes was hacked as part of a Kremlin-directed campaign. Assange’s role in publishing the leaks sparked allegations that he was advancing a Russian-backed agenda.

Back in 2010, Assange vowed to publish documents on any institution that resisted oversight.

Is this conclusive evidence that Assange has gone rogue? Not really. Then again I haven't seen the stuff Assange rejected and, I suspect, neither have you. It could be a smoking gun, I don't know. What I do know is that this adds to previous evidence suggesting that Julian Assange may be using WikiLeaks selectively to advance a personal agenda. That I find all too believable.