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WikiLeaks founder sought Russian visa in 2010, per AP report
The Associated Press has published a cache of 10 documents that it says are part of a leaked "larger trove of WikiLeaks emails, chat logs, financial records, secretly recorded footage, and other documents." AP reporter Raphael Satter declined to elaborate as to how much more material the AP had or why that material was not being released now.
Among those documents is a purported November 30, 2010 effort by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to seek a Russian visa via its London consulate. That's just a week before Assange surrendered to British authorities who sought him for questioning on behalf of Swedish prosecutors who wanted him on allegations of sexual misconduct. By June 2012, Assange had entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has remained since. Assange has denied any wrongdoing in the Swedish case.
[...] This cache adds intrigue to WikiLeaks' and Assange's ongoing saga. Numerous media outlets reported early last month that Assange's days in the embassy are numbered and that the Ecuadorian authorities could boot him soon. "The files provide both an intimate look at the radical transparency organization and an early hint of Assange's budding relationship with Moscow," Satter wrote.
[...] For its part, WikiLeaks responded shortly after the Associated Press story went live on Monday morning by suggesting that, at a minimum, the visa application document was false, tweeting at numerous media outlets:
Mr. Assange did not apply for such a visa at any time or author the document. The source is document fabricator & paid FBI informant Sigurdur Thordarson who was sentenced to prison for fabricating docs impersonating Assange, multiple frauds & pedophilllia. https://t.co/xzMfhctFx4
Related: Ecuador Reportedly Almost Ready to Hand Julian Assange Over to UK Authorities
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday September 19 2018, @05:36AM (8 children)
It would have been interesting had it been true, but it is a falsehood.
What actually is interesting is how quickly and widely it spread with even the active help of news services like the Associated Press which used to fact check. Too much disinformation is spread via Twitter which is actively tilting the discourse by shadowbanning or suspending supporters, including Julian's mother, at moments like this. IThe summary could have been better. It is poor form that SN is part of spreading lies.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:52AM (4 children)
Lies don't spread like that. Salacious lies do.
Meanwhile, fact checking has always been hard, and Millenials don't do hard. They might have to look something up in a library, or call somebody, or, ugh, travel to interview somebody (then they'll have to bag on the jello-fest performance art at Galapagos this weekend, which is total oh noes).
This lie, in particular, is a stupid lie built on top of a stupid narrative that Russians are some n-dimensional chess players pulling on every string, undermining American democracy, when they can't even run their own country or find a way to extend the average life expectancy of their men past 66 years old by having them not drink themselves to death on bootleg vodka. A country that cannot manage to keep their most valuable geopolitical asset, nuclear ICBMs, in silos that do not fill up with water is not a country that can do anything like what the Establishment wants us to believe.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
Ah, that explains our resident carrion bird!
Damn "Millenials!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @03:34PM
He has joined the forces of poop and refuses to accept responsibility for his own faults. I predict millenials will finally fix the world once these dinos finally over-botox.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 19 2018, @04:16PM
That's not really a millennial thing: As you point out, fact-checking has always been hard, which is why propaganda has always existed. It's been particularly sophisticated since the work of Edward Bernays, who applied psychology to train politicians, PR flaks, business executives, and advertisers on exactly how to bypass humans' rational brains to convince them to believe whatever they've been told to believe.
And the simplest example of how effective propaganda is: Most Americans throughout the Cold War thought that they were on defense, when in fact they were mostly on offense.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @11:32PM
According to Fox News, all of the accusations against President Trump are also fake news.
Why do you trust RT's reporting at face value? For that matter, why do you trust Assange's denial of the story at face value? And does that same logic apply to President Trump when he denies reports of various things?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 19 2018, @04:07PM (1 child)
I'm not sure I'd go with RT as my source for that.
My guess would be that yes, Assange tried to go to Russia when he got word that the US was going to try to have him arrested in the UK, extradited to Sweden on extremely weak charges, and then immediately sent to the US to be on the receiving end of the Chelsea Manning treatment (in case you forgot, years of torture before trial that eventually compelled him to confess to the crime, exactly what the Bill of Rights was supposed to prevent). He would have tried to go anywhere he could where he thought the US couldn't get to him under those conditions. Assange was smart enough to know he needed the aid of a sovereign nation that was not allied with the US to protect himself, the more powerful the better, which means I'd fully expect him to have approached the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans if he had a way to do that, and quite a few other countries before ending up trapped in the embassy of Ecuador.
None of that discredits the information he has leaked so far, of course, but the Grand Trump-Russian Conspiracy requires that any and all communications between anyone thought to be involved in Clinton's loss and the OMG! RUSSIANS!!! be considered "proof".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday September 20 2018, @04:04AM
I'm not sure I'd go with RT as my source for that.
No news site is 100% on all topics, there are varying levels of bias per topic in the best of them. RT is good on some topics. This is one of them. Even so. in all cases, with all decent news sites, you still have to use windage when aiming for the truth.
The Washington Times seems to be the only other one to cover it -- lately. Their article was WikiLeaks denies Julian Assange sought Russian visa [washingtontimes.com]. The fake documents were already dismissed long ago, but it's now permanently buried by the search engines. However Wikileaks is doing a poor job at communicating by attempting to do everything through Twitter instead of running a blog on self-hosted systems.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 19 2018, @05:43PM
It would have been interesting had it been true, but it is a falsehood.
Guy who might've done something shady denies it...
I wouldn't really call that evidence that it's a falsehood. And the summary notes that it's disputed.
So about the worst you can say is that we don't know for sure.