The WikiLeaks-Russia connection started way before the 2016 election

Zack Beauchamp · Friday, January 06, 2017, 9:48 am

Julian Assange insists, against all evidence, that the hacked Democratic emails WikiLeaks published didn't come from Russian intelligence services. “Our source is not the Russian government,” he said in a Tuesday interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

This is a touch hard to believe. Publicly available evidence, including unique code and Russian writing in the hacked documents themselves, links the document theft to Russian state-sponsored hacks. Every US intelligence agency that has investigated the issue has concluded Russia is, in fact, responsible. Leaks from their analyses, reported by CNN and the Washington Post, indicate that the US has identified the go-betweens used by Russia to hand documents to WikiLeaks. Assange is either lying or willfully blind to the facts.

Indeed, when it comes to Russia, Assange doesn’t have a ton of credibility.

Throughout WikiLeaks’ existence, the allegedly pro-transparency group has had strange, shadowy, but very well-documented connections to the Russian state. The connections range from sharing purloined documents with a pro-Russian dictator to Assange receiving money for appearing on Russian state TV to WikiLeaks’ key involvement in NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden ending up in Russia.

These incidents don’t prove, as some have alleged, that Assange is some kind of paid Russian agent, or that WikiLeaks is a Russian front organization. But they do show that WikiLeaks, an organization purportedly devoted to transparency, is at a minimum okay with helping out the world’s most aggressively authoritarian leader.

The Kremlin is just as friendly. Russian officials, up to and including Putin himself, have defended Assange and WikiLeaks — with one Russian official even suggesting Assange deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s a strange relationship: a secretive quasi-dictator lining up alongside a group that says it's dedicated to revealing state secrets. But it's the relationship Putin appears to have turned to when he was looking for a trusted ally to leak the emails hacked from Clinton’s circle.

“I don’t necessarily think he’s some sort of paid agent for the Russians,” says Chris Zappone, an editor at The Age newspaper in Assange’s native Australia who has covered Assange’s Russian ties extensively. “But I do think he’s being manipulated by the Russians.”

Source
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia-ties