Election 2016

Report: Wikileaks Refused to Publish Leaks on Russia

Written by SK Ashby

Why didn't Wikileaks publish damaging leaks on Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin in 2016? That kind of information must be floating around out there, right?

According to Foreign Policy, a massive cache of data extracted from Russian computers was shopped around last year but Wikileaks, which was eager to publish every single document concerning Hillary Clinton they could get their hands on, turned down the offer of dirt on mother Russia.

For their part, Wikileaks says they didn't publish the data because it was already available, but that's not exactly true.

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. [...]

In 2014, the BBC and other news outlets reported on the cache, which revealed details about Russian military and intelligence involvement in Ukraine. However, the information from that hack was less than half the data that later became available in 2016, when Assange turned it down.

Wikileaks published John Podesta's risotto recipe and his familial association with the Comet Ping Pong restaurant that would eventually spawn the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory.

The idea that Wikileaks did not find the cache of Russian data to be relevant does not pass the laugh test. I think we all know where their loyalty lies, and it's certainly not with truth or justice.

I'm no fan of CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and his own hands are dirty in this case, but he was right when he said Wikileaks is a "non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia."

TRUMP: Wikileaks! I love Wikileaks.