Wikileaks is a neutral, nonpartisan agency only interested in transparency. An organization that would never contact one side in an election and both solicit help in spreading a story …
“We think it would be great if you guys could comment on / push this story”
And offer messaging advice to that campaign.
“Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us wlsearch.tk”
They’re passive receivers of information. They don’t go out and somehow find websites that haven’t even launched—ones that might be critical of the Russian government.
“A PAC-run anti-Trump site ‘putintrump.org’ is about to launch.”
Not the sort of people who would hack that site and hand the keys over to a campaign.
“We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump’.”
And they absolutely would not do all this in private, through secret messages hidden from the public. Because they’re dedicated to “radical transparency.” Because all those things they would never do … would make it appear that Wikileaks was nothing but an arm of the Russian government’s hacking operation working in coordination with the Trump campaign to boost Trump and shield Putin from any fallout. Which would have been obvious to anyone on the receiving end of those messages.
Donald Trump Jr. has followed his own idea of “radical transparency” which is—dump stuff after he gets caught. Trump Jr. released the emails from Rob Goldstone arranging the Trump Tower meeting, after he was contacted by the New York Times who made it clear they intended to publish those letters. Trump Jr. released the direct messages between his Twitter address and that of Wikileaks after it was clear The Atlantic already had the messages and had published most in an article. Trump Jr. deserves exactly zero credit for cracking open the barn door long after the horses have roamed.
Note that Trump Jr. could release all his communications. He could make it clear if he exchanged other messages with Assange and Wikileaks through email, text messages, or other routes. He could clear up the possibility that he’d talked to other members of the Trump campaign about these messages, or the Trump Tower meeting, or discussions inside the campaign after Papadopoulos let them know that Russia had the stolen DNC emails months before that was made public. He might share his communication with Manafort and Gates. With Flynn and Cohen. Maybe just publish the stream of messages he’d passed on to Hope Hicks so they could be read by his father without officially being read by his father.
But Trump Jr. hasn’t done any of that. Because, like Julian Assange, like Wikileaks, Donald Trump Jr. is not interested in transparency. He’s interested in the illusion of transparency … so long as he calculates that it helps him.
Trump Jr.’s sneering point of the morning is that he only made three replies to Wikileaks. Which is like being only a little bit pregnant. He only coordinated a little with the organization he knew was releasing emails illegally obtained by teams of Russian government hackers. Oh, and there were those other occasions where he didn’t reply to the message from Wikileaks—he just acted on them.
The biggest thing to be learned from the Trump Jr./Wikileaks exchange is just how slimy both sides were. How little concerned they were with the idea of actual honesty or openness. How ready they were to conspire together to give the impression of honesty, while privately snickering at the gullible.
Like when Wikileaks proposed they publish some of Trump’s tax information …
If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality. This is the real kicker. That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing about Clinton will have a much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a “pro-Trump” “pro-Russia” source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.
This statement … is amazing. If Trump Jr. will help sneak Wikileaks some information, they can use it to cover up the fact that they’re helping him … which would really stick it to those bastards who say Wikileaks is helping him.
And hey, isn’t it also amazing that the only website that Wikileaks located for them, and “guessed the password” was the one about Putin?