Caitlin Johnstone
CNN has published an
unbelievably brazen and dishonest smear piece on Julian Assange, easily the
most egregious article of its kind since the notoriously bogus Assange-Manafort
report by The Guardian last year. It contains none of the
“exclusive” documents which it claims substantiate its smears, relying solely
on vague unsubstantiated assertions and easily debunked lies to paint the
WikiLeaks founder in a negative light.
And let’s be clear right off
the bat, it is most certainly a smear piece. The article, titled “Exclusive: Security
reports reveal how Assange turned an embassy into a command post for election
meddling”, admits that it exists for the sole purpose of tarnishing Assange’s
reputation when it
reports, with no evidence whatsoever, that while at the Ecuadorian embassy
Assange once “smeared feces on the walls out of anger.” Not “reportedly”.
Not “the Ecuadorian government claims.” CNN reported it as a fact, as an event
that is known to have happened. This is journalistic malpractice, and it isn’t
an accident.
Whenever you see any “news”
report citing this claim, you are witnessing a standard
smear tactic of the plutocratic media. Whenever you see them citing
this claim as a concrete, verified fact, you are witnessing an especially
aggressive and deliberate psyop. The Ecuadorian embassy was easily the most-surveilled
building in the world during Assange’s stay there, and the Ecuadorian
government has
leaked photos of Assange’s living quarters to the media in an attempt
to paint him as a messy houseguest in need of eviction, so if the “feces on the
walls” event had ever transpired you would have seen photos of it, whether you
wanted to or not. It never happened.
SCOOP: New documents obtained
exclusively by CNN reveal that Assange received in-person deliveries,
potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 election, during a series
of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. w/ @kguerrerocnn https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/assange-embassy-exclusive-documents/index.html …
Exclusive: Security reports reveal how Assange
turned an embassy into a command post for election...
“New documents obtained
exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person
deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election,
during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,”
the article begins.
In its very first sentence the
article invalidates all the claims which follow it, because its use of the word
“potentially” means that none of the documents CNN purports to have contain any
actual evidence. It’s worth noting at this time that there is to this day not
one shred of publicly available evidence that any of the Democratic Party
emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016 were in fact “hacked” at all, and could
very well have been the result of a leak as
asserted by former British ambassador Craig Murray, who claims to have
inside knowledge on the matter.
The glaring plot holes in the
Mueller report’s assertions about Russia being the source of the 2016 WikiLeaks
drops have already been ripped wide open by journalist Aaron Maté’s
meticulous analysis of the report’s timeline in an article accurately titled “CrowdStrikeOut:
Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims“. The CNN
smear piece, which claims to “add
a new dimension to the Mueller report”, is entirely relying on this porous
timeline for its reporting. Plot holes include the fact that Mueller claims
(and CNN repeats) that the Russians transferred the emails to WikiLeaks on or
around July 14, which Maté notes is “a full month after Assange publicly
announced that he had them.”
CNN kicks off its smear piece
with the inflammatory
claim that “Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at
critical moments”, mentioning both “Russians” and “hackers” in the same breath
in an attempt to give the impression that the two are related. It’s not until
paragraph 43 and 46, long after
most people have stopped reading, that the articles authors bother to inform
their readers that the “hackers” in question are German and have no established
connection to the Russian government whatsoever. The “Russians”
counted among Assange’s scores of visitors consist of RT staff, who have always
consistently reported on WikiLeaks, and a “Russian national” about whom almost nothing is
known.
The article falsely
labels Assange a “hacker”, a defamatory
claim the mass media circulates whenever it wants to tarnish Assange’s
reputation. Assange, of course, is a publisher. WikiLeaks publishes materials
which are given to it, it doesn’t “hack” them.
· 17h
.@CNN puts out the claim that @RT published articles about Podesta e-mails
before @wikileaks even released
them. A serious claim for which CNN scrupulously fails to provide evidence.
That is a LIE that's been
debunked over and over. We published ONE article about the emails that were
RELEASED already, just not TWEETED about yet, because WikiLeaks had been
releasing them like clockwork and we paid attention. It's called journalism, they
should try it sometime.
CNN also repeats the long-debunked
lie that RT “published articles detailing the new batches of emails
before WikiLeaks officially released them” during the 2016 election, citing no
evidence because this never happened. RT reported on a
WikiLeaks release in October 2016 after it had been published by
WikiLeaks but before the WikiLeaks Twitter account had tweeted about it, and
western propagandists willfully conflated WikiLeaks publications with tweets
from the WikiLeaks Twitter account in order to make it look like RT had insider
knowledge about the publications.
In reality, RT was simply
watching the WikiLeaks site closely for new releases in order to get an early
scoop before other outlets, because Podesta email leaks had been dropping
regularly.
“That is a LIE that’s been
debunked over and over,” tweeted RT
America editor Nebojša Malić in response to the smear. “We published ONE
article about the emails that were RELEASED already, just not TWEETED about
yet, because WikiLeaks had been releasing them like clockwork and we paid
attention. It’s called journalism, they should try it sometime.”
“Yes that is fake news,” tweeted RT’s
Ivor Crotty. “I was the editor on the team that monitored wikileaks and by
Podesta 6 we knew they tweeted at 9am EST each day (1pm Dublin) – so we checked
the database by reverse searching and discovered a new dump, tweeted about it,
and the conspiracy theorists jumped.”
“RT already addressed this in
2016, convincingly if you read the sequence of events they lay out: the Podesta
emails appeared on the WikiLeaks website before WikiLeaks sent a tweet about
it,” Maté tweeted at
CNN’s Marshall Cohen. “Ignoring that allows for the conspiracy theory you
propose. It’s ridiculous to suggest that RT-Wikileaks ‘were coordinating behind
the scenes’ based on the fact that RT tweeted about the Podesta emails AFTER
they appeared on WL’s site, but BEFORE WL tweeted about them.
You’re implicating RT in a
conspiracy… for doing journalism.”
It’s not possible to research
the “RT had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks drops” conspiracy theory without
running across articles which debunked it at the time, so the article’s authors
were likely either knowingly lying or taking dictation from someone who was.
“Spanish newspaper El Pais on
July 9: ‘Spanish
security company spied on Julian Assange’s meetings with lawyers‘. Add
little security state propaganda and 6 days later you get from CNN: ‘How Julian
Assange turned an embassy into command post for election meddling’,” noted Shadowproofmanaging
editor Kevin Gosztola in response to the CNN smear, a reminder of how a little
narrative tweaking can turn a story on its head in support of the powerful.
This would be the same CNN who
told its viewers that it’s against the law to read WikiLeaks, with Democratic
Party prince Chris Cuomo lying “Remember,
it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents; it’s different for the media,
so everything you learn about this you’re learning from us.” The same CNN which
falsely reported that Assange is a pedophile not once,
but twice.
The same CNN which has been
caught blatantly lying in its Russiagate coverage, which has had
to fire journalists for misreporting Russiagate in a media environment
where that almost never happens with Russia stories, which has deleted
evidence of its journalistic malpractice regarding Russiagate from the
internet without retraction or apology.
So this latest attempt to
tarnish Julian Assange’s reputation from CNN is not surprising. Nor is it
surprising that the article contains exactly zero of the “exclusive documents”
which it says validate its claims and insinuations. Nor is it surprising that
CNN is using invisible evidence which almost certainly came
into its hands through a government agency to give weight to its smear. But the
sheer volume of disinformation and deceit they were able to pack into one
single article this time around was just jaw-dropping. Even for CNN.
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