The problem was obvious. WikiLeaks, like many journalistic organizations, has long insisted on keeping its sources secret. However, Assange was not merely maintaining silence; he was actively pushing a narrative about his sourcing, in which Russia was not involved. He once told me, “WikiLeaks is providing a reference set to undeniably true information about the world.” But what if, in the interest of source protection, he was advancing a falsehood that was more significant than the reference set itself? Arguably, his election publications only underscored what was known about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton. His denials, meanwhile, potentially obfuscated an act of information warfare between two nuclear-armed powers. [...]
Conventional journalism is often an incremental, inefficient process, built on chains of personal trust: between sources and reporters, reporters and editors, editors and readers. Assange has difficulties with the messiness of trust, and in WikiLeaks he invented a system that made it largely unnecessary. By design, the WikiLeaks site prevents him from knowing where submissions come from, so there is no need to trust that he will keep a source’s identity a secret. (In practice, he readily accepts material in less than anonymous ways.) There is no need to trust his editorial judgment, either, because he has vowed to publish everything in full, in as pristine a form as possible. WikiLeaks, in Assange’s ideal, is a populist machine, delivering unmediated secret information directly to readers. [...]
But Assange’s argument made little sense. The Swedish extradition process requires the approval of the nation’s Supreme Court; thus, the scenario that Assange was proposing—a geopolitical plot to use his sex-crimes case as a pretext to deliver him to the United States—would require at least three high justices to act as conspirators. If this were not reason enough for skepticism, under the rules governing European arrest warrants Sweden could not extradite Assange to the U.S. without British approval; in other words, shipping him to Stockholm would only add a layer of bureaucratic obstacles for Washington. In any event, Swedish law prohibits extraditions for “political crimes,” which include espionage, and for cases eligible for the death penalty. [...]
For nearly half a decade, Assange had been cultivating a dislike of Clinton that was partly personal and partly philosophical. Clinton, he suspected, had wanted to assassinate him, and was instrumental in aggravating his conflict with Sweden. Moreover, he saw her as the main gear of a political machine that encompassed Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and overseas client nations, like Saudi Arabia. “She’s the smooth central representation of all that,” he once said. “And ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States.” [...]
At times, though, Assange has had questionable associations. In 2010, Israel Shamir, a controversial Russian with extremist views, visited him at Ellingham Hall. (Shamir, a convert from Judaism to Greek Orthodox Christianity, has written several anti-Semitic screeds.) Some WikiLeaks volunteers viewed him as an eccentric hanger-on; some suspected that he had ties to Russian intelligence. During one visit, Assange—who had become lax in his attitude toward the State Department trove—gave him more than ninety thousand unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables concerning Russia, former Soviet-bloc countries, and Israel. Shamir sold some of the material to a magazine friendly to the Kremlin, and delivered other parts of it to Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian leader, who used them to arrest opposition figures. (Shamir denies this, citing “a malicious invention by my detractors.”) One Belarusian activist later told the Web site Tablet, “I really hate WikiLeaks. How can they do this? The KGB is telling these people, ‘Your name is in the American cables and you are a traitor, an American agent, and you will be treated like an enemy.’ ” [...]
Assange told me that, as he negotiated the deal, he pushed for editorial freedom. He asked RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, if he could host Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader. “She said, ‘The Kremlin won’t like it, but it would be good for us, because it will show our independence,’ ” he recalled. He then asked about inviting a Chechen terrorist, and got an unambiguous no. Laughing at the memory, he said, “That’s the line: all the way up to a Chechen terrorist.” Assange did invite Navalny, who declined. Navalny’s spokesperson told me that he believed it was indecent to have any contact with RT, saying, “This channel is associated with the spread of lies and propaganda, including about many opposition activists.” [...]
This kind of judgment—deciding what is signal and what is noise—is precisely what Assange’s system was designed to eliminate. In his campaign publications, the results were clear. There were stories of genuine import: an episode in which Donna Brazile, a CNN commentator who became the head of the D.N.C., illicitly leaked debate questions to Clinton; others in which Clinton seemed uncomfortably close to selling political access in exchange for large donations to her family foundation. But there were also thousands of pages of trivia, some of which did harm. E-mail conversations about a pizza place in Washington were spun into a conspiracy theory about child pornography, which ended in an armed attack. The leaks revealed staffers’ personal e-mail addresses and cell-phone numbers and, in one case, a voice mail that captures a parent and a child together at the zoo. Above all, the steady drip from WikiLeaks, always promising some bigger revelation, distracted from an essential inquiry into whether the country’s national sovereignty had been breached. For more than a year, it has often seemed that there is nothing but noise. [...]
In a later conversation, I urged him to articulate a coherent view of Trump, but the prospect seemed to pain him. “It’s hard to sum up in the current climate of polarization,” he told me. It seemed his main concern was that by criticizing Trump he would somehow appear to validate the previous norms of American politics. “Governments are evil,” he told me. “The last government was evil. This government is evil. Does the Trump Administration appear to have a potential to be uniquely bad? Maybe. But in many other respects it’s the same problem that existed under Obama. The difference is that now everyone is talking about it. What is associated with this Administration is a certain aggressive rhetoric, which can make the problem worse if people accept it; on the other hand, it also makes everyone pay attention to problems that have been there for a long time.” He told me that, whatever Trump’s flaws, his Administration had the capacity to challenge entrenched power in Washington, and to disrupt the structure of American power overseas. “I will give you a list of counterintuitive structural positives,” he told me. Several days later, he presented a set of ideas that could be distilled into one: “A complaint from civil libertarians and constitutional scholars is that the power of the Presidency is too strong. O.K., it has been reduced now.”
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