The Assange Collusion

Marcy Wheeler observed recently that one reason Mueller couldn’t establish a criminal conspiracy involving Russia and the Trump campaign was that the Trump campaign was able to deal legally with Russian intelligence’s cutout:

Again: Barr lied when he said the report found no collusion.

The report found no illegal conspiracy.

What Stone did was coordinate, legally, with Wikileaks.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 18, 2019

And as the Report reminds us, this ratfucking — which both sowed discord during the DNC and stepped on the Access Hollywood tape — was extensive and important.

In addition, the Libertarian Ratfucker-in-Chief is a genuinely disgusting person:

Julian Assange not only knew that a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer wasn’t his source for thousands of hacked party emails, he was in active contact with his real sources in Russia’s GRU months after Seth Rich’s death. At the same time he was publicly working to shift blame onto the slain staffer “to obscure the source of the materials he was releasing,”  Special Counsel Robert Mueller asserts in his final report on Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

“After the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that Russia was behind the hacking operation, Assange continued to deny that the Clinton materials released by WikiLeaks had come from Russian hacking,” the report reads. “According to media reports, Assange told a U.S. congressman that the DNC hack was an ‘inside job,’  and purported to have ‘physical proof’ that Russians did not give materials to Assange.”

Dragging a murdered person’s family through hell to lie about your ratfucking on behalf of Donald Trump, what a guy.