Tulsi Gabbard on assange: what the evidence says · JRE #2143

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

The underlying claim that opinion turned sharply against Assange after the 2016 releases is well supported: former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told NPR that Assange went from being regarded as a champion of press freedoms to a virtual pariah, attributing the shift to the 2016 leaking of the DNC emails, after which people felt Assange had changed into more of an activist than a journalist. The specific phrase Hillary Clinton's emails is imprecise, however. What WikiLeaks published in 2016 was internal Democratic National Committee staff email (July 2016) and roughly 20,000 messages stolen from the personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta (October to November 2016), not messages from Clinton's own private State Department server, which was a separate FBI matter. A 2018 federal indictment attributes the DNC, DCCC, and Podesta thefts to Russian military intelligence officers, who released the material via DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, and another organization. So the reputational shift is real and tied to that episode, but the emails were the DNC and Podesta files rather than Clinton's own emails.