Russian state-media try and fail to debunk Assange-bombshell.

[DetlefK]

Warning: RT is funded by the russian government and has a habit of lying by omission in its articles. Handle with care.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/481238-assange-trump-rohrabacher-russia-dnc/

Both outlets base their headlines on a revelation from Westminster Magistrates Court, where Assange’s barrister Edward Fitzgerald presented a statement from another attorney, Jennifer Robinson, about US Congressman Dana Rohrabaher “going to see Mr. Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr. Assange… said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”

Though both publications faithfully reproduced Fitzgerald’s quote, they both jumped to the exact same conclusion, presenting Robinson’s statement as proof that Trump sought to “deny” or “cover up” what they treat as the established fact – i.e. the ‘Russian hack’ of the DNC, and the subsequent publication of internal party emails.

Never mind that the ‘Russian hack’ has only been alleged by Mueller’s prosecutors and the US intelligence community – the same one that spied on Trump during and after the 2016 election – the main story around which this malicious misinterpretation resolves isn’t even true.

While Rohrabacher did visit Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, he said it was Assange who showed him “definitive proof that Russia was not the source” for the DNC emails, according to a February 2018 report in the Intercept.

Yeah!!!!!

That Assange-bombshell is fake!!!!!

Because the media jumped to a conclusion!!!!!

Because just because Mueller and the US intelligence-community say that Russia meddled, that does NOT make it a fact!!!!!!

HAHA!!!



And you know what? Assange actually said that he has proof that it wasn't the Russians! Yeah, take that you filthy western imperialists!

That's my story and I'm sticking to it and let's not bring up this OTHER interview from August 2017 where Assange took great pains to perform a ridiculous song-and-dance number to neither confirm nor deny that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.

Nope, we are NOT talking about that, because it would ruin my talking-point how Assange says it wasn't the Russians.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-latest-mueller-indictment-reveals-about-wikileaks-ties-to-russia-and-what-it-doesnt

What he did say is that he did not receive the e-mails from the Kremlin; as he told Sean Hannity, on Fox News, “Our source is not the Russian government, and it is not a state party.” It is hard to know how he could say such a thing definitively, especially since the G.R.U. frequently worked through fronts, but when I asked him if he knew the full chain of custody of the e-mails he abruptly told me, “I’m not going into sourcing.”

...

“It’s bad form to rule people out,” he told me. Then Assange invoked a strange, transitive argument: because he had already declared that his source was not a state, he was willing to deny that Guccifer 2.0 was his source only in a context in which the persona was being defined as a state-run entity. Clearly, whether or not WikiLeaks received material from Guccifer 2.0’s handlers had nothing to do with how it was defined; he either had obtained the e-mails from the entity or he had not.

...

“I understand the political value to WikiLeaks in a denial. I also understand that if one day someone is arrested for being our source they may want to preserve the Guccifer 2.0 option.” In other words, he did not want to publicly rule out the persona as a source, because he wanted to give a hypothetically accused third party plausible deniability, since Guccifer 2.0 had claimed to be his source. (When he realized that I was ready to publish this, he tried to retroactively pull it off the record.) After kicking around other possible responses, all of them vague, he returned to his original, a denial contingent on how one defined the persona: “If there is a claim that Guccifer 2.0 is a state officer, then it’s easy to give a no answer without giving away more information.”