Conservative pundit Glenn Beck recently took on the question of the morality and ethics of the WikiLeaks DNC email hack – and found some troubling answers.

Speaking on his podcast, Beck noted that whistleblowers need to be protected. He pointed out that he knows of “three or five whistle-blowers” who tried to do the same thing as Edward Snowden – expose corruption in the Department of Homeland Security – who are afraid for their jobs because trying to go through the system didn’t work out for them.

But Snowden’s leak was, Beck says, “important, constitutional stuff, that our own government was violating.” Or at least, he gives Snowden the benefit of the doubt that it was. But “this is just a document dump.”

Beck, once known for his outlandish views and outrageous performance, has recently become a voice of reason and moderation among conservative pundits. [

He’s right. Like most hacked information that WikiLeaks has ever released, the DNC hack contains tens of thousands of emails, placed on a server for public download with no regard as to their content. And much like the 2010 U.S. diplomatic cable leak, which sparked a global diplomatic crisis and put American diplomats and intelligence assets at risk, the DNC email leak ultimately has a lot of potential for disaster.

Beyond that, Beck argues that the DNC isn’t a government institution – it’s a private one, and there should be a certain expectation of privacy in turn.

“Nobody has a right — that’s like breaking into IBM and Apple and just releasing all their documents. You don’t have a right to do that.”

And as his head writer and discussion partner Steve “Stu” Burguiere notes, the moral justification stands on pretty shaky ground.

“I mean, if this had happened to a candidate that I liked, I would be furious about it. And, you know, just because it’s a candidate I don’t like, you know, I’m supposed to embrace it?”

The discussion of the DNC email leak on the Glenn Beck Show comes in the wake of former Republican Presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio’s own stance on the leaks, declaring that he would not read or use the WikiLeaks documents, as reported by The Blaze. And as they note, and Beck reiterates, WikiLeaks – especially their editor-in-chief Julian Assange – is emphatically not a friend of the United States.

“You’ll notice that they haven’t documented — they haven’t document dumped anything on Russia. Nothing on enemies of ours. Only our allies and us. And trying to hurt us with our allies. I don’t trust Julian Assange or WikiLeaks at all.” While Assange continues to hide out at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, WikiLeaks steadily releases more hacked information – all from the DNC. [Image by Carl Court/Getty Images]

He also noted WikiLeaks’ alleged ties to Russia and the mounting evidence that, as reported by Vox, the DNC email hack was almost certainly carried out by a hacker working for Russian intelligence, a conclusion drawn by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which the DNC employed to investigate the hack. They not only found numerous error messages within the leaked documents written in Russian, but, in an interview with the self-professed hacker (who calls himself Guccifer 2.0,) found that he was unable to speak the Romanian he claimed was his native language. Further, two other cybersecurity firms independently examined CrowdStrike’s findings and traced the malware used to infect the DNC back to an IP address used by Russian intelligence in a previous hack on the German parliament.

Finally, Beck notes that there is evidence that some of the emails may have been manipulated – at the very least, erroneous conclusions were drawn from them and posted as fact. One was only spotted when a purported exchange between members of the DNC was recognized by a journalist as his own writing.

As Beck says, “We don’t know what’s true and what’s not coming from them… and for us to give them credibility is bad. Is really, really bad.”

In the long run, though, he holds that concerns about veracity are largely immaterial compared to the ethical question that nobody’s asking.

“So how we are just going ahead and being fine with it — we’re only fine with it because we’re on teams.” “We might be because we would be like, “Eh, Steve Jobs, and that leftist, he finally gets his.” Does that make it better? It doesn’t.” “You would have a better chance of being on the moral right side, if it was law-breaking stuff. But just to release people’s private emails is absolutely morally reprehensible.”

From a dedicated “leftist” to someone very conservative and right-wing – well said, Glenn Beck.

[Featured Image by Rob Kim/Getty Images]