Some reports about Michael Cohen’s statements to Congress are inaccurate, and none of them tell us much that is new about WikiLeaks. As often happens in mainstream media (MSM) reporting about Julian Assange, he is loosely called a ‘hacker’ rather than a publisher.

Early on 28 February, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation told its radio listeners that WikiLeaks had hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The New York Times got it right, reporting in advance of Cohen’s appearance on 27 February that he would say a Trump adviser was communicating with WikiLeaks and had given the President advance notice about the release of Democratic emails which had been hacked by Russia (?)

It has been reported since September 2016 that Donald Trump Jr. was in contact with WikiLeaks, and if CNN knew this, it’s unlikely that the President didn’t. The only revelation from Cohen about WikiLeaks is the name of Roger Stone as the man who told President Trump in advance that emails hacked from the Clinton campaign were to appear on WikiLeaks. What we still don’t know is who inside the DNC was the hacker.

Opinions about Assange vary according to how he serves their interests. Sarah Palin and Fox News in 2010 said WikiLeaks should be listed as a terrorist organization (The WikiLeaks Files: the world according to US empire, with an introduction by Julian Assange, London: Verso, 2015). But after the DNC emails appeared, Palin, Sean Hannity, and Australian politician Pauline Hanson supported him. Republican politicians expressed fury at the time, accusing Assange of treason, and Donald Trump himself told a CNN interviewer: ‘I think it’s disgraceful, I think there should be like death penalty or something’.

Then, during the election campaign, a grateful Trump said the Democrats were in meltdown and told a rally ‘I love WikiLeaks.’ Under his new Administration, however, Trump’s Attorney-General Jeff Sessions made arresting Assange a priority. As CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who’d been a fan of WikiLeaks during the campaign, said it was time to ‘call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia’. Assange, he added, is not a US citizen so he has no First Amendment freedoms (David Smith, Guardian, Friday 21 April 2017). The stakes are high for Assange. A former senior official in the Reagan administration, Craig Roberts, asserted that ‘there is a concerted effort to nail him – to shut [Assange] up…If the legal attempt fails, he’ll simply be assassinated by a CIA assault team. It’s common practice for the CIA to do that’ (Kellie Tranter).

Julian Assange has asserted that WikiLeaks didn’t receive the emails from the Russian state, adding that many of the 800 000 documents WikiLeaks has published about Russia have been critical. Trump and Hillary Clinton can’t both be right about WikiLeaks. In October 2017 Hillary Clinton told the ABC’s Four Corners that Julian Assange was ‘very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence…he has done their bidding.’ He was, said Clinton, ‘a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator.’ As Secretary of State, she had called Assange a traitor for publishing the Iraq war logs and US diplomatic cables, and others in Congress called for his execution.

But demanding interception of others’ communications was Clinton’s forte, not Assange’s. WikiLeaks revealed that in 2009 she asked for details about UN officials’ passwords and encryption keys for private and commercial networks, and in 2010 she authorized and intelligence-gathering campaign against the leadership of the UN and selected members of the UN Security Council. As well, she doubled arms sales to Saudi Arabia, pushed for the raid by the US, UK, and France on Libya in which 40 000 Libyans died, cheered Gaddafi’s brutal assassination, and the death of Osama bin Laden. Assange reminded John Pilger in a 2016 interview that she saw all this as supporting her coming presidential campaign. Clearly, the WikiLeaks publisher doesn’t love Clinton, nor she him, and the timing of his pre-election release damaged her cause.

When WikiLeaks revealed that in 2009 Clinton had asked for details about UN officials’ private communications and in 2010 had authorized intelligence gathering from selected UN leaders and Security Council members, she denounced digital transparency as ‘an attack on the international community’ and WikiLeaks as a ‘danger to the world’ (Hillary Clinton, cit. Perry Link, ‘How China fears the Middle East revolutions,’ NYRB, 24 March 2011, pp. 21-2). She told Australians Assange was ‘very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence…a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator’ (ABC ‘4 Corners,’ 16 October 2017). She wanted to ‘just drone him’ for releasing the DNC emails, she said on 3 October 2016 (Guardian, 14 November 2017). Wikileaks then released the Podesta emails which were widely reported in the MSM as indicating Clinton knew of Saudi and Qatari involvement in funding and otherwise supporting IS, America’s nominal enemy (B. McKernon, ‘Hillary Clinton emails leak: Wikileaks documents claim Democratic nominee “thinks Saudi Arabia and Qatar fund Isis”’, The Independent, 11 October 2016). Internal conversations between DNC members published by WikiLeaks in 2016 showed among other things their collusion to undermine Bernie Sanders (Caitlyn Johnstone, Medium, 10 May 2018). WikiLeaks also released documents revealing the hacking methods of the CIA (Jacquelin Magnay, ‘Assange rejects embassy exit deal’, TWA, 8-9 December 2018: 10).

Assange remains a target for character assassins, for whom ‘nihilist’ is a favorite term of abuse. ‘Assange is no dreamer: he’s a nihilistic wrecker who’ll revel in our ruins,’ David Aaronovitch informed readers of The Times (17 November 2017, Australian: 11). ’We had long known about the role WikiLeaks played in releasing emails stolen from the Clinton campaign by Russian hackers,’ he added, noting that Sputnik news agency carried WikiLeaks material, but didn’t mention that the Guardian, the New York Times and German papers had done the same. Lacking a criminal charge to cite against Assange, he dissected his personality: as a nihilist, he is ‘only made whole by bringing down others’. He accused Assange, if he’s guilty of no crime, of guilt by association: Farage, Trump, Putin, and Assange were joined in a commitment to ‘disrupt the West’. These four, Aaronovitch assured readers, are ‘the gamers, the nihilists and the disrupters…who don’t want you to be happy.’

What WikiLeaks has disrupted is the system by which governments, media, internet mega-companies, and intelligence agencies can hack and collect our data unaccountably and at will. Assange has made them unhappy by revealing their loot. So journalists like Aaronovitch are unhappy and vengeful. Whatever the results of current investigations of the 2016 election and Russian activities, they will be used to implicate, not exonerate Julian Assange.

Britain was reported to have written to Ecuador guaranteeing that if he left the Embassy, Assange would not be extradited to a country with the death penalty, an assurance he did not trust. In March 2018 Assange was silenced by having his access to the Internet, telephone and visitors cut off. The following month the Democratic National Committee filed suit alleging conspiracy against the Russian government, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks (Guardian 16 May 2018). In November 2018, US prosecutors admitted they had unexpectedly obtained a sealed indictment against Assange, including a complaint, supporting affidavit, and arrest warrant, intended to be kept sealed until his arrest, so that he could ‘no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter’ (‘Accidental filing reveals US Assange indictment’, TWA 17-18 November 2018: 15).

The MSM credulously recited what the Guardian’s Luke Harding, a declared opponent of Assange, reported: that he had met with Paul Manafort three times in the Embassy to talk about passing Clinton’s and Democrat Party emails to Russia. This was false, Craig Murray, a former UK ambassador, asserted. The Murdoch press, no supporter of Assange, reported the Manafort meeting just two weeks before changing its mind and calling it ‘an absurd and incompetent story’ (Cameron Stewart, ‘Bombshells and bloopers’, Australian, 4 February 2019: 11. ‘Embassy asked to spill on Assange’, Weekend Australian, 19-20 January 2019: 13).

In 2015 Australia’s then Attorney-General, George Brandis, stated that Assange had broken no Australian or US law; but Prime Minister Scott Morrison repeated in November 2018 that his government would not help Assange. Even an Australian commentator who said she was ‘over Assange’ pointed out that no justice can be delivered ‘for skipping bail on a feeble charge that has since been dropped, a refusal to deny extradition intentions, secret charges emerging from a secret court over an act that may not even be illegal and for which the principal culprit has already been pardoned’ (Elizabeth Farrelly, ‘Tedious, but Assange still deserves justice,’ SMH 8-9 December 2018: 32-3).