U.S. Politics

[Tom Graves]

This article from May 2025 by Erik Veland is for all of you Julian Assange lovers out there.

WikiLeaks and the Kremlin’s Useful Idiot

The Revolutionary Who Sold Out

In 2010, at the height of WikiLeaks’ fame, Julian Assange cut a romantic figure: the white-haired hacker-turned-muckraker defiantly releasing Collateral Murder and troves of U.S. diplomatic cables. He was lauded by many on the left as a hero, someone finally holding American power to account. Back then, Assange vowed that WikiLeaks would publish documents on any institution that resisted oversight, insisting “we don’t have targets”. And indeed, in its early years WikiLeaks published a broad array of leaks—from Sarah Palin’s emails to documents on Arab dictatorships and surveillance companies. The organisation’s stated mission was unbiased transparency in the public interest.

But over time, the reality of WikiLeaks diverged sharply from its emancipatory rhetoric. Behind the utopian branding was an organization increasingly driven by Assange’s personal grievances and political alliances. He grew fixated on the United States and its allies, to the exclusion of authoritarian regimes antithetical to his supposed values. By 2016, as one former associate observed, “he never speaks ill of [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin, he never speaks ill of the Chinese. He has an agenda, which is not pure transparency”. That agenda was becoming clear: Whatever Assange’s original ideals, WikiLeaks was fast turning into a geopolitical weapon pointed almost exclusively at the West.

A Turn Toward Moscow

The transformation did not happen overnight. Early hints of Assange’s new loyalties surfaced in 2012, when he struck an odd deal to host a talk show on RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin-funded TV network. On The World Tomorrow—broadcast from house arrest in England—Assange interviewed figures like Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, all under RT’s logo. It was one of the first public signs of a budding relationship between WikiLeaks and the Russian state media apparatus. RT even ended up as the sole live broadcaster when British police finally dragged a bedraggled Assange out of London’s Ecuadorian embassy in 2019, suggesting a coziness that would have been unthinkable for the “anti-establishment” icon a decade prior.

More troubling were revelations about what WikiLeaks chose not to publish. In the summer of 2016—right as WikiLeaks was busy dumping stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—Assange received but refused to publish a massive cache of documents from inside Russia’s own government. At least 68 gigabytes of data from the Russian Interior Ministry were offered to WikiLeaks, containing evidence of Moscow’s military and intelligence operations in Ukraine. This was precisely the kind of material one would expect a fearless transparency organization to champion. Instead, Assange privately stonewalled it. Internal chat logs show him giving “excuse after excuse” and ultimately declining to run the Russian files. The source who provided the data later lamented that publishing it “would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services… Assange gave excuse after excuse”. In the end, the Russian leak was quietly posted elsewhere to little fanfare. WikiLeaks had a chance to embarrass the Kremlin—and passed.

Publicly, Assange’s outfit offered only mealy-mouthed explanations. WikiLeaks claimed it never rejects submissions based on “country of origin,” insisting the Russian files were either already public or couldn’t be verified. But this rings hollow. Credible reporting showed that only a portion of the cache had previously surfaced, and much more new material became available in 2016—the very data Assange refused. By contrast, WikiLeaks eagerly verified and amplified hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton’s staff that same year, even though U.S. officials warned they were procured by Kremlin-directed hackers. The contrast in treatment was glaring. As one Boston University scholar quipped at the time, to be a genuine transparency organisation “you have to be evenhanded,” yet Assange “never speaks ill” of Putin and co. and clearly “has an agenda” beyond pure truth-telling.

So what changed? Part of the answer lies in Assange’s own political resentments. He had nursed a grudge against Hillary Clinton ever since her tenure as Secretary of State during the first WikiLeaks releases. Clinton, for her part, was openly critical of Assange’s tactics and had indirectly been blamed for pushing allies to investigate him. By 2016, Assange made little secret of his desire to see Clinton lose the presidency. “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” WikiLeaks hinted to Donald Trump Jr. in a private message that year, unabashedly suggesting strategies to hurt Clinton’s campaign. In Assange’s mind, Clinton personified the American “deep state” he despised—and if helping her opponent meant indirectly aligning with Russian interests, so be it.

Moscow, which viewed Clinton as hostile to Russian influence, found Assange to be a convenient ally of convenience. Russian intelligence operatives appear to have cultivated WikiLeaks as a cut-out for their own information warfare. In early 2016, Russian military hackers (the GRU) breached the DNC’s network and Clinton’s campaign chairman’s emails. According to a 2017 U.S. intelligence report, the GRU then relayed the stolen material to WikiLeaks for public release. This wasn’t a mere conspiracy theory—it was the consensus of the American intelligence community, affirmed with “high confidence”. By July 2016, an online persona created by Russian operatives (calling itself “Guccifer 2.0”) was privately communicating with WikiLeaks, ultimately transferring a trove of Democratic Party emails to Assange’s organization. In short, Russia hacked, and WikiLeaks dumped.

Whether Assange was a witting participant or a useful idiot remains a subject of debate. But by late 2016 the effect was undeniable: WikiLeaks was effectively acting as a PR arm of the Russian interference campaign. As The Atlantic would later put it, Russia had found in WikiLeaks a perfect “conduit” to launder stolen documents with a sheen of transparency activism. And WikiLeaks for its part showed no compunction about timing its leaks for maximum political damage to Clinton. In early October 2016, just hours after the notorious Access Hollywood tape threatened to sink Donald Trump’s candidacy, WikiLeaks began releasing Clintonworld emails that diverted media attention and hurt the Democrats. This timing was no coincidence, but a strategic salvo. Leaked internal communications later revealed that Trump associates were tipped off in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans. Roger Stone, a Trump adviser, was actively trying to coordinate with Assange that summer on the upcoming “dumps”. All told, the evidence points to an unprecedented synergy between a purported transparency organization, a U.S. political campaign, and Russian spies—an unholy alliance against a common target.

Selective Leaks and Strategic Silences

Perhaps the starkest indictment of WikiLeaks’ transformation is its selectivity. Assange loves to insist that information should flow freely, consequences be damned—yet WikiLeaks’ pipeline mysteriously runs dry when it comes to Putin’s kleptocracy or other regimes unfriendly to the West. It’s not for lack of available material. Russian insiders did try to feed WikiLeaks explosive documents on Moscow’s wars, as we’ve seen, only to be rebuffed. And while WikiLeaks blasted out tens of thousands of Clinton-related files in 2016, it showed no similar zeal to expose, say, the billions pilfered by Putin’s cronies or the Kremlin’s disinformation networks. By 2016, Assange’s outfit had “switched course, focusing almost exclusively on Clinton and her campaign”. Approached that year with another unrelated leak, WikiLeaks demurred, replying, “Is there an election angle? We’re not doing anything until after the election unless it’s… election related”. In other words, the self-declared global transparency force was prioritising American electoral politics above all else. Anything not tied to the U.S. election was deemed “diversionary”. Such calculations betray a clear bias in what was supposed to be impartial truth-telling.

And what about wrongdoing in Russia itself? Assange had famously teased in 2010 that WikiLeaks had dirt on the Kremlin: “We have [compromising materials] about Russia… we will publish these materials soon,” he vowed, promising Russians would learn “a lot of interesting facts about their country”. That never materialised. WikiLeaks did partner with a Russian newspaper to release a handful of U.S. diplomatic cables from Moscow in late 2010, but the project fizzled out, yielding just a few stories. One Russian journalist noted that almost a quarter million Moscow embassy cables were obtained, yet only a “handful” were ever published. Notably, the Russian paper involved, Novaya Gazeta, paid WikiLeaks for exclusive access to the trove —raising questions about WikiLeaks’ motivations. (Assange’s team denies taking payment, but the arrangement remains murky.) In any case, the grand Kremlin exposé Assange promised was quietly shelved. Russians learned little from WikiLeaks about their own leaders’ crimes.

Meanwhile, troubling reports emerged of WikiLeaks suppressing embarrassing revelations about Russia’s allies. In 2012, WikiLeaks received files detailing a €2 billion transaction between the Assad regime in Syria and a Russian state-owned bank. According to leaked court records, someone at WikiLeaks removed or failed to publish those documents, effectively concealing a damning link between Moscow and Damascus. When confronted, WikiLeaks angrily dismissed the claims as “neo-McCarthyist conspiracy theories” pushed by Hillary Clinton’s camp. The pattern was becoming clear: criticise WikiLeaks, and you’re a lackey of the CIA or Clinton; try to expose Russia, and you’re pushing “conspiracies.” Assange’s ostensible moral clarity curdled into the same reflexive whataboutism and denial that Kremlin propagandists use to deflect criticism. It was never WikiLeaks’ role to hold Moscow accountable—only to undermine Russia’s chosen adversaries.

Even Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference underscored WikiLeaks’ one-sided leaking. Mueller’s 2018 indictment of 12 GRU officers laid out in painstaking detail how Russian cyberoperatives hacked Democratic emails and passed them to WikiLeaks via “Guccifer 2.0,” their online persona. Assange, however, repeatedly lied to the public about this. Throughout late 2016 and beyond, he vehemently denied that Russia was his source, peddling alternative theories (including the baseless insinuation that a murdered DNC staffer might have been the leaker). On Fox News and Twitter, Assange trafficked in the “thoroughly debunked” claim that his Clinton email trove might have come from a Democratic insider—not the Kremlin. By doing so, he lent credence to a cruel conspiracy theory and helped Russia obscure its hand. This was not fearless speaking truth to power; it was willful distortion to protect the very power that was benefitting him. As Mike Pompeo, Trump’s own CIA director, later remarked, WikiLeaks increasingly behaved like a “hostile intelligence service” abetted by state actors like Russia. Even Hillary Clinton—once Assange’s prime target—bluntly called him a “tool of Russian intelligence”. Such assessments, coming from across the political spectrum, underscore how far WikiLeaks strayed from being a neutral transparency platform. It became, in effect if not intent, an information laundromat for Kremlin dirty deeds.

2016 and the New Disorder

The WikiLeaks-enabled operation against Clinton in 2016 succeeded beyond Putin’s wildest dreams. Donald Trump, the beneficiary of the DNC/Clinton leaks, eked out a victory and ushered in an era of U.S. foreign-policy chaos that played directly into Moscow’s hands. The fallout from WikiLeaks’ meddling extends far beyond hurt feelings at the DNC. It helped fracture Americans’ trust in democratic institutions and inoculated a generation of online activists to accept stolen, cherry-picked information as just another form of “transparency.” Russia proved it could weaponize openness against an open society—turning America’s free press and fascination with leaks into instruments of election subversion. And Assange was the crucial middleman in that experiment.

The aftershocks have reshaped the geopolitical landscape. Trump’s presidency corroded the transatlantic alliances and global democratic norms that Putin reviles. In Europe, the hack-and-leak playbook was soon redeployed. On the eve of France’s 2017 presidential vote, a dump of Emmanuel Macron’s campaign emails appeared online. Again, a swarm of bots and far-right influencers amplified the leak—and WikiLeaks’ official Twitter account “signal boosted” the hashtag, helping propel the stolen data into the mainstream. (WikiLeaks later even hosted a searchable archive of the Macron emails on its site.) The pattern was familiar: one-sided leaks targeting a liberal candidate, surfacing via opaque actors, then promoted by Assange’s platform to the benefit of Kremlin-aligned figures. Though less effective in France than in the U.S., the Macron episode confirmed that WikiLeaks had become a reliable tool in the arsenal of disruption.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks’ biased leaking and overt partisanship have tainted the very ideal of whistleblowing. Genuine whistleblowers rightly fear being conflated with what WikiLeaks became—a pawn in another country’s propaganda effort. The case of Assange also polarized the public: to some he’s a martyr for press freedom, to others a traitor abetting autocracy. That schism has complicated international efforts to address his fate and has been cynically exploited by both autocratic regimes and populist politicians. Putin’s government, for instance, revels in the spectacle of the West punishing Assange: it allows the Kremlin to posture as a defender of journalistic freedom (even as Russia jails and poisons its own truth-tellers). In reality, Moscow cares for Assange only insofar as he was useful. Internal documents revealed that in late 2017, Russian diplomats and Ecuadorian officials concocted a secret plan to smuggle Assange to Russia—by naming him as an Ecuadorian diplomat and stationing him in Moscow. The scheme fell apart when Britain refused to play along. But the mere fact it was attempted underscores Russia’s vested interest in Assange. Like Edward Snowden, whom Russia granted asylum in 2013, Assange was a prized asset in the information war—a trophy who could both embarrass the U.S. and perhaps be of further service from Moscow. (It’s telling that when Scotland Yard hauled Assange out of the embassy in 2019, the only camera crew on site belonged to Ruptly, an arm of RT. The Kremlin literally had its lens trained on him.)

The cumulative effect of WikiLeaks’ actions has been to embolden a new era of cynical power politics. By helping install Trump and other pro-Kremlin sympathisers, WikiLeaks contributed to weakening the post–Cold War democratic consensus. Internationally, we now see a world where norms of non-interference are eroding—thanks in part to the success of Russia’s interference in 2016. Other state and non-state actors learned the lesson: leaking and disinformation can decisively sway elections, especially in the age of social media. The line between truth-telling and information warfare has blurred. And for that, some responsibility lies at the feet of Julian Assange, who naïvely (or willfully) allowed WikiLeaks to become a vehicle for an authoritarian government’s agenda. The tragic irony is that a project founded to expose state crimes ended up facilitating one of the most brazen acts of geopolitical subterfuge in modern history.

A One-Eyed Messenger: Silent on Ukraine, Vocal on Gaza

If there were any remaining doubt about Assange’s affinities, one need only compare his fervor (or lack thereof) on two of today’s major conflicts: Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza. The contrast is striking. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—a flagrant act of aggression against a sovereign democracy—Assange has been notably silent. Admittedly, from his British prison cell he has limited means to comment. But even WikiLeaks’ supporters and surrogates have shown little appetite to condemn Moscow’s war. You won’t find WikiLeaks publishing leaked Kremlin battle plans or intelligence intercepts exposing Russian atrocities in Bucha or Mariupol. There has been no massive dump of documents on the GRU’s operations in Ukraine, even though such information would be of immense public interest. The absence is telling. Assange’s brand of dissidence stops at Russia’s doorstep.

In fact, Assange has previously echoed the Kremlin’s narrative on Ukraine. In a 2015 interview (during the first phase of Russia’s aggression), he parroted the idea that the real culprit was Western meddling. “The U.S. has long been trying to draw Ukraine into the Western orbit… if not to make it a NATO member,” Assange told an Argentinian newspaper, adding that Russia had issued “numerous warnings” that NATO expansion into Ukraine could trigger civil war. It was a line indistinguishable from Putin’s own talking points—blaming NATO for Russia’s invasions of its neighbor. What Assange did not say was anything critical about Moscow’s role in fomenting the conflict. He offered no sympathy for Ukrainians’ right to determine their own future. In short, even when he did speak on the issue, his stance aligned neatly with Russian disinformation: that Ukraine is merely a pawn and Russia the aggrieved party.

Contrast this with Assange’s very vocal stance on Gaza. When Israel bombards Palestinian territories—admittedly a cause célèbre on the global left—Assange finds his voice again. In late 2024, after weeks of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, the WikiLeaks founder (freed briefly from isolation to address a European forum) delivered an impassioned statement. He inveighed that “artificial intelligence is being used to create mass assassinations” in Gaza, claiming that “the majority of targets in Gaza are bombed as a result of AI targeting”. Assange decried how advanced surveillance and Western weaponry enabled what he described as a “genocidal assault” on the Palestinians. Today, he wore a shirt bearing the names of 4,986 Palestinian children, aged five and under, killed by Israeli forces since 2023 to Cannes. His message on Gaza was amplified by sympathetic outlets and social media, painting Israel (and its U.S. and EU backers) as the chief authors of atrocity. To be sure, criticising the bombing of civilians is entirely correct. But the selectivity of Assange’s outrage is glaring. Here is a man who positions himself as an anti-war truth-teller, yet he reserves his fiercest condemnations for wars involving Western powers or their allies, while giving a pass to wars launched by Russia.

Beyond Ukraine, the pattern of silence persists wherever Russian interests are involved. Consider Sudan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo—conflict zones steeped in brutality, where Russia’s footprint, often via the Wagner Group, has been well-documented. Moscow’s support for authoritarian regimes in Africa, its extraction deals, and its military backing have all attracted international scrutiny—but not from WikiLeaks. Despite its self-anointed status as a global transparency vanguard, the platform has never published major disclosures about Russian operations in these theatres. No leaks exposing Wagner’s atrocities. No internal memos about Kremlin resource deals. No whistleblowers from Russian ministries operating in Africa. The silence is deafening, and revealing. It’s not that no one tries—former WikiLeaks collaborators have confirmed that the organisation routinely turns away submissions that implicate Moscow or its proxies. The inconvenient truth is this: if a conflict bears Russian fingerprints, Assange’s crusade for “truth” tends to look the other way. Selectivity is not transparency—it’s propaganda in the shape of disclosure.

This discrepancy fits a broader pattern of Russian-aligned messaging. For years, the Kremlin has sought to co-opt Western anti-imperialists by stoking outrage at U.S. and Israeli actions, all while Russia wages its own brutal campaigns with far less scrutiny. Assange, whether by ideology or opportunism, fell right into this pattern. He is eager to call out “massacres” by Israel or America, reinforcing narratives popular in Moscow and Tehran, but you will not hear him lambaste Putin for leveling Grozny or Aleppo, let alone Ukrainian cities. It’s a rhetorical blind spot entirely consistent with someone who has thrown in his moral lot with the “anti-Western” camp. In the end, Assange’s principles seem to align not with universal human rights or consistent anti-war ethics, but with a geopolitical agenda that just so happens to mirror the Kremlin’s. Little wonder that Russian state media and diplomats champion Assange’s cause so loudly—they recognise one of their own.

The End of the Myth

It is time to dispense with the myth of Julian Assange as a heroic dissident speaking truth to power. The record shows something far different: a paranoid gadfly who, in trying to tear down Western “imperialism,” readily became a propaganda tool for a rival empire. WikiLeaks, under Assange’s direction, selectively published information to maximise damage to the Kremlin’s enemies and routinely shielded Putin’s regime from similar scrutiny. This is not the praxis of a pure transparency organisation; it is the modus operandi of a political actor serving a specific interest. In a delicious twist of fate, the man who once reveled in exposing secrets now has his own unsavory motivations laid bare. As a scathing 2019 Atlantic critique observed, Assange’s ties to Russian hackers and intelligence “are now beyond dispute”. No amount of self-righteous posturing can obscure that reality.

None of this is to cheer for Assange’s harsh treatment at the hands of the U.S. and U.K. authorities, who have kept him confined and facing espionage charges. One can simultaneously oppose the draconian punishment of Assange as a matter of press freedom and reject the hagiography that paints him as an unblemished truth warrior. Indeed, perhaps the ultimate tragedy of Julian Assange is that he discredited his own cause. By commingling legitimate whistleblowing with foreign espionage plots, he made it easier for governments to crack down on leaks and harder for the public to trust genuine revelations. In the court of public opinion, Assange transformed from a symbol of radical openness to a cautionary tale of how a noble ideal can be warped by ego and geopolitical gamesmanship.

History will likely remember WikiLeaks’ founder not as the leftist hero he once pretended to be, but as a cautionary figure—a man whose hubris and grudges were skillfully manipulated by an authoritarian state. A man, who was instrumental to the current state of the world right now. The tale has elements of classical tragedy: the hubris of assuming one can weaponise any information without being used in turn; the irony of a transparency advocate operating in shadows and half-truths; the fall from visionary to pawn. In the final analysis, Julian Assange wasn’t immune to the oldest pitfall in politics: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In embracing that cynical credo, he betrayed the very principles of accountability and truth that he once championed. The world is more chaotic for it. And the myth of Assange the righteous rebel lies in tatters—another glaring casualty of the disinformation age that WikiLeaks, wittingly or not, helped usher in.

References

Barlow, R. (2017, January 12). Why Julian Assange and WikiLeaks aren’t heroes (Interview with P. Hare). BU Today.

Davidson, J. (2017, Aug 17). WikiLeaks turned down leaks on Russian government during U.S. presidential campaign. Foreign Policy.

Watson, K. (2017, Nov 15). How did WikiLeaks become associated with Russia? CBS News.

Graham, D. A. (2018, Nov 29). Is WikiLeaks a Russian front? The Atlantic.

Weiss, M. (2019, Apr 12). Julian Assange got what he deserved. The Atlantic.

TimePath Wiki. (Retrieved 2025, May 21). WikiLeaks - Timeline. Timepath.

BBC News. (2017, May 9). Macron Leaks: The anatomy of a hack (M. Mohan).

TASS (Assange Interview). (2015, Mar 24). US trying to drive wedge between Russia, Ukraine for years, says Assange.

Palestine Chronicle Staff. (2024, Oct 4). “Artificial Intelligence Used for Mass Assassinations” in Gaza – Julian Assange. The Palestine Chronicle.

Associated Press. (2018, Oct 17). Ecuador tried to move Julian Assange to Russia, new files confirm. The Guardian.

Watson, K. (2017, November 15). How did WikiLeaks become associated with Russia? CBS News.

U.S. Department of Justice. (2018, July 13). Grand Jury indictment: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al. (Case 1:18-cr-00215).

U.S. Intelligence Community. (2017, January 6). Assessing Russian activities and intentions in recent U.S. elections. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ICA 2017-01D).

Institute for the Study of War. (2024). The Kremlin’s Campaign in Africa.

Africa Defense Forum. (2021). Russia’s shadow soldiers.

RBC-Ukraine. (2024, May 20). Explainer: How WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ended up in jail and what awaits him. RBC-Ukraine.

World Socialist Web Site. (2023, October 6). Julian Assange and the fight for democratic rights. WSWS.

Media Lens. (2022, March 17). “Nearly every war has been the result of media lies” – Julian Assange, state-corporate media and Ukraine. Media Lens.

Middle East Eye. (2023, February 9). Russian foreign minister blasts western powers and defends Wagner Group in Sudan. Middle East Eye.

France 24. (2024, June 4). Russian FM Lavrov takes aim at ‘West’ during visit to Congo Brazzaville on Africa tour. France 24.

SBS News. (2018, October 12). Files show plan to move Julian Assange to Russia. SBS News.

Atlantic Council. (2019, April 12). Julian Assange: A life above the rule of law. Atlantic Council.

Wired. (2017, September 19). A WikiLeaks Russia dump reveals just enough—but not too much. Wired.

[John Corbett]

Right now, things are looking good for the Democrats going into the midterms but that can change.  9 months is an eternity in politics. An impressive amount of economic data has been posted but few Americans are going to delve deeply into that data. People vote on how they perceive things are going for them. The single biggest driver of voter turnout is the pissed off factor and that is almost always directed at the party in power. If voters see significant improvement in the area of wages vs. prices, the GOP could survive the midterms. If not, the Democrats will almost certainly take back the House and have a reasonable chance of taking back the Senate, even though they need a net gain of 4 seats to do that. In politics, perception is the reality and unless voters truly believe things are getting better economically, the GOP is in trouble.

[Royell Storing]

  This is exactly why the Dem's want to shutdown the govt. They want to slow the US economy and also stifle the posting of the economic numbers that will reflect a booming US economy. This is what happened as a result of the 1st shutdown. Even if the Dem's take the House and Senate, Trump still has Veto Power. This stalemate is not good for the US. But, the Dems could care less. As usual, this is ALL about Power & Control.   

[Tommy Shanks]

  This is exactly why the Dem's want to shutdown the govt. They want to slow the US economy and also stifle the posting of the economic numbers that will reflect a booming US economy.

Shocker: Royell Storing's "analysis" of the U.S. economy is as flat-out wrong as his analysis of the Dealey Plaza film and photo record.