By now, most of you know that Donald Trump begged Russia to go ahead and leak any Hillary Clinton emails that it has on hand. In so doing, Trump has all but invited an authoritarian country to openly interfere in our politics.
As chilling as that is, there’s another, more fundamental reason why Trump’s call should send a chill down the spine of any fair-minded American. How do you get more frightening than trying to defeat a candidate with foreign espionage? Easy. Using foreign espionage to recklessly endanger the privacy of ordinary American citizens.
The media would like you to believe that the story in the leaked emails was how the DNC put a thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton–and even went as far as to suggest Bernie Sanders’ religious commitment should be fair game. But the 500-pound gorilla in the leak was the massive trove of donors’ personal information contained in many of those emails–Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, home addresses, phone numbers, and passport numbers. Every last bit of this information was completely unredacted.
As outrageous as the DNC staffers’ behavior was, it’s even more outrageous that neither Julian Assange nor anyone else at WikiLeaks even thought about redacting this information once they got it from the Russian hackers who plied into the DNC servers. In the name of exposing corruption at the DNC, they put innocent people at risk for identity theft.
This behavior is the very reason that I turned against WikiLeaks in 2013, when it emerged that it had leaked the unredacted Social Security numbers of American servicemen. Leaking personal information in this manner is unacceptable. Period, full stop. I would be saying this if this leak had targeted the Republican National Committee.
Then again, Assange may have been doing what he was told. John Schindler, the national security columnist at the New York Observer, notes that “anyone versed in counterintelligence and Russian espionage tradecraft” knows that WikiLeaks is a Russian front. Schindler, a former NSA counterintelligence expert, points out that Assange is slavishly pro-Kremlin. Assange has his own show on RT, a Russian agitprop machine masquerading as a cable news network. He has also parroted Vladimir Putin’s line on Syria and a number of other issues. Additionally, WikiLeaks’ spokesman in Russia and Belarus, Israel Shamir, is a former KGB agent who is fanatically loyal to the Kremlin.
To Schindler’s mind, WikiLeaks dropped any pretense of being a champion of democracy when Assange asked if Russian Federal Security Service agents could serve as his bodyguards in the UK Ecuadorian embassy last year. Schindler found it curious at best that a transparency advocate would want the protection of one of the most notorious secret police forces in the world.
“Why Assange wants FSB bodyguards is a question every journalist who encounters Julian henceforth should ask. Until he explains that, Wikileaks should be treated as the front and cut-out for Russian intelligence that it has become, while those who get in bed with Wikileaks — many Western “privacy advocates” are in that group — should be asked their feelings about their own at least indirect ties with Putin’s spy services.”
Let’s review. There is overwhelming evidence that pro-Kremlin hackers got those DNC emails, and then handed them to WikiLeaks to formally leak them to the public. There is equally strong evidence that WikiLeaks, which has amply demonstrated that it has no regard for the privacy of innocent third parties, is on Putin’s payroll.
And now Trump has called for Russia to leak more emails. It’s only fair to ask if Trump condones putting innocent people’s privacy in danger in the name of defeating Hillary. If that’s the case, then it’s yet more evidence that Trump is lying through his teeth–or rather, his hair–when he says, “I’m with you.”
