Foreign Affairs
Assange Might Be Trying To Hide Putin’s Involvement In The DNC Leak
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Wikileaks head Julian Assange’s allegation that a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer was the source of the email leak could be an attempt to obfuscate the Kremlin’s involvement.
Assange told Dutch media on Wednesday, he was offering a $20,000 dollar reward for information on the July 10 murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. Assange made this claim, despite claiming in July not to know who the source of the leak was.
The Washington Metropolitan Police Department has not released any information on the circumstances of Rich’s murder. Nevertheless, the allegations may be an attempt to draw attention away from Russia’s complicity in the DNC hack, and Assange’s own connections to the Kremlin.
DNC officials acknowledged in late June the organization had suffered an email hack, and that two independent cyber security expert firms attributed the hack to Russian intelligence agencies. John Schindler, a former NSA analyst and national security expert, noted in The New York Observer that the hackers left behind a signature in Russian and that both groups responsible for the hack are well known Russian intelligence fronts.
U.S. intelligence officials generally consider Wikileaks, the source of the leak, to be an intelligence arm of the Kremlin.
“Some are attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy, and in their attempts to do so, are actually causing more harm than good and impeding on the ability for law enforcement to properly do their job,” Rich family spokesman Brad Bauman told Business Insider on Wednesday. Bauman urged the media to, “refrain from pushing unproven and harmful theories about Seth’s murder.”
Joshua Foust, a National Security Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted as early as early as 2013 in War is Boring, that Wikileaks had quite stark connections to Russia’s intelligence agency. Wikileaks head, Julian Assange, is a paid contributor to RT, a well known Kremlin backed propaganda outlet. Schindler noted in 2015 that Assange reportedly told Snowden “he would be protected by Vladimir Putin and his secret services, notably the FSB.”
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