Wednesday, November 15th 2017 (WASHINGTON) – WikiLeaks has been called many things: a transparency organization, a propaganda outlet for Russia, a hostile intelligence service, an outlet for whistleblowers.
During the 2016 campaign, the self-proclaimed media organization was called a friend by then-candidate Donald Trump after it leaked thousands of hacked emails, revealing damaging information about Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Only weeks before the election, Trump proclaimed, “I love WikiLeaks!” The group had just released a trove of emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account.
The fondness for WikiLeaks expressed by Trump and members of his campaign has been a source of trouble for the president, especially after the intelligence community released its 2016 election assessment identifying WikiLeaks as one of the Russian government’s “cutouts” or “front organizations” used to influence the election.
Trump’s WikiLeaks problem was further aggravated on Monday when The Atlantic reported on the “largely one-sided” correspondence between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks during the presidential campaign and beyond.
“Hey Donald,” read one message from October 12, 2016, “great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link … there’s many great stories there the press are missing.”
Fifteen minutes later, Donald Trump tweeted, “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”
The question raised by the limited communications raise the question of what exactly is WikiLeaks, an innocuous anti-secrecy publication or a weapon of information warfare? Is it a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” as Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo suggested? Or is it an “asylum” for “the world’s most persecuted documents,” as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed?
Shortly after The Atlantic reported on the exchange, Don Jr. released all of his direct messages with WikiLeaks, which he said were “selectively” and “ironically” leaked by one of the congressional committees looking into Russian election interference.
Some congressional investigators seized on the newly public information as further evidence of Russian collusion. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) issued a statement, saying the Twitter messages “seem to indicate that President Trump’s son was actively engaged and may have been coordinating strategy with a known agent of the Russian government, WikiLeaks.” He added that “there seems to be no innocent explanation for these messages.”
Senate Judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) dismissed the back and forth as “very innocuous.” He pointed to Trump Jr.’s limited engagement with the group, which made requests from sharing links to appointing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as U.S. ambassador to Australia.
The top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee Diane Feinstein (Calif.) said the back and forth was serious enough to warrant Donald Trump Jr. appearing before the committee to explain the matter. Both the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees are investigating foreign election interference.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was quick to denounce WikiLeaks as having “blood on their hands.” The group published 400,000 classified Iraq War documents leaked by former U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley “Chelsea” Manning, a leak that some argue put American assets in jeopardy. “They’d be the last group in the world id want to talk to,” Graham said, stopping short of passing judgment on Trump Jr.’s decision to engage.
Despite leading the effort to have the U.S. government to identify and treat WikiLeaks as “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) was unfazed by the revelation. Members of the committee already had access to the transcripts and some are pushing to have Donald Trump Jr. testify publicly about the campaign and Russian collusion allegations.
Trump critics have demanded accountability from the president and those associated with the campaign, essentially arguing that they should have known better than to make common cause with a “known agent of the Russian government.” Experts say WikiLeaks etiology is more complex than some politicians have claimed.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of ‘Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law,’ explained that WikiLeaks has evolved significantly since it was founded in 2006 and even given a handful of awards for journalism and free speech.
“WikiLeaks has undergone a slow transformation from more or less a transparency organization with some anti-western inclinations to pretty closely tied to Russian foreign policy,” he said.
WikiLeaks message to Trump Jr. on election day was “the clincher,” he added, and demonstrated the organization’s “true character.”
The account suggested it would be “much more interesting” if Donald Trump would not concede, but instead “spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred.”
That, Schoenfeld said, “was exactly from the Russian playbook.”
Ben Nimmo, an information defense analyst with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, noted that while it is not possible to deny the connections between Russian election hackers and WikiLeaks publications, he has not seen evidence showing a definitive, conscience link.
“There is a very peculiar nexus between WikiLeaks and the leakers and the Russian intelligence community,” he noted. “The big question is, what is their relationship with Russian intelligence? And we simply don’t know the answer to that one. It is not clear.”
That murkiness may provide cover for Donald Trump Jr. and other members of the Trump campaign who have been criticized for promoting material found in the WikiLeaks datasets. However, it was already clear to the U.S. intelligence community and many others that WikiLeaks should be managed carefully.
“It is not your everyday publisher. It is certainly not your everyday transparency organization,” Nimmo stated. “It’s an organization which would need to be approached with great caution.”
According to sources close the congressional investigation cited in The Atlantic report, Donald Trump Jr. reached out to numerous other senior officials in the Trump campaign after he got the first message from WikiLeaks, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner. However, at no point did Trump Jr. “rebuff” WikiLeaks, even as intelligence assessments showed the group to be in league with Russian intelligence interests.
President Trump has still not publicly disavowed WikiLeaks. CIA director Pompeo denounced the group and “the damage they cause to national security.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in April that arresting Julian Assange was “a priority.”
Schoenfeld suggested that President Trump’s failure to denounce WikiLeaks demonstrates a “basic lack of judgment and loyalty to the country.” He said it shows Trump is “willing to rely on foreign entities to accomplish his goals including the goal of becoming president.”
According to Nimmo, the back and forth communications say more about Wikileaks than it does about Donald Trump Jr.
“Overall, what it really does is shine a very bright light on WikiLeaks, their lack of partiality and the way they were supporting the Trump campaign against the Clinton campaign,” he said. “The big, outstanding question is: On whose behalf? And only WikiLeaks can answer that.”
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