Why Is Assange Helping Trump?

Jonathan Freedland

... Quito will have seen the US opinion polls and have concluded that Hillary Clinton is on her way to winning the White House. Why not try to earn some credit with the presumed incoming president by taking action against the man who is causing her such trouble? By turning off his Internet, Ecuador hopes to stop Assange causing any more damage to the Democratic candidate. Doubtless they hope their good turn will be remembered when Ecuador needs the help of the second President Clinton.

Which is not to say that the foreign ministry can justify its action only in terms of pragmatic self-interest. It believes a principle is at stake too. As it declared in its statement on Tuesday, Ecuador “respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states.” In its mind, WikiLeaks’s publication in recent weeks of “a wealth of documents, impacting on the US election campaign,” has represented a violation of that no-meddling rule.

And Ecuador has a point. The traffic in leaked texts has been entirely one-way: it’s been all Clinton, all the time. In July, Assange signaled a glum even-handedness when asked whether he backed Trump or Clinton: “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea.” But that’s not how it’s played out. WikiLeaks has not released, say, the elusive tax returns of Donald Trump—which might have confirmed his all-but-admitted non-payment of federal income tax over the last two decade—or those much sought-after outtakes from The Apprentice, which are rumored to supply yet more proof of his boorish, if not predatory, attitude to women. Or indeed anything which would discomfort both candidates rather than just one ...

It would be a mistake to view this merely as an anti-Clinton intervention in the US election. It is positively pro-Trump. That’s borne out not only by the one-sided nature of the disclosures but also by Trump’s curious comments about them. In July, he seemed to applaud the Russian hack of the DNC, calling on Russia to go further and find Clinton’s missing emails. (Admittedly, he had changed tack by the second presidential debate, insisting that, “I know nothing about Russia.”) ...

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/19/wikileaks-why-is-assange-helping-trump/