Julian Assange, who received the computer-data from what U.S. President Barack Obama alleges was ‘Russian hackers’, had an opportunity, in his 3 January 2017 interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, to deny the allegation by Craig Murray (a former British Ambassador and longtime friend of Assange) that no Russian or any other hackers were involved passing that information to Wikileaks; and, in reply, Assange declined the invitation to deny it, and he said, in short: Obama and his Administration are flat-out lying about this matter.
Hannity then probed further, to find whom the source actually was:
(See 55:00- in this interview, especially at 56:50-)
Hannity: There was one report in the [UK newspaper] Daily Mail that suggested somebody that you are friendly with, actually was handed the documents at American University, in a wooded area, by a disgruntled Democrat, who felt betrayed because the revelations showed that Bernie Sanders had been betrayed and they didn’t like the corruption of the Clinton Foundation. Can you confirm or deny that?
ASSANGE: Well that statement came from Craig Murray, a friend of mine, but Wikileaks is a source-protection organization. We are famous for never having exposed one of our sources. That’s why sources trust us and they come to us. So, I can’t comment on other people’s statements about our sources, except what we have said, which is that our sources [in this] are not a state party [such as Russia or any other government].
No one — not even Obama — denies that the publisher of the information was Wikileaks. Furthermore, Assange said in this interview (56:50-), “There is one person in the world, and I think it’s actually only one, who knows exactly what is going on with our publications, and that’s me.”
He was saying there that (at least as regards the present matter) he — and perhaps only he in the entire Wikileaks organization — was the person who received and published this information from the individual who was supplying it. This doesn’t necessarily exclude Craig Murray from the possibility that he had passed it along to Wikileaks (i.e., to his friend Assange), but it says that only Assange knows whether or not Murray had supplied it to him. (And Assange refuses to answer that question.)
Craig Murray did, in fact speak at American University in Washington DC, at 10:15 AM on Saturday 24 September 2016, addressing a “World Without War” conference, in the Founders’ Room at the University’s School of International Studies. The video is here. Essential background on this heroic man, Murray, is here, explaining why the U.S. State Department under Obama had initially denied him entrance into the United States to speak at this event and to receive in Washington a whistleblower’s award.
Then on December 10th, buried in an article at Britain’s Guardian, was this blockbuster, which was mentioned there only in passing:
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
(Notice that the U.S. propaganda-system insists upon calling it a ‘hack’, so they can allege that ‘the Russians did it’ and thereby increase the probability of war with Russia, which Barack Obama has been hankering for ever since — at least — when he perpetrated a 2014 coup in Russia’s neighboring country Ukraine so as to get Ukraine into NATO and U.S. missiles five minutes to Moscow.)
The next day (the 11th), Murray headlined at his blog-site “The CIA’s Absence of Conviction”, where he described the Guardian’s efforts to bury that news, and he went on to say that the Democratic Party’s and Obama Administration’s and U.S. ‘news’media’s totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election [of Trump] now wish us to believe are the KGB. [NOTE: The KGB, of course, ended when the Soviet Union did, in 1991.]
It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence-free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive [i.e., from Obama].
Here, then, is the (opening of the) true story, published in Britain’s Daily Mail, on December 14th, of how this information from the computers of the Democratic National Committee and of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Chairman John Podesta managed to reach wikileaks and thereby the U.S. and global public.
![Screen Shot 2017-01-06 at 1.47.17 PM](http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Screen-Shot-2017-01-06-at-1.47.17-PM.png)
Screen Shot, Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails — they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for ‘disgusted’ Democratic whistleblowers
• Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and associate of Julian Assange, told the Dailymail.com he flew to Washington, D.C. for emails
• He claims he had a clandestine hand-off in a wooded area near American University with one of the email sources
• The leakers’ motivation was ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the ’tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders’
• Murray says: ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks’
• ‘Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that,’ Murray insists
• Murray is a controversial figure who was relieved of his post as British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct but is close to Wikileaks
By Alana Goodman In Washington, Dc For Dailymail.com
PUBLISHED: 15:33 EST, 14 December 2016 | UPDATED: 18:01 EST, 14 December 2016
And here is the actual reason that the UK government fired him from UK’s diplomatic corps. But the reason was broader than that, as was also made clear by Murray, in another recent video of him. So: that’s why he’s a ‘controversial figure’, and it’s also why, after his assistance in getting this information out to the public in 2016, he’s even more of a ‘controversial figure’ (i.e, a dissident, a hero) than he had been before.
The Obama-Clinton operation cheated Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic nomination, and that’s why this information became leaked — not hacked — out of the Obama-Clinton-DNC conspiracy. Trump had nothing to do with it; Russia had nothing to do with it.
Here was the lawsuit against the Hillary campaign (and summarized here), that was filed by backers of Bernie, and blocked by the Democratic National Committee. The judge condemned the Hillary side’s ‘shenanigans’ delaying trial. Even after those ‘shenanigans’, the Democratic National Committee said on September 22nd that the case should be thrown out. Two days later, Craig Murray received the information which then became Wikileaked.
Murray received the Hillary-campaign information on September 24th. Little over a week later, on October 7th, Wikileaks published documents from the computer of Hillary’s Campaign Chairman John Podesta, and politico announced it headlining “The most revealing Clinton campaign emails in WikiLeaks release”. That same day, Politico also bannered “Podesta: ‘I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians’,” and the legend that ‘Russia hacked the Clinton campaign’ started immediately to compete in the day’s ‘news’ stories, and diminish focus on, the contents of that information which had been ‘hacked’.
However, the information from the DNC itself had been published much earlier, on July 22nd, and so this could not have come from the September 24th leak. Whether it came from the same person, or through the same courier (i.e., Murray), isn’t yet known. The Obama Administration has made no distinctions between those two data-dumps, but charges that all of the leaks from the Obama-Clinton-DNC conspiracy — both the anti-Sanders campaign during the primaries, and the anti-Trump campaign during the general-election contest — came from ‘Russian hacking’. The reason why the emphasis is upon the anti-Trump portion is that the conspirators now are trying to smear Trump, not Sanders, and so to make this a national issue, instead of only an internal Democratic-Party issue.
They are trying to de-legitimize Trump’s Presidency — and, at the same time, to advance Obama’s aim for the U.S. ultimately to conquer Russia. The mutual hostility between Obama and Trump is intense, but Obama’s hatred of Russia gives added impetus to his post-Presidential campaign here. This Nobel Peace Prize winner had Russia in his gunsights well before he, as a cunning politician, made political hay out of Mitt Romney’s statement that “Russia, this is, without question America’s number one geopolitical foe.”
Only a fool trusts the U.S. government (and the U.S. ‘news’media) after ‘Saddam’s WMD’ (which despite all the lies to the contrary, didn’t exist). Like Craig Murray said, “I used to be the head of the FCO unit that monitored Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and I know for certain, I can tell you, they knew there weren’t any.”
In a December 31st posting at his blog, Murray headlined, “Exit Obama in a Cloud of Disillusion, Delusion and Deceit”, and he opened:
“I had promised myself and my family that on this holiday I would do nothing but relax. However events have overtaken my good intentions. I find myself in the unusual position of having twice been in a position to know directly that governments were lying in globe-shaking events, firstly Iraqi WMD and now the ‘Russian hacks’.”
Being a whistleblower is dangerous, in a criminal regime. But some people have a conscience.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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