Julia Ioffe, a journalist who has written extensively about Putin and Russia, wrote in The Columbia Journalism Review that the RT network began in 2005 “as a soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad, to counter the anti-Russian bias the Kremlin saw in the Western media.”29 However, Ioffe wrote, today the network has “become better known as an extension of former President Vladimir Putin’s confrontational foreign policy.”30
Powerful Russian financial backing has given RT the legitimacy of many international news agencies. They use it to pay American contrarians to appear on their RT America channel and offer an air of debate, frequently on Kremlin-directed themes. Not surprisingly, Assange hosted his own twelve-episode television show called The World Tomorrow, or simply, The Julian Assange Show. It ran from April to June 2012, airing from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The Guardian journalist Luke Harding, who was the paper’s Moscow correspondent from 2007 until 2011, referred to Assange as a “useful idiot” in a review of the show.31 Assange’s first interview was with Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group who hadn’t spoken to the media for six years, but Harding writes it “wasn’t quite the incendiary event that Russia Today had promised.” He continues, “The questions were clearly agreed in advance. Some were softball, others fawning, with Nasrallah’s answers unchallenged.”32 In a preview posted by RT on April 16, 2012, Assange said he imagined forthcoming criticism: “There’s Julian Assange, enemy combatant, traitor, getting into bed with the Kremlin and interviewing terrible radicals from around the world.”33 In response to this expected critique, he said, “If they actually look at how the show is made: we make it, we have complete editorial control, we believe that all media organizations have an angle, all media organizations have an issue.34
A year and a half earlier, events unfolded that indicate a connection between Assange and Russia. Princeton University professor of American History Sean Wilentz writes in The New Republic: In October 2010, just before WikiLeaks reached the acme of its influence with the release of the State Department cables, Assange vowed that WikiLeaks would expose the secrets not just of the United States but of all repressive regimes, including that of Russia. In an interview with Izvestia, a formerly state-controlled daily, he explained, “We have [compromising materials] about your government and businessmen.” The same day, Kristinn Hrafnsson of WikiLeaks told a reporter, “Russian readers will learn a lot about their country.”
Unlike the Americans, though, the Russians put WikiLeaks on notice. The day after Hrafnsson’s interview appeared, an anonymous official from Russia’s secret police, the FSB, told the independent Russian news website LifeNews.ru, “It’s essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever.”
Then, something strange happened: A few days after Assange was arrested on sexual assault charges, Kremlin officials emerged as his most vocal defender. The Moscow Times reported that Vladimir Putin himself had condemned Assange’s arrest: “If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That’s what, democracy?” Putin’s indignation was echoed by other top Russian politicians, including State Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov, who observed, “The real reason for his arrest is to find out by any means who leaked the confidential diplomatic information to him and how.”35 But Journalist Jochen Bittner observed in a New York Times op-ed: [I]t’s curious that one of the world’s most secretive governments has gotten a pass from WikiLeaks. Why, in all its time online, has WikiLeaks never revealed any Russian intelligence scandal? Because there is none? Or because Mr. Assange doesn’t want to embarrass Mr. Putin?36
Assange has also said that he is the one who encouraged NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to seek asylum in Russia. According to The Guardian, Assange said, “He preferred Latin America, but my advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences, because my assessment is that he had a significant risk he could be kidnapped from Latin America on CIA orders. Kidnapped or possibly killed.”37
Hillary Derangement Syndrome
Assange has made no secret of his dislike of Hillary Clinton. In an article titled “A Vote Today for Hillary Clinton Is a Vote for Endless, Stupid War” published on WikiLeaks in February 2016. In the article Assange wrote that Clinton “certainly should not become president of the United States.” He continued, “I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables.” And, “Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. Her personality combined with her poor policy decisions have directly contributed to the rise of ISIS. She’s a war hawk with bad judgment who gets an unseemly emotional rush out of killing people.”38 Assange has also accused Clinton of pushing to indict him after WikiLeaks release of over 250,000 diplomatic cables, which Clinton condemned at the time.39 Assange has claimed more leaks related to the former Secretary of State are to come. “We have a lot of material, thousands of pages of material,” Assange told Megyn Kelly on Fox News.40 “It’s a variety of different types of documents from different types of institutions that are associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles that are, you know, quite interesting, some even entertaining.”41
Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, drew a connection between Russia and the DNC hack in a July 24 interview with CNN. “What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian State actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Mook said. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here, and I think that’s disturbing.”42
Assange affirmed that WikiLeaks did time the release to come before the start of the DNC. “That’s when we knew there would be maximum interest by readers, but also, we have a responsibility to,” Assange told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “If we published after, you can just imagine how outraged the Democratic voting population would have been. It had to have been before.”43
As for the allegations that Russia was involved in the leak, Assange told CNN, “I think this raises a very serious question, which is that the natural instincts of Hillary Clinton and the people around her, that when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, that she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera, because if she does that when she’s in government, that’s a political, managerial style that can lead to conflict.”44
He said, “What we have right now is the Hillary Clinton campaign using a speculative allegation about hacks that have occurred in the past to try and divert attention from our emails, another separate issue that WikiLeaks has published.”45 Assange held that the organization liked to “create maximum ambiguity” about the identities of its sources, saying, “Obviously, to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are. So we never do it.”46