Wikileaks vs Clinton: All Headline, No Scandal

Take a moment to read this great article, Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange, from James Ball who was a previous member of Wikileaks.

When Wikileaks was doing targeted releases and working with journalists to ensure the integrity of releases, I felt they were trying to achieve a good goal, even if it came with a price.

However, indiscriminately dumping 250,000+ cables from the State Dept or indiscriminately dumping 50,000 emails from the Clinton Campaign is not intended to achieve good results.

If there was a real story in the Wikileaks Clinton Campaign emails (aka Podesta emails), they would release the 10 or so relevant emails so that the media and the voters could be laser focused on the wrongdoing or whatever criminal actions were taken.

But that's not what Assange is doing. By dumping 50,000 emails in batches of 10,000, his goal is to generate headlines like "Wikileaks dumps 10,000 more emails", but it's all headline, no scandal.

If your goal is to reveal wrongdoing, then you reveal the wrongdoing and lay it bare for all to see. You don't hide it among 50,000 mundane emails so that the wrongdoing is lost in the noise.

The truth is he's depending on the noise. The noise of the irrelevant emails allows people to try to take snippets out of context to invent stories that have no substance when you look past the headline.

It's why you see stupid articles proclaiming that "Hillary hates everyday Americans" because someone saw a screenshot of an email with "she has begun to hate everyday Americans" highlighted in it... but it's all headline and no scandal. The email was about the phrase "everyday Americans." She hates using that phrase. It's a non-story, but Assange/Wikileaks got what it wanted. It got the appearance of a story without any kind of story.

Wikileaks/Assange may have done good work in the beginning, but I think he's lost his way and is just trying to smear someone he hates. If Wikileaks actually had any damning evidence, they would have already released it. Each new dump is weaker and weaker sauce.

Here are some write-ups of specific claims in the Wikileaks emails, I'll add more if I have time to write them:

Algeria and the Terror Watch List

Hillary's Instructions for Killing Chris Stevens in Benghazi

(image: Carl Court / Getty Images)