A video released by Project Veritas shows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tried to warn the U.S. state department in 2011 that unredacted diplomatic cables had been obtained by third parties, presenting a potential danger to U.S. personnel.
The video highlights WikiLeaks’ longstanding policy of redacting its leaks in order to protect individuals who might be put in harm’s way as a result of them, and the fact that the leak of over 250,000 unredacted Afghanistan cables in 2011 was a result of a rogue third=party employee, not WikiLeaks itself.
It also shows that Assange urged Hillary Clinton’s State Department to take steps to protect U.S. personnel abroad, and that “any individuals who haven’t been warned… should be warned.”
It is unclear if Hillary Clinton’s state department heeded the advice.
The policy of redaction by WikiLeaks is rarely acknowledged by Assange’s critics, such as the late anti-Trump Sen. John McCain. McCain blamed the release of the cables, which were passed to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, for leading to the deaths of U.S. foreign sources.
As Breitbart News previously reported:
While he was alive, neoconservative Senator John McCain claimed that leaks provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, which included the diplomatic cables, caused U.S. foreign sources to be harmed.
However, it was in fact an error on the part of a Guardian journalist, not WikiLeaks, that that led to the full unredacted cables leaking to third parties on the web that WikiLeaks published them as well — and not before Assange attempted to warn the office of Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State about the unintended leak of the cables.
Manning, who was ultimately responsible for the leak, had his jail sentence commuted in an act of clemency by outgoing President Barack Obama in 2016.
President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has argued that Assange’s work, which consisted of publishing material passed to him by Manning and others, is journalism and therefore subject to constitutional protections.
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz has made the same point, arguing that there is “no constitutional difference” between WikiLeaks and the New York Times.
The Department of Justice indicated Assange “on a very factually questionable basis,” said Dershowitz in a 2019 segment on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.
On Twitter, journalist Glenn Greenwald condemned the mainstream corporate media for abandoning Assange.
The media, said Greenwald, previously supported Assange’s right to press freedom, turned against him in 2016 after WikiLeaks published material that damaged Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
“Prior to 2016, when WikiLeaks published authentic, incriminating docs about Hillary & DNC, it was a media consensus that prosecuting Assange would be a grave threat to press freedom.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.