5 Of The Most Damning Things WikiLeaks Has Revealed About Our Leaders

When you scrutinize the charges that have been made against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, it’s undeniable that they’ve been the targets of a massive propaganda campaign. There is no proof that WikiLeaks has ties to the Russian government, and president Obama admitted this in a press conference two years ago. WikiLeaks did not strategically publish Clinton emails during the 2016 election to try to swing the outcome towards Trump, and this was shown when WikiLeaks insider Stefania Maurizi later reported that WikiLeaks had released the Podesta emails entirely in coincidence to the release of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape. And despite the false claims from pundits like Malcolm Nance that WikiLeaks spreads disinformation, WikiLeaks has never had to retract any piece of information that it’s put out.

These and the many other distortions of WikiLeaks’ history are part of a very transparent effort to deflect from the secrets that WikiLeaks has revealed about the people in power. Here are some of the biggest of those secrets.

Helping Israel is one of the main motivators for the U.S.’ campaign against the Syrian government

According to WikiLeaks, an April 2012 email exchange between Secretary Clinton and one of her aides included some unsettling material. Wrote James P. Rubin to Clinton in a discussion about how to handle Syria: “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.”

This particular message to Clinton was intended as a suggestion, not a definite recommendation. But it was not an isolated case. In July 2012, another Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal wrote that “the fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of the Israeli commaders [sic] would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies.”

When Israel and the United States have been partnering to aid jihadist anti-government groups in Syria, when Israel has long wanted to capture Syria’s Golan Heights region, and when Israeli and U.S. foreign policy are known to be essentially one and the same, the messages from these emails are most definitely consistent with a larger agenda. And they should be brought up whenever someone says that America has intervened in Syria for “humanitarian” reasons.

Our government has been shown to directly collude with Wall Street

The Podesta emails show that during the formation of Obama’s transition team, former Citibank executive Michael Froman used his official Citigroup email account to send an email to Obama’s advisers. The email’s purpose was to recommend people for cabinet positions.

And Froman’s Wall Street position had direct effect on who would end up controlling the country. In another email, it’s shown that Froman is the one who recommended Timothy Geithner for the position of Obama’s treasury secretary, even after Geithner had been part of the banking operations which produced the 2008 financial crisis. Geithner and the rest of Obama’s Wall Street cabinet then carried out an unnecessary bailout, which further concentrated the economy and set us up for a likely even bigger future crisis.

As the Trump administration has brought even more Wall Street insiders into the White House, those emails give us some glimpse into what this ongoing coordination between corporation and state looks like.

“Russiagate” was invented by the Clinton campaign as a political marketing strategy

In December 2015, Clinton ally Brent Budowsky sent an email to John Podesta which included these statements:

“Putin did not agree to anything about removing Assad and continues to bomb the people we support. We pushed the same position in 2012 (Geneva 1, which HRC knows all about) and Geneva 2 in 2014. Odds that Putin agrees to remove Assad are only slightly better than the odds the College of Cardinals chooses me to someday succeed Pope Francis. Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin, but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria.”

This shows that before the Democratic Party started its current effort to slander its opponents as Russian agents and blame Russia for Trump’s election, the Clinton campaign was planning to portray Trump as a Russian asset. And since Budowsky’s suggestion was made in the context of gaining an advantage against Russia in the Syria conflict, this email also shows how Russiagate has been used to promote American imperialism.

Our leaders manipulate popular sentiment by creating media echo chambers from behind the scenes

According to Podesta email #59125, in 2007 John Podesta sent a message to George Soros and other billionaires which outlined a plan to create a secretly coordinated political messaging campaign. The email recommended that going into the 2008 election, Democrats should try to “Control the political discourse” by putting together an “echo chamber” within Democratic politics and media.

Given all we know about how modern propaganda works, this was just a glimpse into an ongoing and massive covert messaging campaign from the centers of power. As WikiLeaks has also revealed, numerous media outlets and reporters colludedwith the DNC and/or the Clinton campaign throughout the 2016 election cycle. This merging between government and media of course applies to both sides of the political aisle, with President Trump holding direct ties to Fox News. And beneath all of this, there’s a deep and mostly covert relationship between the American media and the CIA. Most of the information that we’re exposed to is the product of strategic manipulation tactics by the people in power.

Our leaders don’t see anything wrong with rigging elections, because they don’t care about democracy

The DNC email leak needs to be treated with the same significance as the exposing of other famous scandals throughout history, like Watergate and Iran-Contra. It showed that throughout the 2016 Democratic primary, top Democratic officials strategized about how to slander Bernie Sanders in the public eye, and that they colluded with the media to help Clinton’s campaign. As was later revealed in the Podesta emails, the DNC also had Donna Brazile give Clinton debate questions in advance. And these are just a few parts of the efforts from the Democratic establishment to sabotage Sanders’ campaign; there’s documentary evidence that voter suppression and electoral fraud happened in numerous states throughout the primary.

When Sanders complained at one point about his treatment by the party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is shown to have privately written in response to Sanders: “Spoken like someone who has never been a member of the Democratic Party and has no understanding of what we do.” This is how Schultz, and seemingly how the others involved in the rigging of the 2016 election, view the subversion of democracy: it’s just part of how things are done.

But while people like Schultz are happy to protect power in order to keep their comfortable positions, people like Julian Assange value truth and justice over everything else. That’s why Assange has sacrificed everything in his goal to hold power accountable. Let’s help him with this mission.