I'm honestly out of the loop. Is there concrete irrefutable evidence Assange helped electing Trump? Seems weird, even more so with them then turning around and pushing for his arrest. And being an annoying guest? Are you talking about the new rules introduced by the embassy only to be looked at later saying "you broke them"?
This indictment from the Meuller investigation details how GRU agents hacked the Democratic Party and coordinated with WikiLeaks (“Organization 1” in the indictment) to release the documents they obtained (using the personas “DCLeaks”, “Guccifer 2.0”).
I'm conflicted about this. It seems to be proving Wikileaks timed the release to have an effect on the election, and was aware of its wider effects, but don't you think if someone else came to them with a similar release benefiting the opposite party they would have behaved the same way? I still find it difficult to fault Wikileaks for this. They just did the leaking.
From that PDF: Organization 1 added, “if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after.” The Conspirators responded, “ok . . . i see.” Organization 1 explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”
The Panama Papers were released a couple years after changes in US/Panama law meant that it was no longer a great country to launder your money for US citizens, hence why the only US citizens caught in it didn't show any wrongdoing.
Whether anything Assange did was actually decisive in Trump's election is a pretty speculative question, but we do have leaked transcripts of his messages to Donald Trump Jr...
The Russian press are all over any story they can spin to make it look like the West isn't the bastion of freedom, equality and democracy it claims to be - basically, anything which makes us look like our own papers' descriptions of Russia. So that doesn't say much.
(Also, ironically this BBC article and other outlets are having to use a video of Assange's arrest from Ruptly, a subsidiary of Russia Today, because they bought into their own narrative about his impending arrest being a construct of his own imagination so hard they didn't have any reporters outside to catch it.)
The claim is based on Wikileaks offering up information that portrays the US negatively, but little to nothing that does the same against Russia.
From there, linked with the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, claims of them supporting the Trump campaign came to be.
Regardless of your opinion on Trump, I’m not sure that offering up one-sided info that benefits or hurts a candidate is or should be an arrestable offense. Entire television news networks do it.
I am saying that you can hardly deduct anything about their positive affiliation with Russia just because they haven't exposed things about Russia.
So unless they aren't looking for things to leak about Russia because of being in the cahoots with them then it's hardly an argument that because nothing is leaked about Russia they are somehow not attempting.
