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WikiLeaks Releases Hacked Voicemails From DNC Officials (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Late Wednesday afternoon as the Democratic National Convention was in full swing, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks decided to follow through with an earlier statement by publishing hacked voicemails of top democratic officials. There are 29 leaked recordings, which are identified by phone number and total about 14 minutes combined. Many of the voicemails are messages of callers leaving their numbers in hopes of being called back. Others are from voters upset that the DNC was giving too much support to Sanders. The Hill reports that "One caller with an Arizona area code called to blast the DNC for putting Sanders surrogate Cornel West on the platform drafting committee. 'I'm furious for what you are doing for Bernie Sanders,' another caller says in a message. 'He's getting way too much influence. What I see is the Democratic Party bending over backwards for Bernie,' adds the caller, who threatens to leave the party if the DNC doesn't stop 'coddling' the Vermont senator."
Wow voicemails about complaints of Bernie Sanders? What's next, some internal accounting requests showing they spent hundreds of dollars *a month* on office snacks? Where is the "evidence enough to jail Hillary Clinton" that Assange promised? Oh that's right, it doesn't exist because Assange is as overzealous about his documents as he is about his love life.
This wikileak brought to you by the Make-It-Look-Like-We-Tried-To-Bend-Over-Backwards-for-Bernie department of the Hillary Clinton borg cube.
'He's getting way too much influence. What I see is the Democratic Party bending over backwards for Bernie,' adds the caller, who threatens to leave the party if the DNC doesn't stop 'coddling' the Vermont senator."
Oddly, the caller left her name as "an avid supporter of freedom from email prosecution"
"This is a survey call. Mr. or Ms. DNC, which candidate are you more likely to vote for if the election was held today?"
WOW, this totally BLOWS THE DOORS wide open!! What a total DNC DESTROYER!!! What a SHELL SHOCKER!!!!
Witness the sheer POWER of INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM at it's FINEST!! /s
Assange is now about as relevant as Snowden. Which is to say, neither of them are relevant at all.
This is all Russia's fault! I should know, I can see Russia from my back yard!
Pay no attention to the corruption, instead we all need to worry that Trump is going to sell the White House to Canada so they can burn it down... again.
One caller with an Arizona area code called to blast the DNC for putting Sanders surrogate Cornel West on the platform drafting committee.
The man won about half the votes in the primaries. In a fair system, his surrogates would be about half of the platform drafting committee, not a token member or two.
So you thought you could trust the Democrats to leave the power to the people? Right up until they bend you over and fuck you in the ass for corporate interests. That's what Hillary really is, she's the arm of the Democratic Party that will continue to serve the needs of her corporate friends.
Hillary to the left of me, Trump to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle getting screwed.
US clearly needs more parties in the government. The supporters of Bernie and Hillary, and likewise Trump and the former Republican candidates don't belong to the same parties.
I hope that Wikileaks has some strong assurances that these leaks are not state-based, as the quickest way for them to lose the support of the people is to become an unwitting puppet of Russia or any other state.
So what they've got is 14 min of Republican trolling. Well worth the hack.
Why does Wikileaks thinks any of that in controversial? Sanders had a good run, but under no math could he have won. Predictably Hillary Clinton carried the South better than Sanders, and her voting record was 93% the same. Hillary is known name.
It's amazing Sanders did as well as he did considering he was more or less a no name candidate making the same big promise we always hear. This year it seems more young people were desperate enough to pay attention and I think they think that the Sander's 'platform' is somehow significantly different than the standard DNC platform. It's not at all.
Almost everything Sander says is status quo Democrat ideals, The only difference is he stands out there and says they all, perhaps more convincingly in some ways, but outlining the same Democratic goals didn't deserve the level of support Sanders got. Not unless he had a plan to get us there and he did not at all. Anybody can say the things Sanders did, but for some reason most don't get the same attention. Lots of Dems support everything Sanders does, there is nothing there especially leftists really. There are plenty of far more left politicians out there really.
Healthcare and college is basic socialist, it's not really even progressive anymore. If that's progressive liberal then every industrialized democracy in the world has been overtaken by progressive liberals because it's completely common to fund healthcare and college via the government.
Progressive liberalism at this point is paying people a living wage to offset the lack of need for workers as we automate more.
Liberals in the US have been tricked into thinking moderate positions are progressive liberal positions. When every similar nation in the world has these 'liberal' programs, they are modate programs at best. Even in the UK the Brexit idiots did that to protect their, in the rare case of the UK, fully socialized medical system
There is no Bernie Sander conspiracy, he lost by every measure and with any rules system we've ever used. He lost the popular vote by more than 20% and he get blown out in many more stats than he beat Hillary in. Not understanding the voting system is not a reason to make up a conspiracy, especially when both candidate have very similar voting records.
Healthcare should be your focus. The wars are trivial expenses compared to the 3 trillion a year we spend in healthcare. Stop distracting yourselves.
I wonder if the specific timing is WikiLeak's idea or the source's idea.
If you're trying to damage Clinton and the DNC this is great timing, it aggravates Sander's supporters and pits them against the party when everyone is at the DNC, it also distracts the public from good press that the DNC is generating.
But if you're trying to publicize WikiLeaks and the leaks themselves it's terrible timing, almost no one outside of political junkies is going to hear about it because the news is swamped with the DNC itself.
I suspect the source has specific conditions about how this info gets published.
I stole this Sig
I mean, phoning in to complain that Bernie actually was given access? What reporter would do that? They need to get in line after the Billionaires and Millionaires the DNC sold out to, after all!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
At least they are consistent with their emails...
Seems like a leak for the sake of leaking something. Are they just trying to embarrass the DNC by showing they got voice mail access? There is nothing of value here. This does nothing more than violate the privacy of people. Can't claim any moral high ground about whistle blowing with this.
Wikileaks has stated they are trying to influence US politics. How far are they willing to go? Far enough to make up things and add them to the real hacked files? Are some peoples hate for the DNC/Democrats/Hilldog so strong that they blindly accept anything negative about them regardless of it's lack of vetting?
I rather expected the DNC to have a busier account than that. They tapped the roll-over to voicemail for an hour? or were those the juicy 'saved' ones, lol.
I bet anyone, that in the last 40 years that the leaders of each political party in the US have pushed for their favorites to be nominated and elected. The whole point of super delegates in the Democratic Party was to ensure that some extreme candidate didn't get the party nomination (cough, cough, Trump via the Republicans..) and create chaos.
The system is far from perfect and Bernie Sanders did a great job of getting people thinking, but until the presidential election is tax payer funded (and Citizen United overturned ) and open (2-8 parties based on some equation) we will be stuck choosing between the lesser of two instead of the greatest of two or more.
Story comes out yesterday? I think. /. This evening.
Makes it to
Did this story have some sort of numeric rating?
Plus, if you listen to the messages, they're boring.
Really hates Sanders...
This election is rife with hilarious situations, if you know where to look.
Technically, Sanders raised more money than Clinton did in the first 3 months of this year. As an example, at the end of January Sanders raised $67 million compared to Clinton's $27 million.
The maximum one can donate to Clinton (or any one candidate) is $5400, but you can donate to other Democratic campaigns in various amounts. So the "Hillary Victory Fund" held a number of campaign contribution events supposedly for local democratic campaigns. The fund transferred the money to local committees, but then moved the money from there directly to the Clinton campaign.
From the Rolling Stone report:
As an example, take couples who paid or raised $353,400 to sit at a table with George Clooney, a sum that Clooney himself called an "obscene amount of money." The figure represented the maximum allowable donation given the structure of the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint venture between the Clinton campaign, the DNC and 32 state committees.
Donors can give a maximum of $5,400 per election cycle to Hillary's campaign, $33,400 per year to the DNC, and $10,000 per year to each of the 32 state committees in the fund.
If you assumed that the Clooney guests had already given their maximum $5,400 to the Clinton campaign, that left just over $353,000 for the DNC and the committees.
But Vogel and Arnsdorf found that less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by the Hillary Victory Fund went to the state committees.
[...] The money sometimes came and went before state officials even knew it was there. Politico noted that the Victory Fund treasurer, Beth Jones, is also the COO of the Clinton campaign.
[...] Vogel-Arnsdorf also noted that of the $23.3 million spent directly by the fund, most "had gone toward expenses that appear to have directly benefited Clinton's campaign, including $2.8 million for 'salary and overhead' and $8.6 million for web advertising that mostly looks indistinguishable from Clinton campaign ads."
So the Democratic party took all the Bernie Sanders money and matched it with an equal amount of money drained from local democratic elections, and like matter and anti-matter both sums annihilated in a flash of political advertizing!
All that effort and money and work you Bernie Sanders advocates put in came to naught, because the Democrats simply didn't want Sanders to win.
(I don't care *who* you are, that's funny right thar :-)
And nothing will be done about it.
The Democrats probably violated FEC law, possibly violated money laundering law, and absolutely betrayed your trust in a fair and honest runoff between candidates...
All this was noticed in May , and there's been no call for investigation, no call for prosecution, nothing.
Bernie got roughly 43 percent of the popular vote.
Do you think that those extra campaign funds might have tipped the balance in favor of Hillary?
It gets better.
The polls at the time showed that Bernie had a better chance of beating Trump than Hillary.
And by siphoning money away from local elections, the Democrats have probably thrown many local elections to the Republican side!
That's hilarious! :)
Sanders and the rest of the party are calling for *everyone* to support Hillary. They're effectively asking all the Bernie voters to "forget that we just betrayed you in the worst possible way, we have to stick together or Trump will win!". Keep party unity! Don't let the Republicans win!
And they're absolutely right! If Bernie runs as a 3rd party, Trump will win. If Bernie supporters swi
if the DNC had not been working so hard behind the scenes to oppose him while pretending in public that they were treating him equally?
They just needed Bernie to energise the young progressives in 2016 so they could get them out to the polls to vote for Hillary, the pasty old white lady who has never had any principles other than what Wall Street pays her to have.
The timing seems like payback for the treatment Snowden/Asange/Manning has received under a Democratic President.
This isn't leaking. This is doxing. There's nothing of public interest in the voicemails of private citizens calling a party to complain. This isn't about a war or surveillance. It's petty party politics, and politicians aren't the target. Leak the conversations of the powerful. Leak the cover ups. Leave these people alone. This isn't a game. These people calling could be your grandparents or neighbors.
Wikileaks has lost the moral high ground. I can't in good conscience support this kind of behavior.
The Superdelegates were for Hillary, but we probably would have had a situation where Bernie got the popular majority but Hillary got the nomination, if the DNC had played neutral.
Don't lose track of the big issue.
You make some good points, there's lots of insightful analysis that can be done, but the big issue is...
Despite any analysis, he *might* have won the nomination. That $61 million extra given to Hillary by the Democrats is a lot of money, and represents good-faith donations of hard-earned cash gone to waste.
Ultimately, Bernie never got his chance!
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." - George Washington, first President of the US
If people would spend more time reading what our founders said and wrote, and just a tiny bit less time on pop culture, we might be a little bit less messed-up. They designed the American system and left us both the operating manual (the Constitution) and their design notes (extensive writings, both for and against the choices they made see: "Federalist Papers" and "Anti-Federalist Papers" and all thier other books and writings).
Some might say this is payback for recording Romney in 2012 at a private fundraiser without his consent. It's pure gold regardless.
The left constantly throws tantrums with fingers squarely plugged into their ears that conservatives are corrupt scum of the earth and now we're getting oodles of proof it was Democrats projecting their own personas all along. It's nice to see it exposed for the unwashed masses who only get their news from the lamestream media.
If you want to see Democrats sniping at each others' candidates or complaining about what the party's up to, just go on any Democratic blog.
It's not a scandal. It's not a secret. It's not even a problem -- not even when people get hot under the collar and start acting like assholes. George Washington was elected unanimously by the Electoral College, but in every election since then politics has been turning Americans into assholes.
And that is a good thing. You can't make politics 100% civil without pushing out unpopular opinions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So much that Clinton family is tied too.. From enron to watergate.
If you assume Reagan was a bad guy -- You are under the influence of Clinton and Bush administration Propaganda.
Why is there so much blame on President Obama -- Because of the Clinton and Bush administration Propaganda.
If Hillary wins, we will see even more condemning of President Obama, by the Clintons as they have edited public data, washed paper trails by mazes of different signings of policies.
There is a shroud and only so many know that it was a remote-hack job that flew the aircraft into the world towers. This is the type of proof[The wikileaks voicemail hacks] to prove some guilty parties innocents and for Hillary to play queen USA and attempt to condemn a programing group.
Who will she blame ?
Any propaganda you have heard -- Its been Bush jr and Bill Clinton's actual doings... While they twist the paper trails around to condemn someone else.
Obama didn't make Isis Bush jr did.
Watch out wikileaks you are only giving the corrupt ground to move on.
I'll be impressed when Wikileaks posts Trump's tax return.
So this is just a bunch of voicemail from random callers? Why? Why would we even hear about these or moreover care?
Regardless of what you ever may have thought of him - in this last political cycle what assange is doing with these wikileaks releases shows that he us as bad as anyone he is trying to criticize. Using, withholding and releasing information strategically is exactly the same thing that he is supposed to be "crusading" against but instead he is trying to manipulate a populace for his own personal revenge.