Assange Says Wikileaks is 'Working On' Hacking Donald Trump's Tax Return (slate.com)

Julian Assange made headlines Friday when talk-show host Bill Maher asked him why Wikileaks wasn't hacking into Donald's Trump's tax returns. "Well, we're working on it," Assange replied. But it was apparently the culmination of a larger back-and-forth. An anonymous reader quotes Slate: Earlier in the interview, Maher said it sure looked like Assange was "working with a bad actor, Russia" to hurt "the one person who stands in the way of us being ruled by Donald Trump." Assange then tried to move the conversation toward what he thought was a smoking gun against Maher, saying he had found there was a "William Maher" who "gave a Clinton-affiliated entity $1 million." Maher explained he had famously given President Obama $1 million in 2012 and he never tried to hide it. When Assange pressed on whether he had also given money to Clinton, Maher shot back: "Fuck no."
Slate has a video of the entire interview, and while Friday WikiLeaks was publicizing Assange's appearance on the show on Twitter, Saturday they were tweeting a clarification. "WikiLeaks isn't 'working on' hacking Trump's tax-returns. Claim is a joke from a comedy show. We are 'working on' encouraging whistleblowers."

Comments

Encouraging Whistleblowers?

[SeattleLawGuy]

A whistleblower is a person who publicizes information his employer or another entity with which he is affiliated does not want published, out of a desire to accomplish meaningful institutional reform.

Employees who hack you on behalf of their rival company or rival nation are not whistleblowers. They are thugs who think it will be useful if they knock you down and take your briefcase.

Re:So the tax returns aren't public?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Every Republican nominee since Nixon has made his tax returns public.

Re:So the tax returns aren't public?

[Enigma2175]

The thing is if you start 20 businesses and 17 of them go bankrupt, you are still doing ok as a businessman.

Most businesses have, regardless of who started them, failed. The majority of those failures occur within the very first year of operation. Thats what average looks like.

While all businesses do fail eventually (over the timespan of "forever", it's hard not to eventually fail), but it's certainly not in the first year. Most small businesses fail just because they are not worth anything to someone else. When the owner of a small business dies or retires, his business usually fails -- because nobody wants to pay money to buy "Henry Adelson Landscaping" when they can just start their own landscaping company. From a Washington Post Article on the subject:

As far as we can tell, there is no statistical basis for the assertion that nine out of 10 businesses fail. It appears to be one of those nonsense facts that people repeat without thinking too clearly about it.
...

About half of all new establishments survive five years or more and about one-third survive 10 years or more. As one would expect, the probability of survival increases with a firm’s age. Survival rates have changed little over time.

Donald Trump's bankruptcies are the classic "heads I win, tails you lose" scam. If the building project does well, he makes a bunch of money. If it doesn't, he just has the development company declare bankruptcy and all the subcontractors and suppliers that provided the labor and supplies to build the project get screwed.