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

Re: So the tax returns aren't public?

[Anonymous Coward]

Donald Trump has a right to keep his tax returns private. Nobody has a right to hack into a system to obtain them. As former President Bill Clinton said after Republicans impeached him, "even presidents have private lives." If you don't like Trump keeping his tax returns private, you're free to vote for someone else. However, you don't have a right to see his tax return without his consent. I don't like Trump, but I completely support him standing up for his privacy on this issue.

Re:Hacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I live, tax returns are a matter of public record. Please provide a moral justification for treating them in any other fashion.

Re: So the tax returns aren't public?

[ScentCone]

You're confusing personal bankruptcy with one of many businesses doing so. Those are not the same thing. The businesses file their own taxes. Any business that isn't a pass-through LLC has to. If someone owns a bunch of business entities, and one or several of them fail to the point where bankruptcy protection is involved, then there are public records involved - because the matter goes before a court. Which doesn't have much to do with the personal income taxes of the person (or one of the people) who owned shares of that company.

If you really want scandalous, pay attention to the giant money-laundering operation that is the Clinton Foundation.

Re:Hacking

[phantomfive]

So Wikileaks has gone from technically illegal

I don't think they've done anything illegal in the jurisdictions where they live (although Assange probably did illegal things unrelated to Wikileaks).

It is a document filed by a private citizen with its government.

He doesn't want to be a private citizen.

Re: So the tax returns aren't public?

[Anonymous Coward]

If he didn't have such a scandalous history I might agree, but this is someone running for president who filed for bankruptcy as recently as 2009. I'm pretty sure he has already asked Obama to present his.

I want Trump to lose, if only to prevent all the damage he could do, but I have to agree that he is not required by law to release them. Ethically he should, since this is the single most important job interview anyone can ever get, and it has material information that is required for the background check, but practically, at some point you have to trust the voters to see through the obvious lies.

Is he as rich as he says he is? That is almost certainly false. Forbes agreed he was probably a billionaire, but at least half if not more was lies.

Is their something really bad in those tax returns? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I truly believe he values his image more than the presidency or serving the
American people. If hiding those returns protects his image, then I think he is willing to pay any price for that.

Does he believe the stuff he says about Hillary? That answer is an obvious no, since he said the opposite when prior to becoming a candidate?

Does he care about the country? Perhaps on some level, but I rather suspect he cares about himself more.

Is he a republican? From what I can tell no. Nor is he a democrat. He is basically a con man/flim flam artist/etc etc. He says whatever he thinks people want to hear, seemingly having few consistent principles beyond his brand, and to some extent his family.

Is he stable enough not to start a nuclear war? Probably. Even with the money from daddy, it still takes a certain amount of discipline not to lose it all. He is not stupid. No I think the damage he would do would be in other ways. He has publicly talked about abandoning allies. There is, however, a chance he would see striking back with a nuclear weapon as being bold and decisive, completely ignoring the clusterf*ck opening that can of worse would cause.

Those are my opinions. Voters can create their own. They should not need to see his tax returns at this point to smell the rotting fish. If Trump somehow manages to win then we will get the government we deserve. Heaven help us if that does occur...

Re:Maher is an idiot

[ChrisMaple]

The whole essence of the United States constitution is that the government doesn't rule us. That Bill Maher thinks it should is an indication of how corrupt his mind is.

Re:EditorDavid is an ass

[Mashiki]

You're surprised by this? I'm actually astounded at just how much the entire media establishment(US, CAN, UK, EU, etc all the big publications) is against Trump. It's literally frothing at the mouth hate of Trump, and they still don't understand that it's their actions, and the actions of the left that have catapulted him to the top. And these many months in, they still think that this stuff is going to work.

Keep going boys. At this point, I'm hoping for Trump to be elected just to watch your heads explode because your self-fulfilling echo-chambers broke. Maybe then you'll learn what journalism is vs editorials painted as journalism....or the entire media infrastructure will collapse and we'll enter a new era of actual journalists who report on issues neutrally again.

Re:Hacking

[Dog-Cow]

I don't think anyone should have to provide a moral justification for keeping any data private. Privacy should be the default position, and there should be a moral justification for making anything public.

There is no public good served by making a tax return public information.

Wikileaks: Propaganda arm of Russian intelligence

[beamdriver]

Everything they and Assange have done pretty much confirms this.

I mean, come on, every day Assange is telling us that he's going to release some new leak about Clinton that's going to lead to her indictment. He's essentially the Russian version of our old friend, The Iraqi Information Minister.

Re:So the tax returns aren't public?

[tlhIngan]

Trump has refused to show his returns until after he is elected. Could be he has something to hide or could be he just doesn't want people to know he details should he lose. Difficult to be sure!

Well, the problem is D. Trump is apparently a terrible businessman - most of his businesses have failed. Excepting his corporate raider tactics on existing companies and cashing in on celebrity status, none of his ventures have made money. He's worth less today than in the past. He's riding the family fortunes to the ground. Luckily for him, there's a lot of it.

Well, slight correction, apparently his Russian businesses are quite profitable, if you ever wondered where the love for him in Russia comes from.

So there's that - people *assume* he's a good businessman simply because everyone has hear about him. (His flashy plane and other things also help advertise him). The truth is different, and hiding the tax returns is one way to prevent people from knowing it.

In the end, the real irony is when people talked about celebrity presidents, everyone assumed it would be something like a Kardashian or Justin Bieber or other entertainment celebrity. Trump IS a celebrity, except aimed at the more general voter base. So there you have it - the beginning of change in US politices from lying and cheating politicians to celebrities. Maybe in 10 years there really will be Kardashians running, when all those people grow up and become a solid voting bloc.

Re: So the tax returns aren't public?

[johanw]

Good. Now kick us out and let us make peace with Russia instead of trying to start another cold proxy war.

Re:EditorDavid is an ass

[Mashiki]

It's like with brexit, people will vote for Trump as a form of vote of no confidence to current establishment.

Pretty much. Then again the growing dissatisfaction with the current establishment, elitists and globalists has been growing for over a decade now. That they don't seem to understand that people are voting for him and like what he says precisely because they are so pissed off will likely fly over their head. I wouldn't be surprised that if Trump wins, we'll see a slew of articles saying "this is why democracy is a bad idea" and "this is why average people shouldn't vote." Just like they did after the brexit fovte.

Re: So the tax returns aren't public?

[reboot246]

The posters here are also confusing wealth with income. His tax returns will show how much he makes per year (income), not how much he owns (wealth).

Some posters are also exaggerating how many bankruptcies he's had. Even CNN reports exactly FOUR, not six, not seventeen, not dozens. If you take the risks and start a lot of companies, a few are going to fail. That's just part of business. Only the government can get away with failing over and over and over.

Re:So the tax returns aren't public?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Well, Nixon's tax avoidance/evasion is the reason why the tradition evolved. He was the first president(al candidate) to do so, albeit after he was elected.

Also, his "I am not a crook" line was about his tax issues, not Watergate.

Re:Hacking

[khallow]

And Assange exposing what he thought was a private donation by Bill Maher?

It's a private donation by a public figure who just so happens to have a likely conflict of interest in this interview.

Wikileaks has transitioned from an organization that enabled insiders to hold powerful entities responsible to an organization that helps powerful entities attack opponents.

What's supposed to be bad about that? The alleged opponents in questions are also powerful entities. Looks to me like Wikileaks is holding true to its mission.

Re:Hacking

[poity]

It seemed to me that Assange mentioned Maher's donation as a way to reflect the "impure motivation" red herring back at Maher. Maher had, just a second before that, questioned Assange's motives by saying that he had, through his past dealing with the US government, developed a personal animus towards Clinton. This has been the common attack against Assange from the media in the aftermath of the DNC leak -- it goes like this: Assange's motives are not sufficiently pure, therefore the contents of the DNC email leak, no matter how true, must not be discussed, else we would play into the hands of someone else's agenda. This, of course, is fallacious thinking, and Assange tried to show Maher, through his own example, that a million dollar donation to a Democrat does not and should not cast a shadow upon Maher's brutal and regular take-downs of Republican people and ideas. The truth remains the truth, no matter who speaks it.

And that reminds me of something:

At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.

-- George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature