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: 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

[quantaman]

So Wikileaks has gone from technically illegal activity to morally-wrong activity?

A tax return is not like memos of secret negotiations or illegal spy activities. It is a document filed by a private citizen with its government. There is absolutely no moral ground to insisting it be provided to the public.

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

I found that a bit distasteful, while I can see the public's right to know there's something off about trying to shame someone by surprising them with illicitly obtained private information.

Either way I think the big issue with Wikileaks and the DNC emails is they weren't a leak, they were a hack.

For a leak you need an insider who thinks things are so wrong that they're willing to risk their career, and even jail time, by leaking the information. It's a very random happenstance and tends to happen only when things are particularly bad.

But hacks tend to favour the more powerful entities (like Russia) who can dispatch sophisticated technical resources against their enemies. You don't need a massive egregious wrong, if you have an enemy you just need to hack their servers and go digging until you find bad. Russia didn't leak the DNC emails because the Democratic party was favouring Clinton, they leaked them because they were looking for anything to damage Clinton.

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

I can't believe so many people are this stupid

[poity]

It's been a decade since Wikileaks captured the public's attention, and most people still don't seem to understand that it's only a publisher that relies on others to provide info. I figured Bill Maher would know better. I figured journalists would know better. But they've all been speculating on the "Why hasn't Wikileaks hacked Trump yet?" question for the past week, as if they didn't know what Wikileaks is about.

Are they all this stupid, or just pretending to be fucking obtuse?

No... they MUST be pretending. Bill Maher has interviewed Assange in the past -- without questioning his motives or insinuating that Assange/Wikileaks exfiltrated secret documents themselves. He has demonstrated in the past that he knows Wikileaks is only a publisher. As well, there have been thousands of articles in the mainstream press since Collateral Murder and Cablegate, and they did not cast Assange/Wikileaks as hackers or to insinuate that they were enemy collaborators. Journalists have demonstrated in the past that they know Wikileaks is only a publisher.

No... they DO know better, I'm certain ALL of them know better. But they're so full of rage that no one has yet leaked Trump's info to Wikileaks while their favorite Clinton is being undermined, they've become the mirror image of the Fox-watching "Fairness and Balance"-demanding trogs that the left so often mocks and derides.

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