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Ecuador Wanted To Make Julian Assange a Diplomat and Send Him To Moscow (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, Ecuador attempted to deputize WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as one of its own diplomats and send him to Russia, according to a Friday report by Reuters. Citing an "Ecuadorian government document," which the news agency did not publish, Assange apparently was briefly granted a "special designation" to act as one of its diplomats, a privilege normally granted to the president for political allies. However, that status was then withdrawn when the United Kingdom objected. The Associated Press reported earlier in the week that newly-leaked documents showed that Assange sought a Russian visa back in 2010. WikiLeaks has vehemently denied that Assange did so.
> The value is in creating chaos. In the Clinton case, in order to believe there was substantive criminal activity, one must believe that the whole of the FBI and intelligence community were in cahoots with Clinton.
No, it's more than that, there's still too many people looking at the whole Russia-Trump-Clinton thing through the eyes of US politics, let's be clear here, the morning Wikileaks leaked the damaging material on Clinton, Nigel Farage attempted to sneak into the Ecuadorian embassy to meet with Julian Assange - the US House Intelligence Committee has since received intelligence that this was to provide Assange with a thumb drive and that Farage was a Russian conduit:
https://www.theguardian.com/po...
https://www.france24.com/en/20...
If you're looking purely through the lens of "My candidate won, you're just bitter" then you're missing the point here. Let's be absolutely clear - Nigel Farage is incredibly friendly with a guy in British politics called Arron Banks. Arron Banks is a guy who no one had ever heard of until he dramatically appeared on the British political scene around 2015 with a story about how he was going to defect from being a major Conservative party donor to being a UKIP donor, despite the fact no one in the Conservative party had any idea who he was, he suddenly had £1million pounds to dramatically donate to UKIP. Since then he has come under investigation, because no one can explain the source of all his wealth as it's hidden incredibly well behind a cascade of fake businesses in places like the Cayman Islands which are well known conduits of Russian money. Of course, you could fairly trivially dismiss this as paranoia if it weren't for the fact that Arron Banks is married to Ekaterina Paderina. Who you ask? Someone a Russian defector described as one of their greatest intelligence assets, someone who had an affair with a much older MP who just happened to be in charge of one of the constituencies where Britain's nuclear submarines are housed:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/...
On top of that, Farage has consistently refused to condemn Russia even when it annexed Crimea, he has attended Russia's far right convention in St. Petersburg where a number of far right anti-EU parties in Europe were granted support and funding from Russian state entities:
https://themoscowtimes.com/art...
So at this point, if anyone things it's about Clinton or Trump, they really are failing to see the bigger picture. There's a massive web here with ample evidence trailing all the way back to Putin's doorstep, and what's more, it stems from before Trump was even a US political candidate at all, which in itself highlights the fact it's got nothing to do with "bitter Hillary" supporters or whatever justification people like to use for refusing to acknowledge it.
At this point, if you really don't think Russia is involved in interfering in Western politics in an incredibly serious manner, and if you don't think Putin had anything to do with Brexit, Trump, Hungary's Jobbik, France's NF, Greece's Golden Dawn and so on and so forth then you're in denial over such an overwhelmingly large body of evidence that you genuinely only can be either pro-Russian and anti-Western, or the kind of useful idiot that these kind of intelligence operations rely on in the first place.
Assange and Wikileaks are just one part of a massive web