Talking by a link to the “New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream” symposium, hosted at Moscow’s Rossiya Segodnya International Multimedia Press Centre, the Wikileaks founder warned of Google's close involvement with both Hillary as well as the Washington power structure. This is just the sort of thing that the pro-Putin hacks in Russia would like.
Assange claimed that Google was directly engaged in Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, set up a company to run the digital component of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Of course, he didn’t research this himself, the digging was done by someone else. In this case, the programme was reported by Quartz in late 2015. That article claimed that “The Groundwork” was funded by Schmidt “to ensure that Clinton had the engineering talent needed to win the election.”
By using “data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs,” The Groundwork could significantly boost Clinton’s exposure.
With the story already out there, Assange enhanced it with his own unique paranoia theories.
“We should understand that Google... is intensely aligned with US exceptionalism... personally at the top aligned with Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and almost certainly once Hillary Clinton becomes president, those people in Google, like Jared Cohen, will be placed into positions around the new Clinton presidency...”
He said that Cohen was the founder of “Google Ideas,” a foreign policy-focused think tank now known as “Jigsaw,” was revealed as collaborating with Clinton and the media outlet Al Jazeera in an attempt to facilitate regime change in Syria.
However, Assange is forgetting one key thing. People have known about Google’s alliance with the current president for years. In fact, in terms of lobbying visits, Google gets more time than anyone else.
So why is Assange suddenly rearing up to attack the Hilary campaign? Specifically why is he recycling lots of research work already done by journalists and printed?
What is becoming clear is that WikiLeaks has been acting as a political advocate in its own right in the 2016 election and most of it has been Hillary bashing. True, she is a soft target and it is one of the weaknesses of her candidacy, but surely, Wikileaks has a ton of dirt on the other candidates
Recently WikiLeaks came up with a searchable database archive for over 30,000 emails sent to and from Clinton’s private email server. This is brilliant, but why aren’t there similar efforts into Bernie Saunders or Donald Trump’s documentation? Is Wikileak’s role in the US election to provide information on the candidate’s or is it to just bash Clinton?
A cynic would suggest that Assange wants to keep his own name in the media. With the right wingers in the US (Fox News) and the more lefty Saunders campaign all wanting a piece of Hillary, by repackaging old conspiracy theories Assange keeps getting his name in the press.
