US fails in effort to ‘frame’ Julian Assange

PREVIOUSLY redacted portions of the ‘Mueller report’ into supposed Russian interference in the US, released this week, have shown that despite every effort, the Justice Department was unable to concoct evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on the part of WikiLeaks or Julian Assange in relation to their 2016 publications exposing the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton.

The revelation is the latest proof of the fraudulent character of the entire “Russiagate” narrative, used not only to smear Assange, but also to justify expanded online censorship and to push for greater US military aggression.

It is evidence that the US state had been attempting to manufacture criminal charges against Assange, before an indictment was finalised in late 2017 over WikiLeaks’ completely unrelated 2010 and 2011 publications.

The 13 new pages of the 448-page Mueller report were released on Monday as the result of a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Buzzfeed News.

The Justice Department has sought to block the full release of the report since it was brought down in March, 2019, including through the use of extensive redactions.

In September, a US judge ruled that the government had violated the law by withholding sections of the report without legitimate cause, labelling some of the redactions as “self-serving.”

The contents of the new material showed why the Justice Department was so intent on keeping it hidden. The documents disclose that despite a two-year investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller came up with nothing to prove the collusion between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence that had been trumpeted by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and the corporate media.

This is in line with the character of the report as a whole, which was unable to substantiate any of the “Russian interference” in the 2016 US election that the Mueller investigation had been tasked with identifying.

In May, it was revealed that CrowdStrike, a cyber security company handpicked by the Democratic Party to examine the DNC servers had been unable to find evidence that documents had ever been exfiltrated from them. In other words, there may not have been any successful hack, Russian or otherwise.

This aligned with Assange’s repeated insistence that Russia was not the source of the material. It lent weight to the claims of WikiLeaks collaborator and former British diplomat, Craig Murray, who has stated that he has personal knowledge of the source of the DNC documents, and that they were provided by “disgruntled insiders.”

Significantly, even though it is based on the discredited Russiagate framework, the newly-released material from the report concluded that there was no basis for laying conspiracy charges against Assange.

“The most fundamental hurdles” to such a prosecution, it stated, “are factual ones.” There was not “admissible evidence” to establish a conspiracy involving Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks and Trump campaign insider Roger Stone.

The centrality of Stone to the attempts to concoct charges against Assange underscores the frame-up character of the entire operation. After the Mueller report was finalised, Stone was successfully prosecuted.

But it was not for involvement in any conspiracy. Rather, Stone was sent to prison for falsely claiming under oath that he had ever had any relationship with WikiLeaks or Assange (Oscar Grenfell for World Socialist Website/November 5, 2020).