Attorney general Jeff Sessions has told political allies in Alabama that he is not considering running for his old Senate seat as a write-in candidate in next month’s special election. That’s according to a spokeswoman for Sessions at the Department of Justice, Sarah Isgur Flores, who also tells me…
The Scrapbook was dismayed but not surprised when, in the waning days of his presidency, Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning. We have been equally dismayed and unsurprised at the desire of left-leaning institutions to treat Manning as some sort of folk hero. It is cold comfort…
CIA director Mike Pompeo cancelled a scheduled appearance at Harvard Thursday after the university hired Chelsea Manning, a former Army private and leaker who Pompeo described as an “American traitor.”
Note: Fox News retracted the story upon which this report was based on May 23.
Top Republican lawmakers are ripping President Obama's last-minute decision to commute the bulk of former Army Private Chelsea Manning's 35-year prison sentence.
Oklahoma senator James Lankford, a member of the intelligence committee, said on CNN Thursday that there's no doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of Democratic campaign officials.
Two of the country's top intelligence officers say the man behind the WikiLeaks organization, Julian Assange, has no credibility and has done damage to the United States.
During an interview with Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday night, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asserted: "We have the trust of our sources, we have the trust of our readers, having never got it wrong."
It will go down as a classic do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do presidential statement. At a press conference in Berlin on November 17, Barack Obama urged his successor to “stand up" to Vladimir Putin when Russia deviates "from our values and international norms."
This has not been an especially ennobling election. Or a rewarding one. Or even entertaining. Pretty much everything about 2016 has been boorish and grotesque. But finally it is time to laugh.
Last week I noted that DNC head Donna Brazile denied that she leaked questions to Hillary Clinton in advance of a Democratic primary debate. The denials of Brazile, who was working at CNN at the time, were particularly bizarre in the face of a leaked email showing her giving Clinton's team a…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on how WikiLeaks releases are impacting the 2016 presidential race.
One last story from the trove of Democratic insider emails released by WikiLeaks. This one comes courtesy of our friends at the Washington Free Beacon, whose headline we just ripped off: "Emails: Liberal Think Tank Freaked Out at SNL's Criticism of Donors."
Among the revelations from the hacked John Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks is quite a bit of evidence of media malpractice. But perhaps the most damning bit involves interim Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile:
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on his recent story about how WikiLeaks is impacting the 2016 presidential race.
One last story from the trove of Democratic insider emails released by WikiLeaks. This one comes courtesy of our friends at the Washington Free Beacon, whose headline we just ripped off: “Emails: Liberal Think Tank Freaked Out at SNL's Criticism of Donors."
On March 5, 2015, John Podesta, former White House chief of staff and longtime Clinton family confidant, received an email from his daughter. “I'm heading back to NY tonight. Any chance you're staying in nyc b/c of weather (or scandal)?" she asked. Podesta responded, "What scandal? A few e-mails…
If you put Marco Rubio's many opinions of Donald Trump and Election Day the last several months into a paragraph, there's a cohesive, though not entirely coherent progression in there:
If further evidence were needed that this country faces two choices going forward on health care, a leaked Hillary Clinton email just provided it. The choices we face are (a) the repeal of Obamacare and its replacement with a conservative alternative, or (b) a government monopoly. Obamacare cannot…
The news that Hillary Clinton's campaign maintained lists of journalists for friendly leaks and helpful advice—Maggie Haberman and John Harwood of the New York Times, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, etc.—is not news, exactly. Some would argue that the more interesting story would be a list of…
The facts are by now widely known, if still not nailed down with precision. On Friday, July 22, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, a massive trove of emails purloined from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by hackers was posted on WikiLeaks, the online bulletin board for leaked…
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will not find a home in France. The French government has announced today it will not grant asylum to the fugitive.
Bradley Manning pleaded guilty today to leaking classified material. "Army Pfc. Bradley Edward Manningpleaded guilty Thursday to 10 charges that he illegally acquired and transferred U.S. government secrets, agreeing to serve 20 years in prison for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks that…
Julian Assange is planning a senate run in Australia as a member of the "WikiLeaks Party," he recently revealed in an interview.
Fox News: "Arizona Sheriff Says 2 Guns Found in Bust Linked to 'Fast and Furious'"
WikiLeaks has long claimed that it is taking measures to protect the men and women whose identities may be exposed in leaked documents for the first time. These people include spies, sources, and the like who never thought their names would appear on the Internet in a leaked State Department…
Last week, when Libyan tyrant Muammar Qaddafi had reportedly fallen from power, Senator John McCain, along with his colleague Senator Lindsey Graham, issued (in part) the following statement:
Hope and Change: "85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad"
A two-page assessment of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr is among the newly leaked WikiLeaks files. Khadr, of course, killed American serviceman Christopher Speer during a shootout in Afghanistan. His many advocates have turned him into something of a false martyr, however, claiming that Khadr is…
During a span of 22 months the website WikiLeaks.org morphed from a digital anarchist demonstration project into a semisuccessful international campaign against the American government. WikiLeaks solicited classified documents and then orchestrated a global media typhoon around them. The…
CNN:
Many questions have been raised about Julian Assange’s and WikiLeaks’s association with the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Israel Shamir. (See, notably, Michael Moynihan’s detailed exposé on Reason.com here.) Among other things, Shamir defends the “veracity” of The Protocols of the Elders of…
The Bradley Manning Support Network announced today that PayPal has closed the account of a group, Courage to Resist, that the network is working with to raise funds for the U.S. Army soldier alleged to have delivered classified cables and other secret government documents to WikiLeaks. The website…
Accused rapist Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, is supposed to be extradited to Sweden to face charges of rape. The Guardian reports:
In a major development that has been largely ignored or misrepresented in the American media, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has obtained access to the full stash of over 250,000 classified American diplomatic cables previously obtained by WikiLeaks. The paper has been posting a steady stream…
State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley wrote the following on his Twitter page early this morning:
Here is a new myth about Guantanamo. The attorneys for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claim that if Assange is extradited to Sweden he may end up detained in Cuba. The Guardian (UK) reports:
A recently leaked WikiLeaks cable says that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was slapped in the face by Revolutionary Guard chief of staff Mohammed Ali Jafari. The New York Daily News reports:
As America’s premier First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams is a force to be reckoned with. The force is on display at full power in today’s Wall Street Journal, where he takes up the subject of WikiLeaks and offers a very dim view of the activities of Julian Assange. Among other things, Mr. Abrams…
WikiLeaks founder and accused sex offender Julian Assange has been rewarded with a book deal, expected to be worth $1.7 million. The New York Times reports:
251,287. That’s the number of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks claims to have obtained. 1,897. That’s the number of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that, according to WikiLeaks’s own count, have thus far been published on its website: not even 1 percent of the reported total.…
WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has been released on bail from a British jail. He's currently staying put in Britain, waiting for an extradition trial to determine whether he will be sent to Sweden to face multiple charges of rape. The Daily Mail reports (my emphasis):
Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation is the principal fundraiser for WikiLeaks and indeed, on its own account, WikiLeaks’s de facto financial manager. In “Tax Deductible WikiLeaks,” I noted that donations to WikiLeaks via the foundation are even tax deductible for German contributors. This is because…
Although it’s way too soon to know how the WikiLeaks release of classified U.S. documents will play out historically, it is interesting to compare two cables brought to light by the document dump—one written by Bruce Laingen, the chargé d’affaires in Tehran at the time of the Iranian revolution in…
On December 1, Undersecretary of State William Burns appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to brief members of Congress on Iran. He touted the effectiveness of the latest round of sanctions and then listed some “wider actions of the Iranian leadership” that cause concern. He cited the…
Last weekend, PayPal announced that it was freezing the PayPal account used by WikiLeaks. In a statement, PayPal explained that WikiLeaks was in violation of the company’s acceptable use policy, which “states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote,…
In the middle of a February 28, 2008 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, we find this sentence:
Foreign leaders, rivals and allies, often find it useful to take anti-American positions, but Turkish prime minister Recep Tayip Erdoğan has taken the rarest of steps in threatening to sue the U.S. State Department in both national and international courts for defamation. At issue is the…
Gabriel Schoenfeld writes in today's Wall Street Journal:
Julian Assange has been arrested by British authorities. The WikiLeaks founder, who is responsible for the release of nearly 250,000 secret State Department cables, was arrested on two sex-related charges.
According to Senator Joe Lieberman, WikiLeaks's servers are no longer being hosted by amazon.com. Here's Lieberman's full statement:
A cable released by WikiLeaks that is available on the New York Times’s web site underscores the difficulties that both the Bush and Obama administrations have had in transferring war on terror detainees to Afghan custody. The cable, which originated at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on August 6, 2009,…
As Bill Kristol was saying, "If Tea Party-inspired Americans—and freedom-loving hackers around the world—can act effectively in cyberspace against today’s threats to our liberties and well-being, and to the liberties and well-being of others—that’s something to be applauded."
The criminal and anti-American enterprise WikiLeaks said in a Twitter message this morning that it was under a “distributed denial of service attack," a method often used by hackers to slow or bring down websites. If this is the U.S. government at work, good for our civil servants. If this is…
Yesterday, Secretary of State Clinton called the disclosure of the WikiLeaks documents "an attack on America's foreign policy interests." She and her colleagues in the Obama administration have proceeded, as they must, to try to limit the diplomatic damage, to reassure allies, to improve security…
It is one thing if a left-wing human rights organization like Amnesty International cannot tell the difference between a jihadist and a legitimate political dissident. It is quite another if the U.S. State Department suffers from the same intellectual confusion. One diplomatic cable released by…
The press has highlighted several documents from the latest WikiLeaks cache that deal with the Obama administration’s attempts to close Guantanamo. The administration can’t close Gitmo without transferring a large number of the remaining detainees to other countries. But its efforts in this vein…
Once upon a time I was a member of the policy planning staff at the Department of State, and had a security clearance. It was so long ago that I cannot now recall the level of security my clearance allowed, but it was suitably low. Like most people under such circumstances, I was curious about what…
Max Boot has an excellent post on the press, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks:
The editors at Der Spiegel can’t contain themselves. Even before publication of the WikiLeaks documents, they’ve taken to their website to announce jubilantly that the leaking of these documents “is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy.”
The world is once again anticipating a massive leak of classified documents by WikiLeaks. The U.S. State Department is so concerned that it has published a letter addressed to the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and his attorney, arguing that publication of the documents will “risk the lives of…
The latest dump of classified WikiLeaks documents shows a few important facts: (1) The United States military unavoidably classifies a mountain of documents because of the easy loquacity of modern computerized warfare; (2) the release of these documents provides no startling revelations—anyone…
WikiLeaks has posted a massive collection of classified documents pertaining to the war in Iraq on the web. As it did with a previous leak of documents concerning Afghanistan, it provided them in advance to the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel. The Pentagon has strongly condemned the…
Early Friday evening I received a link, via email, to this story at ABC News’s website by Russell Goldman and Luis Martinez. The opening sentences read (emphasis added):
The pressure on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, from human rights groups continues to mount. One day after five human rights groups critized WikiLeaks and Assange for endangering Afghans who cooperated with Coalition forces and the Afghan government by leaking more than 76,000 U.S.…
WikiLeaks is now promising to release the remaining 15,000 classified Afghan war documents it has in its possession. The Pentagon is asserting that grave harm will result. Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell is calling the prospective publication the "height of irresponsibility."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange reacted indignantly when members of the press, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen questioned the wisdom of releasing more than 77,000 classified memos without making an effort to remove information that could…
The government of France is joining Britain in taking a tough stand on Pakistan for its double-dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan. From Reuters:
When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the massive leak of more than 90,000 classified documents, he claimed that he was exposing “thousands” of possible American war crimes. The documents show nothing of the sort. Some of the documents do detail the brutality of war, and the unsurprising…
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, on WikiLeaks:
Sickening:
Julian Assange, the man in charge of WikiLeaks, released a video earlier this year slandering U.S. troops as being guilty of "collateral murder." Now Fox News reports: