BuzzFeed News reports that Twitter direct messages (DMs) between Emma Best, a freelance journalist, and WikiLeaks' Julian Assange show WikiLeaks was communicating with Guccifer 2.0, a Russian military intelligence officer, about the stolen Democratic National Committee emails it eventually released.
WikiLeaks had mentioned Guccifer 2.0 a single time before, tweeting in June 2016 — five weeks before it released its first dump of Democratic National Committee emails — that the persona had claimed it gave WikiLeaks DNC emails.
But by the time of the DM conversation with Best, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had shifted the story of how WikiLeaks acquired those emails, giving repeated TV interviews that floated Seth Rich, a Democratic staffer who had been murdered in what police concluded was a botched robbery, as his real source.
The messages between Assange and Best, a freelance national security journalist and online archivist, are the starkest proof yet that Assange knew a likely Russian government hacker had the Democrat leaks he wanted. And they reveal the deliberate bad faith with which Assange fed the groundless claims that Rich was his source, even as he knew the documents’ origin.
According to BuzzFeed News, Best messaged Guccifer 2.0 in August 2016 to see if she could get access to the emails he advertised on a WordPress account.
Best has experience posting large data sets, and wondered if she could host the files on archive.org, a nonprofit digital library.
But Guccifer 2.0 had another idea. “[I] gonna send a large trove to wikileaks,” it said. Best, who had DMed with WikiLeaks before, relayed that message to WikiLeaks in a direct message on Twitter. Neither party conveyed to her whether they had interacted together before.
“I told them that Guccifer 2.0 was considering giving me at least part of the cache, which is when they asked me to be their ‘agent,’ which they said I would get ‘credit’ for,” Best said. She didn’t agree to act as Assange’s agent, she said, but stopped messaging with Guccifer 2.0.
WikiLeaks was adamant in its communications with Best that it didn't want anyone else to leak the files.
“[T]hese other media groups are very likely to take a stupid initial angle,” WikiLeaks said in one message sent Aug. 12 at 9:14 p.m., adding that other news outlets would focus less on the content of the leaks than how they came to be. “‘We don’t know if its true. Possibly russians who knows blah blah blah.’”
WikiLeaks’s pitch worked. “I dropped the matter with both parties and never received or passed on any exclusive G2, DNC, Podesta, etc. documents,” Best said.
Assange went on to release the hacked documents and then repeatedly pushed the Seth Rich conspiracy theory in media interviews.
Beyond the June 2016 tweet, Assange made no mention of Guccifer 2.0. As with previous misdirections, hinting that Rich was responsible gave WikiLeaks a means of not implicating the Russian government.
WikiLeaks has been caught covering for Russia at least twice before, both in the summer of 2016, when it declined to publish a huge cache of Russian government data, and in its 2012 exclusion, in its published “Syria Files,” of a $2.4 billion transaction from the Central Bank of Syria to the VTB Bank in Russia. In September, it finally published 35 files from a private Russian intelligence company, but most of them were already public and of little news value, leading experts to allege that was a decision to quiet criticism that WikiLeaks was too friendly to Russia.
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The files that Guccifer 2.0 published on its WordPress account would later appear in both of WikiLeaks's major drops during the 2016 election: the DNC Email Archive and the Podesta Emails dumps.
In between those releases, on Aug. 12, 2016, it was clear from those messages to Best that the WikiLeaks Twitter account knew that Guccifer 2.0 was the source of hacked Democratic documents.
Full story: These Messages Show Julian Assange Talked About Seeking Hacked Files From Guccifer 2.0 (BuzzFeed News)