When it was first revealed in November that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under secret charges by the Trump administration, I spent the next few days being told by Russiagaters that this was proof that I have been wrong about their demented cold war cult all along, because #MuellerTime is fast approaching. At long last, they vehemently assured me, Assange was going to prison for working with Russia to deprive Queen Hillary of her rightful throne.
None of those people have come back to apologize or admit that they were wrong when subsequent evidence disproved their claims. None of them ever do.
As it turns out, whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in a secret case investigating Assange for his 2010 role in the WikiLeaks publication of military war logs and diplomatic cables. Manning served seven years in prison for leaking those documents to the transparency advocacy outlet before her sentence was commuted by President Obama, meaning, obviously, that this sealed case has nothing to do with the 2016 leaks Russiagaters have been fiendishly obsessing over. Indeed, the Washington Post reported yesterday that “U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, say the case is based on [Assange’s] pre-2016 conduct, not the election hacks that drew the attention of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.”
So there you have it. Democrats like Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden who have been cheering for Assange’s arrest have actually been cheering on the Trump administration’s prosecution of a journalist for publishing facts about Bush administration war crimes. They thought they were supporting the agenda to punish Assange for publishing leaks that hurt the Hillary campaign, but in reality they were defending two Republican administrations while helping to manufacture support for a prosecution that would set a devastating precedent for press freedoms throughout the entire world.
If you are unfamiliar with the work of Russiagate Grand Wizard Rachel Maddow, you might think she would report the revelation that an unfounded belief held by many of her acolytes has been completely and thoroughly disproven once and for all. If you are a bit more familiar with her, you might assume that she would completely ignore this revelation like she normally does when her conspiratorial ramblings are disproven by facts and evidence. But if you know Rachel really, really well, you might guess what she actually did on her show last night.
That’s right, she flat out lied about it.
On last night’s episode of MSNBC’s most popular show, Maddow blatantly deceived her audience by weaving this story about the Chelsea Manning subpoena into her conspiratorial Russiagate ramblings about Roger Stone, despite those stories having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with one another.
Maddow began by gushing about investigations into Roger Stone’s alleged connections to WikiLeaks, of course not mentioning the fact that the only known interactions between Stone and WikiLeaks consist of WikiLeaks telling Stone to stop lying about having connections to them. Maddow smoothly weaved this into the news that the House Judiciary Committee has formally requested documents pertaining to WikiLeaks (among many other things) from dozens of Trump associates, with a gigantic grin on her face and a tone of immense significance in her voice. Then, without pausing, Maddow began talking about the sealed case against Assange and the Manning subpoena, falsely suggesting that these had something to do with the things she’d just been speaking about.
“And because of the criminal case against Roger Stone, you should also know that today, in federal court in Virginia, little bit of drama,” Maddow said. “Today in federal court in Virginia, the US attorney himself, the top of that prosecutor’s office, the EDVA US attorney himself, personally turned up in court for a sealed hearing today that appears to be about some sort of legal case potentially involving WikiLeaks and/or Julian Assange.”
Maddow then went on to describe November’s revelation via court filing error about Assange’s sealed criminal complaint with her trademarked conspiratorial “you can’t tell me this is a coincidence” histrionics. She then cited a Daily Beast report that former WikiLeaks volunteer David House had accepted an immunity deal in exchange for his testimony before this grand jury, completely omitting the fact that the report explicitly states that this testimony pertained to the 2010 leak drop and not anything to do with 2016.
“Late Thursday, Manning revealed that she’s fighting a subpoena to testify before a grand jury that’s been investigating Julian Assange for nearly nine years,” the Daily Beast article reads in its second paragraph. “But Manning isn’t the only one being dragged into the aging probe of WikiLeaks’ first big haul. A former WikiLeaks volunteer who was also personal friends with Manning was subpoenaed last May.”
Maddow knew this, and willfully distorted it to fit her narrative.
And that something "is based on [Assange's] pre-2016 conduct, not the election hacks" investigated by Mueller (https://t.co/QUIiKPjcih). But @Maddow omits that inconvenient part of the WP article, going instead w/ Stone-Cohen innuendo to falsely suggest this pertains to Mueller: https://t.co/0KGO9jkMAY
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 6, 2019
“So, all of this to say between that court filing error in November, the reporting around that error that suggested that it was weird that he was in that case and it was a mistake but the information was true, and then what we saw today in Virginia, something appears to be happening in federal court that pertains to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. And this is happening as the president’s longtime advisor Roger Stone goes to trial for lying to Congress and witness tampering, allegedly, about his supposed communications with WikiLeaks during the campaign. It happens potentially as he’s going to jail for violating the gag order in that case. It happens as tons of people associated with the president and his campaign are being asked detailed questions by the Judiciary Committee about their interactions with WikiLeaks, including during the campaign, and it happens within a week of Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen testifying before Congress that the president, himself, was personally notified by phone in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans to dump stolen material that Russia hacked from the Democrats during the campaign.”
So she just plain lied. By suggesting that the Virginia grand jury has anything at all to do with Roger Stone’s walking clickbait shenanigans, the House Judiciary Committee’s investigations into possible Trump malfeasance, and Cohen’s testimony that Trump had advance knowledge of the (already publicly announced) upcoming WikiLeaks drops, Maddow knowingly deceived her tinfoil pussyhat-wearing audience into holding out hope that legal proceedings will soon be vindicating their cult.
Maddow then kicked it up into ultra-mega-Super-Saiyan-galaxy-brain Russiavaping by telling her audience not to Google any of the things she was telling them, because they’ll get computer viruses if they try.
“Now I will warn you,” Maddow said with a laugh, “if you are an interested news consumer who is interested in following this part of the story, I will warn you: just about everything that pertains to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Roger Stone is basically un-Googleable. All the online trash that relates to these characters, put your virus protection on. But something does appear to be happening there in federal court.”
While both MSNBC & FOX compete to build fearful alternate realities, this evening's @maddow uses a Scientology technique. Warn viewers, at the end of the show, to not search the net (to check her alternate reality claims) or they'll be attacked by viruses https://t.co/mponlQiLN2
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 6, 2019
Needless to say, this also is completely false. Google algorithms are slanted in favor of mainstream news media, not toward websites that will give you a “virus”, so the top results you get when you type in WikiLeaks or Assange’s name will always be news stories from conventional sites, many of which today refute Maddow’s claim that the Manning subpoena and grand jury have anything to do with the 2016 Trump campaign.
And of course, that’s the point. Narrative management is Rachel Maddow’s job, for which she is extremely well-compensated, and the more isolated she can keep her audience within a tight, narrow echo chamber, the better she can do that job. Rachel Maddow is nothing other than a cold war propagandist, rewarded like all her colleagues for promoting falsehoods to keep mainstream liberals supporting longstanding US government agendas against noncompliant nations while still letting them feel like rebels.
In today’s media landscape, powerful and opaque government agencies are scrutinized and criticized far, far less than a lone political prisoner in an embassy who revealed inconvenient facts about those agencies. The campaign to smear, silence and imprison Assange tells you all you need to know about the governments that WikiLeaks has exposed, and the mass media’s complicity in that campaign tells you all you need to know about them as well.
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26 responses to “Russiagate Grand Wizard Deceives Audience About Assange”
It must torture the brain to have to listen to Rachel Mad-cow on the Mostly Stupid Nitwits Believing Conspiracies network, even if it involves researching her vaunted misdirections. But it is very true: She has a distant relationship with the truth. Even more distant than tenth cousins, or Lizzie Warren and Cherokees.
Why does my timeline of Wikileaks keeps getting removed?
There’s some kind of spam filter on WordPress that I don’t know how to change. Any post with multiple links seems to get flagged. I waved it through.
Caitlin,
Because outstanding content creators can benefit from each other’s work, here’s another example of Corbett’s outstanding work:
https://www.corbettreport.com/psychographics-101
I believe Julian Assange is a hero for exposing government secrets, and I deplore what is happening to him and how he is being treated. All that said, I must point out that, under U.S. law, he not only exposed the things that government was doing, he also published classified information on the internet. Whether we agree that this information should have been available to the public, or not, it is not surprising that the U.S. government wants its pound of flesh for his doing what he did. I understand that he does not enjoy the same protections that the Washington Post did in the Pentagon Papers case because, in that case, the government could not prevent publication of classified information preemptively; i.e., before publication. In Assange’s case, the law allows for prosecution of classified information after its publication. The real travesty here is that the same government that is going after Julian Assange is NOT going after the New York Times, for example, for doing the same thing Assange did. It’s that kind of selective prosecution that makes people realize how much power government has over our lives and that it can choose to ruin us, or not, base on the whim of some pencil-neck bureaucrat or some crooked career politician.
Just wanted to trigger the email notification after the fact.
A demonstration of why “equal justice” under laws is vital. An enormous excess of laws on the books and selective application of them is one of the most common forms of elite tyranny
“Donald Trump talked politics with Bill Clinton weeks before launching 2016 bid”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bill-clinton-called-donald-trump-ahead-of-republicans-2016-launch/2015/08/05/e2b30bb8-3ae3-11e5-b3ac-8a79bc44e5e2_story.html?utm_term=.7d50181fc235
An important financial annoucement to Australians! GET YOUR MONEY OUT OF THE BANK BEFORE THEY STEAL YOUR MONEY! The collapse is on the doorstep!
https://www.adamseconomics.com/
By John Adams, not only an Aussie, but world recognised economist!
WikiLeaks: Julian Assange’s internet access ‘cut’ (October 8, 2016)
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37680411
Fox News Julian Assange’s Arrest 10/18/2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T_h7pSVIFo
“DDoS attack that disrupted internet was largest of its kind in history, experts say” (October 21, 2016)
The victim was the servers of Dyn, a company that controls much of the internet’s domain name system (DNS) infrastructure. It was hit on 21 October and remained under sustained assault for most of the day, bringing down sites including Twitter, the Guardian, Netflix, Reddit, CNN and many others in Europe and the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/26/ddos-attack-dyn-mirai-botnet
The Podesta email dumps were happening during this time.
Every day at 9:00 PM, I am subjected to the blathering of the RussiaGate Grand Wizard by the dictat of She Who Must Be Obeyed. I end up yelling back at the screen, and am rewarded by having SWMBO playing the show a second time online in our marriage bed. What’s that definition of insanity….? I need to find another pursuit at 9:00.
Thank G*d for Caitlin and her comrades across the web for sweet relief.
BTW, I know a wizard who would be most aggrieved to find RM elevated to his ranks.
Maddow is a lying scum bag, why anyone watchs this deceitful shit bag news outlet, is beyond me!
If you want some truth, here is some for you. Syria is the front line for the battle against the uni-polar establishment, and the final battle is NOW at hand! This is VERY important, because if Syria and it’s allies lose this battle, then terrorism WILL, spread rapidly to China & Russia, along with the rest of the world!
Syria, NEEDS our FULL support right now! From the front line of this battle comes an editorial that EVERYONE should read!
https://journal-neo.org/2019/03/05/idlib-reportage-from-the-last-front-in-syria/
“Now it has emerged that two of the top lawyers representing Assange, John Jones in London and Michael Ratner in New York, died within less than a month of each other this year. And, Assange’s closest confidant in London and a Director of WikiLeaks, Gavin Macfadyen, died just yesterday.
Now there is WikiLeaks leaking emails and documents that show that the same kind of cartel-like behavior that has corrupted Wall Street to its core has also infested the top of the Democratic Party. And, amazingly, three key members of the Assange/WikiLeaks support network have died within six months of each other this year. The statistical probability of this being a natural occurrence is slim.”
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/10/banker-deaths-and-wikileaks-deaths-have-a-common-thread/
Wikileaks and Julian Assange were taken out since October of 2016.
Caitlin, I suggest you start referring to MadCow, Blitzer, etc. as “actors”. They grew up knowing full well what “successful” taling heads had to say, so that’s what they’re doing. And, as you pointed out in your piece, they’re being very handsomely rewarded for doing so.
..
Is there justice in this world — that truth will be rewarded? Maybe in the past. Not today, at least, not yet.
..
What I find interesting is that these liars actually provide a service to their hopeful listeners. They tell their listeners EXACTLY what they want to hear.
You’ll enjoy this episode from Corbett documenting a non-obvious point of the Rhodes scholarship program:
https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-350-history-is-written-by-the-winners
Caitlin, if you haven’t watch Corbett before or often, you’ll enjoy it, too.
I’m baffled and disgusted that Maddow is considered a credible news source by anyone with half a brain. My own “liberal” sister was shocked and skeptical when I tried to explain what a shameless tool Maddow is. I did suggest some sites (like this one) for her to check out but sadly, I doubt if she will.
I agree with you. Because of identity politics, lots of people who should know better believe her because she is a gay woman and that fact is the only fact that counts with them.
It’s possible, and I’ve read convincing articles about it, that Assange, and Snowden are U.S. intelligence community assets. It’s difficult to estimate the level of depravity to which “intelligence” and armed services will stoop, and both thrive on creating chaos, death, and destruction. Both have very little to do with safety, and security which are just covers for their criminal activity of sowing death, destruction, and fear everywhere, including domestically, from which to profit. Presstitutes like Rachel Madow, a closeted lesbian, and total nut job propagandist, and Anderson Cooper, et. al. are just part of the mix. They’re not real journalists. The U.S., Israeli, and other western European countries, along with Russian, Chinese, and South American intelligence agencies are all run by hard core international criminal thugs. The same goes for the armed services in all those countries. By and large only psychopaths, and sociopaths are attracted to spying, and armed conflict. There are also decent people, very much in the minority, that are attracted to those fields, but they are quickly marginalized if they don’t toe the line of hard core criminality that rules intelligence, and armed services. The best insight I have ever seen into the absolute psychopathy, and sociopathy of U.S. politicians, intelligence, and armed services personnel is that provided by Kay Griggs, who was married to a sexually deviant, total sociopath, and psychopath who was U.S. armed services, and fairly high up on the cannibal food chain that runs it. http://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?t=968&start=10
The notion that Assange, who is in isolation in chronic pain and in collapsing health, is a “U.S. intelligence community asset” is insane and stupid. What intelligence community asset would be rewarded for his servitude with torture? And Maddow is not a “closeted” lesbian. She’s been out for years.
I was wondering if Maddow’s wife knew that Maddow was a closeted lesbian.
lol!
Narrative control by Caitlin apparently involves posts refuting her assertions that she doesn’t like. Odd. I’ll repost my list of CIA assets murdered by the CIA with links to articles in reputable news sources about them.
Correct. Thank you.
Send Rachel Maddow (& MSM State TV, WolfBzio ex AIPAC employee, Fox, D&R’s, MIC, Etc.) to GITMO? Put a wall around these War Criminals? The People United Will Never Be Divided. Power To The People. Blink…Get to work for the children. Keep on… Yes We Can? Blink. Get out of the way.
Without a doubt, Maddow is a lying POS. Like most conspiracy theorists, she is constantly connecting dots without ever showing why they should be connected in the particular pattern that she has chosen. Of course, the real reason is that the pattern supports the theory that she is promoting and profiting from. Truth be damned. Maddow is certainly not the only one, but as Caitlin put it, she is the Russiagate Grand Wizard and has the biggest audience.