Who killed Seth Rich?

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reports,

A rather stunning report from Gateway Pundit outlines information contained within a lawsuit filing. The lawsuit, filed by Businessman Ed Butowsky, alleges Wikileaks founder Julian Assange confirmed to Fox News analyst Ellen Ratner that the DNC leaked emails were received from Seth Rich and his brother Aaron.

A CTH commenter who calls himself snailmailtrucker writes,

Seth Rich was MURDERED in DC.
Debbie Wassermann Schultz’ Brother was the Investigating Assistant District Attorney investigating the Seth Rich Murder.
Seth Rich was seen the Night of his Murder with Debbie Wassermann Schultz’ Boyfriend Imran Awan…one of the Awan Brothers of the Debbie Schultz/Awan Bros. ESPIONAGE case who Infiltrated and Compromised The ENTIRE Democrat Party’s COMPUTER SYSTEM!

Now you know why there was never any evidence to a relate anyone to Seth Rich’s Murder…..
Debbie’s Brother DESTROYED IT ALL !

Read more here.

An aside on Assange

Ace reports that Assange got booted out of the Ecuadorian embassy after

embarrassing pictures of the socialist president of Ecuador, whose first name is actually Lenin, were leaked, showing him in swank hotel rooms with beds loaded with expensive items from the room service menu.



President Lenin Moreno blamed Assange for the hacking and leaking of these personal travel photos, though I don't think there's any real reason to suspect that.

An anti-American activist

In the American Spectator, Jed Babbin is no fan of Julian Assange.

The example of Assange’s behavior that defines him and WikiLeaks was WikiLeaks’ March 2017 publication of a substantial portion of the computer hacking tools that the CIA uses to conduct espionage abroad. The “stories” were published in WikiLeaks’ “Vault 7.” They weren’t news stories revealing what the CIA was doing: it was the computer software itself — the lines of code — that were being used.

The difference there was rather than publish news about the CIA’s behavior and the targets against which the tools were employed, Assange and WikiLeaks published the actual computer software. Doing so gave every adversary — nations, terrorist networks, and others — information which they could use to protect themselves against U.S. espionage.

WikiLeaks isn’t a news publication but a cyber bulletin board on which any leaker can have America’s most closely-guarded secrets published. Assange isn’t a journalist: he’s an anti-American activist whose mission in life is to damage the United States. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said when he was CIA director, WikiLeaks functions as if it were a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”

Read more here.

"What is going on here?"

In National Review, Andrew McCarthy asks why isn’t Assange charged with ‘collusion with Russia?’

In a nutshell: Knowing that Russia had the capacity to hack the DNC and perhaps Clinton herself, WikiLeaks urged it to come up with new material and vowed to help bring it maximum public attention. By necessity, this desire to hurt Clinton would inure to Sanders’s benefit. And sure enough, WikiLeaks eventually published tens of thousands of the Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence.

...First, why was there no Sanders-Russia probe? Why, when President Obama directed John Brennan, his hyper-political CIA director, to rush out a report on Russia’s influence operations, did we not hear about the WikiLeaks-Russia objective of helping Sanders win the Democratic nomination? Brennan & Co. couldn’t tell us enough about our intelligence-agency mind readers’ confidence that Putin was rootin’ for Trump. Why nothing about the conspirators’ Feelin’ the Bern?

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think there is any basis for a criminal investigation of Senator Sanders. But there appears to have been no criminal predicate for a “collusion” investigation of Donald Trump, either — not a shred of public evidence that he conspired in the Putin regime’s hacking, other than that presented in the Clinton-campaign-sponsored Steele dossier (if you can call that “evidence” — though even Christopher Steele admits it’s not). Yet, Trump was subjected to an investigation for more than two years — on the gossamer-light theory that Trump stood to benefit from Moscow’s perfidy.

A more serious question: Why hasn’t Assange been indicted for criminal collusion with the Kremlin — the same hacking conspiracy for which Mueller indicted the Russian operatives with whom Mueller says Assange collaborated? The same conspiracy for which the president of the United States, though not guilty, was under the FBI’s microscope for nearly three years?

The most striking thing about the Assange indictment that the Justice Department did file is how thin it is, and how tenuous. Leaping years backwards, ignoring “collusion with Russia,” prosecutors allege a single cyber-theft count: a conspiracy between Assange and then–Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning to steal U.S. defense secrets. This lone charge is punishable by as little as no jail time and a maximum sentence of just five years’ imprisonment (considerably less than the seven years Assange spent holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid prosecution).

...espionage charges are time-barred. Which brings us to the possibility — perhaps even the likelihood — that Assange will never see the inside of an American courtroom.

As I pointed out on Thursday, the 2010 Assange-Manning cyber-theft conspiracy charged by prosecutors is outside the standard five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes: The limitations period was already exhausted when the indictment was filed in 2018. To breathe life into the case, the Justice Department will have to convince both British and American judges that this comparatively minor conspiracy charge is actually a “federal crime of terrorism,” triggering a three-year statute-of-limitations extension.

Adversary countries are a security challenge, not a law-enforcement problem. Because they don’t have to surrender their officials for an American trial, an indictment is a pointless gesture. But now, having with great fanfare filed charges against Russia that implicate Assange, the government shrinks from lodging these same charges against Assange — who, unlike the indicted Russian officials, may be in a position to put the government to its burden of proof. This just makes Mueller’s indictment of Russians look more like a publicity stunt than a serious allegation. If the government is afraid to try the allegations against Russia in court, people will naturally suspect the allegations are hype.

...Meanwhile, let us remember: Despite a dearth of evidence that he was complicit in Moscow’s hacking, President Trump was forced by the Justice Department and the FBI, urged on by congressional Democrats, to endure a two-year investigation and to govern under a cloud of suspicion that he was an agent of the Kremlin. Now we have Assange, as to whom there is indisputable evidence of complicity in the hacking conspiracy, but the Justice Department declines to charge him with it — instead, positing the dubious Manning conspiracy that may very well be time-barred.

What is going on here?

Read more here.

If Julian Assange is extradicted to America, what should we do with him?

Julian Assange was arrested and dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London yesterday. Clash Daily has a good summary of events here.

Engaging with Julian Assange

Investigative reporter John Solomon at The Hill tells us about a missed opportunity for the US government

to engage Julian Assange in a dialogue over redactions, a more responsible way to release information, and how the infamous DNC hacks occurred was lost — likely forever.

Swedish prosecutors drop charges against Assange

The Guardian reports that

Swedish prosecutors have dropped their preliminary investigation into an allegation of rape against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, bringing an end to a seven-year legal standoff.

Read more here.

"Our new motto, thanks to Assange, should be: Transparency for leaders. Privacy for their citizens."

Is Julian Assange the true hero of 2016? That is what Roger L. Simon thinks.

...We also learned, via Assange, that Saudi Arabia and Qatar funded both the Clinton Foundation and ISIS.

...Meanwhile, the true hero of this election is the mainstream media's polar opposite, Julian Assange, the man whose life is literally endangered while living under virtual house arrest in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It is he—and his organization—who truly reports the news undistorted and unbiased through undisputed primary sources. It is he who has revealed to our country and the world how power works.

...What Assange has shown us is that the situation is far worse than any of us imagined, that the power of global elites is so great that political parties are almost irrelevant. These elites endanger our republic and the world to such a degree that transparency is mandatory.

...Our new motto, thanks to Assange, should be: Transparency for leaders. Privacy for their citizens. I know that's hard to attain. But that should be the message from the revelations of 2016.

Read more here.