Washington, D.C. – This week, in a stunning turn of events, U.S. congressman Dana Rohrabacher became the first congressman to meet with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
During the private three-hour meeting Assange told Rohrabacher that he will prove that leaked DNC documents, published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election, did not come from Russia. Then on Thursday, Rohrabacher made a promise to pardon him.
On Thursday, Rohrabacher gave an interview with the Daily Caller in which he noted that Assange couldn’t come to Washington given his current status as a wanted criminal. So, he brought up the notion of pardoning the political prisoner.
Rohrabacher told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview Thursday that Assange is hoping to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he is currently in asylum, and that during the meeting they explored “what might be necessary to get him out.”
The congressman told TheDC that “if [Assange] is going to give us a big favor, he would obviously have to be pardoned to leave the Ecuadorian embassy.” Assange took asylum in the embassy in August 2012 after facing sexual assault charges in Sweden. The Justice Department also reportedly wants to charge Assange for helping Edward Snowden, a former NSA analyst, leak thousands of classified documents.
“He has information that will be of dramatic importance to the United States and the people of our country as well as to our government,” Rohrabacher said. “Thus if he comes up with that, you know he’s going to expect something in return. He can’t even leave the embassy to get out to Washington to talk to anybody if he doesn’t have a pardon. Obviously there is an issue there that needs to be dealt with, but we haven’t come to any conclusion yet.”
The potential for a pardon based on smashing the Russian hacking narrative is nothing short of bombshell. And, according to Rohrabacher, Assange has the proof to back it up.
Rohrabacher recounted his conversation with Assange to The Hill:
“Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year’s presidential election,” Rohrabacher said,“Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.
Perhaps even more interesting, when Rep. Rohrabacher was pressed for details about the source of the documents he said that he had information that was to be shared with President Trump privately.
“Julian also indicated that he is open to further discussions regarding specific information about the DNC email incident that is currently unknown to the public,” Rohrabacher added.
While anonymous sources within U.S. intelligence agencies have continually claimed they have proof of Russian involvement — which it has curiously never made public — numerous former intelligence officials have come forward after a technical analysis of the data and determined that it was much more likely that someone on the east coast of the United States was behind the data theft from the DNC.
The technical analysis revealed that files stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 election cycle were most likely downloaded to a USB drive by someone with physical access to a computer connected to the DNC network. The analysis firmly refutes the official narrative of the files being hacked remotely by the Russians – as popularized by the U.S. corporate media, without any actual evidence ever publicly presented.
According to a report by Bloomberg:
The January assessment of the U.S. intelligence community, which serves as the basis for accusations that Russia hacked the election said, among other things: “We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release U.S. victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.”
VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) instead surmises that, after WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016 his intention to publish Hillary Clinton-related emails, the DNC rushed to fabricate evidence that it had been hacked by Russia to defuse any potential WikiLeaks disclosures. To this end, the theory goes, the DNC used the Guccifer 2.0 online persona to release mostly harmless DNC data. Guccifer 2.0 was later loosely linked to Russia because of Russian metadata in his files and his use of a Russia-based virtual private network.
VIPS includes former National Security Agency staffers with considerable technical expertise, such as William Binney, the agency’s former technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis, and Edward Loomis Jr., former technical director for the office of signals processing, as well as other ex-intelligence officers with impressive credentials.
While the DNC leak was quickly attributed to the Russian hackers by U.S. intelligence agencies, a document published by an individual going by the name Forensicator reveals how the 7-zip file published by Guccifer 2.0 was transferred at a speed of 23 MB/s, making it “unlikely that this initial data transfer could have been done remotely over the Internet.”
“The initial copying activity was likely done from a computer system that had direct access to the data,”the report from the Forensicator stated. “By ‘direct access’ we mean that the individual who was collecting the data either had physical access to the computer where the data was stored, or the data was copied over a local high speed network (LAN).”
Even more curious, the DNC never allowed the FBI to conduct a technical analysis of the allegedly hacked servers, and instead relied on a private company called CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike’s conclusions informed much of the intelligence community’s assessment — which had obvious conflicts of interest — due to the fact they’re being paid by the DNC as well as their co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch’s affiliation with the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that has generally viewed Russia as a hostile power.
Assange has previously intimated that Russia wasn’t the source of his leaked information, but Tuesday marks the first time he has engaged with a U.S. lawmaker to make it “official.”
Rohrabacher noted he had information he planned to deliver to President Trump upon his return to the US, and said that included a request that the WikiLeaks be given a news media seat inside the White House press briefing room.
“Julian passionately argued the case that WikiLeaks was vital to informing the public about controversial though necessary issues. He hoped that WikiLeaks — an award-winning journalistic operation — might be granted a seat in the White House press corps. As a former newsman myself I can’t see a reason why they shouldn’t be granted news status for official press conferences,” he said.
In regards to other information to be delivered to the president, Rohrabacher said:
“We left with the understanding that we would be going into further details in the near future. The rest of the message is for the president directly and I hope to convey it to him as more details come in.”
“Unbeknownst to me I am the first member of Congress to visit there with Mr. Assange,” he said.
While initially, the U.S. public saw through Hillary Clinton’s “the Russians did it” mantra last year, and she lost the election, many Americans have been propagandized into believing the “Russians hacked the election” narrative after a prolonged and sustained propaganda operation.
Authoritarian regimes often use external enemies to distract the public from domestic discord, but in a functioning democracy, this should never happen. Perhaps the fact that these tactics are now being used on the American public should serve as a wake-up call that we are teetering on the brink of despotism.
Please share this article so that the “Russia hacking” narrative can finally be put to rest, and called out for what it is – U.S. government sponsored propaganda!
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