How do I know? You pretend this is established beyond a reasonable doubt when it has never been tested in Court to that standard. Without that, the claim is not compelling.
Not that there was not opportunity. If the FBI had wanted those hard drives so they could make the case, they could have worked with a US attorney to obtain them.
If they wanted to test their claim that the Russians provided the documents to Assange, they could have indicted him, and taken the opportunity to prove their claims in court.
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?
Mueller brought a dozen felony charges against the Russian operatives with whom, we’ve been told for over two years, Assange conspired. So why isn’t Assange charged with at least some of these felonies?
If I were a cynic (perish the thought!), I’d suspect that the government does not want Special Counsel Mueller’s Russian-hacking indictment to be challenged.
The legal case Mueller would have to prove to a jury has problems. To state the most obvious: The Justice Department and FBI did not perform elementary investigative steps, such as taking possession of, and performing their own forensic analysis on, the servers that were hacked. Instead, they relied on CrowdStrike, a contractor of the DNC, which has a strong motive to blame Russia.
Mueller’s team knew that no Russian defendant would ever actually be tried in a U.S. court on the hacking allegations. The indictment was more like a press release than a charging instrument. It was meant to be the last word on hacking: An authoritative version of events pronounced by a respected U.S. prosecutor that would never be challenged by skilled defense lawyers. The point was to put to rest the nettlesome “How do we really know Russia did it?” question raised by some former intelligence agents.
If Assange were charged with the Russian-hacking conspiracy that Mueller has alleged, and if he were ever brought to the U.S. to face trial, he would maintain that he did not get the Democratic emails from Russian intelligence. Remember, a defendant does not have to prove anything: It would not be Assange’s burden to establish Russia’s innocence; the Justice Department would have to prove Russia’s culpability.
If the Justice Department had indicted Assange for collusion, Mueller’s Russian-hacking indictment would no longer stand unchallenged. Assange would deny that Russia is behind the hacking, and prosecutors would have to try to prove it, using hard, admissible courtroom proof.
Adversary countries 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.
What is going on here?
Julian Assange & Russia Collusion: Why Not Charge Him? | National Review
