The unraveling of Julian Assange

Here is a man dedicated to radical transparency, yet he refuses to appear before a Swedish court to defend himself from rape charges. His organization retweets the president-elect who once called for him to be put to death. He spreads the innuendo that Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, was murdered this summer because he was the real source of the e-mails WikiLeaks published in the run-up to November’s election. And now he tells Fox News’s Sean Hannity that it’s the U.S. media that is deeply dishonest.

This is the proper context to evaluate Assange’s claim, repeated by Donald Trump and his supporters, that Russia was not the source for the e-mails of leading Democrats distributed by WikiLeaks.

We all know that the U.S. intelligence community is standing by its judgment that Russia hacked the Democrats’ e-mails and distributed them to influence the election. And while it’s worrisome that Trump would dismiss this judgment out of hand, this also misses the main point. Sometimes the spies get it wrong, like the “slam-dunk” conclusion that Saddam Hussein was concealing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The real issue is Assange. The founder of WikiLeaks has a history of saying paranoid nonsense.