As if things weren’t bad enough for Julian Assange already. He’s no doubt sitting on pins and needles right now as he faces imminent eviction from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, whereupon he’s likely to land in a British jail. Now, on top of all that, thousands of Twitter direct messages from the official Wikileaks account (allegedly including many written by Assange himself) have been dumped into the public domain. A journalist has published all of the DMs in the name of transparency. That’s rather ironic since Assange clearly wouldn’t want all of this material revealed (with some of it painting his team in a rather unflattering light) but he’s the guy who made his fame and fortune through revealing the private messages of others. (Forbes)

Ever wondered what’s going on behind closed doors at Julian Assange’s pro-transparency outfit Wikileaks? Thanks to journalist Emma Best, you can now rifle through 11,000 direct, private messages sent to and from Wikileaks’ Twitter account.

Best released the messages Monday, saying they came from the “Wikileaks + 10 chat,” a private group for the organization’s more active supporters. She claimed many of the messages contained offensive material. “At various points in the chat, there are examples of homophobia, transphobia, ableism, sexism, racism, antisemitism and other objectionable content and language.” Wikileaks hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

More obviously, the messages show a strong Republican favouritism. Previous reports had already revealed portions of the Wikileaks’ Twitter chats. They included messages allegedly sent by Assange himself, one saying “it would be much better for the GOP to win.” He later described Hillary Clinton as “a bright, well-connected, sadistic sociopath.”

You can browse the full dump of messages via Emma Best’s website. Portions of this archive have been made public previously, but this is apparently the entire trove. They are presented in plain text so you can search for your favorite topics and see what the Wikileaks insiders were up to. (Assuming you don’t have enough free time to pour through all of it.) I took a few quick passes and found some interesting material. For one thing, the Wikileaks staff has been accused of being “pro-Trump” and “anti-Clinton” but this passage from November of 2015, roughly one year before the election, shows that they really don’t care for either major political party in the U.S. (Emphasis added)

[2015-11-19 13:46:18] Unfortunately Clinton has the power to fool, just like Obama, her sheep’s skin completely disguises her nature. And having an ex-president for a husband…well in name recognition alone is very much there.

[2015-11-19 13:46:39] We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.

[2015-11-19 13:47:28] Dems+Media+liberals woudl then form a block to reign in their worst qualities.

[2015-11-19 13:48:22] With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute.

[2015-11-19 13:50:18] She’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.

[2015-11-19 13:51:24] But Labour did not by any means stop the Lib/Tory government curtail their programme.

[2015-11-19 13:52:35] And the Republicans are very close to being fascists so *sigh* …

[2015-11-19 13:56:11] It is very difficult to realistically believe in a political renaissance in the US..

Then there’s this little snippet from the week before the 2016 election. A couple of them are talking about the upcoming Clinton presidency and the panic among journalists that the Podesta emails were only a start. They seem to imply that the emails of a number of MSM journalists were either available or being looked into and the major news networks were panicking over it.

[2016-10-27 09:25:36] [Tweet] https://twitter.com/NRO/status/791528116862746624 There’s so many bizarre op-eds on the Podesta emails. Journos feel the need to reassure their readers that, even though the emails are newsworthy, WikiLeaks is a bad thing!

[2016-10-27 09:39:39] I agree, considering #PodestaEmails speak eloquently of MSM’s collusion with Clinton establishment this is the result of ‘we have been found out’. Part of the political umbrella. But the threat is real for them as they are thinking journo’s e-mails might be next on the list as WL ‘does not hold anything as sacred’ remember JA’s Trafalgar speech 8.10.2011 ‘Journalists are war criminals’? perhaps some realise they might be next on the list as power actors. Sadly Greenwald/Wolf tet-a-tet discussion about privacy is both an expression of such fear and the development of an effective talking point. Suddenly WL threatens privacy. Perhaps end to end strong encryption advocates should provide the antithesis to such argument and demand such universal standard in online communications, a reference to Cypherpunks made by JA recently.

In any event, there’s definitely a lot of “socially unaccpetable” langue in there and the Wikileaks team doesn’t come off looking as pure and altruistic as Assange would like to depict them. If you’ve got some time to kill this week, feel free to browse through or search for your own favorite keywords.