I can only go by what he said.

He was more fearful of getting sent to the usa as Sweden refused to guarantee that he wouldn't be extradited

Just to repost this.

Given that he has deliberately evaded justice for serious crimes his integrity has to be questioned.

Your attacking him personally rather than what wikileaks release.

The question was whether he was a credible source. I'm also not attacking him, I'm stating facts.

Has his website said anything wrong to get a bad reputation?

Take the man away from this personally, and just look at the website in general, are they, or are they not a good source of information?

They used to be, to an extent. Over the past year that reputation has been shredded. They (Assange) were bought. They took sides, clearly. Their (and Assange) integrity has to be seriously questioned now.

Bought by whom?

Whoever thought it was a good idea to have Trump in the White House. The Russians, clearly.

Exactly- if they were only interested in digging up dirt and exposing corruption, then why weren't they posting it on the Republicans too? Why was it entirely one-sided? I'm sure there's plenty of material they could have put up about Trump and the GOP- but they didn't.

Yes you are. Trump did one thing right in the election - he put a very simple message across, which appealed to the most basic instincts of voters - if you worked in manufacturing and are worried about your job - it is very easy to blame external factors such as open trade, Mexicans or China.

So while his comments about Muslims, Mexicans and the like were controversial and were attacked by the liberal press - these were often dismissed by Trump supporters as the Mainstream Press. Trump ignored the press and spoke directly to people either via Twitter or at rallies and he had a very simple message.


It is not a reference to hacking the voting machines, so much as the election itself. As I said many Trump supporters dismissed the mainstream press as a conspiracy by the political elite. Yet those same people lapped up the information about Clinton's email server and the hacks of emails and they were fed a constant diet of email information.

As for the machines - the security or lack of it has been well documented. But with the lack of any proper auditing - there is no way to say absolutely either way - but given the importance of an election - would this not be sensible?



Not a conspiracy - so much as look at who benefits with a Trump victory and one of the biggest gainers is Putin who calculates that he will have much more of a free hand with Trump in the Whitehouse than Clinton - so it benefits him to discredit Clinton and to be positive about Trump - which is precisely what he did.

None of which is relevant to the point that Trump is not a popular president - with him being the first to have a negative approval rating on entering the White House, and losing the popular vote by the largest margin of any president in history. He is president - just not popular.

Assange hates Clinton with a passion and has a score to settle

Keeping their powder dry perhaps, influence an election to get their preferred choice into power, then release material to weaken that choice.

I think that's more out of hatred of clinton and her backers

Trump had wall to wall negative news coverage. It was deafening.
Clinton hardly had any negative news coverage at all.

So with or without Wikileaks it could be argued that the mainstream news was unbalanced and had an effect in itself on the election. But not perhaps in the manner it was intended.

There are many variables to consider which are virtually impossible to measure in terms of what effect they had on the election result, but Wikileaks (Or Russian hacks if you'd prefer to believe) were simply the American public reading what was presumably the real motivations and actions of the DNC, which they didn't like. It's not as if The Russians somehow made the American public think a certain way somehow. The public just read what was there. Unless of course the emails weren't real.

But then there were the videos which not many people speak about at the moment, which were film of Democratic spokespeople speaking of their tactics. Some say that those videos possibly had a severe effect on public perception.

Questions over Clinton's health.

Negative campaigning.

People turned off by celebrity endorsements.

Trump's promises sounded more appealing to the rust belt.

Poorly judged approach to campaign strategy.

A distrust of Clinton based on her use of a private email server and sending and receiving classified information.

Clinton's record. The experience she was trying to sell herself by.

Her own tendency to be economical with the truth.

Clinton hardly getting out to campaign in areas she needed to appeal to.

Reliance on blue states.

And people simply not liking or trusting Hillary Clinton right from the very start.

There were so many variables involved. No one can say what actually swung the election and to what effect, let alone determined the result. The DNC and Hillary Clinton herself must be arrogant to the extreme if they believe that she would have won if it wasn't for those Russians. That arrogantly assumes that naturally she was going to win. Obviously, why wouldn't she? She was supposed to win by default. There can be no other explanation other than Putin making the public vote against her.
How could Trump win without the Russians? It's ludicrous to suggest something so preposterous.

So the hacking of the election by Russia, was not so much a case of rigging it in terms of actual votes (which you know is kind of the most important thing if you are going to say someone influenced an election to such a degree as people are saying), but in terms of information being released to the media.

So, so far we have a lot of speculation, but no actual confirmed facts that Russian hackers did anything in this election, in terms of interfering with the actual votes, or anything of that nature.

If there is clear information out there on this topic, where is it? Do the American public not deserve to know how exactly the Russians interfered with their election, (if they did)?

Why has it not been made public so far, if this information does indeed exist?

It just seems so far to be more narrative driven, then fact based driven do far, until that changes, then it just comes across as sour grapes by those most pushing this line of reasoning as to why Hillary lost.

And remind me again how Putin discredited Clinton?

Noone has ever maintained that Russians hacked actual voting machines, you're making a straw man. The issue is that Russia / Wikileaks released information on the DNC that they knew would influence votes and move voters towards Trump. They kept up the 'Clinton is scandal-plagued' narrative, which was only helped by Comey (who should be cursed for destroying the credibility of that office).

There have been reports issued, reports given to private and public investigators, and not even Republicans (who have been given this information) are questioning the validity of the report. You're essentially believing Trump over literally everyone else, The only reason Trump is denying it happened is because it means that he didn't do it all himself, which is impossible to admit since he's a serial narcissist.

Oh except constant refrains that Hilary was a crook - not that anyone could point to a specific thing that had been proven - lots of allegations that were unproven though.


Repeat something often enough and it will eventually be seen as true - people start thinking well we keep hearing about this (emails) so there must be something in it.


Which was all shown to be false.


Which came from the Trump campaign - or is calling someone a crook not negative campaigning.


As I said he did one thing right - his message was simple


There is something in that - after all while he did not get the highest popular vote it was spread over a larger area - hence he won the electoral college.


Which was shown to be misguided but otherwise there was nothing wrong with that.


True


I'm not so sure many people trust Trump - certainly not those who were not paid by his companies and lost thousands, sometimes there livelihoods.

Me, not so sure - I just think he is psychologically unsuited to the role, arrogant and what policies he has announced will make us all poorer - even those who did not vote for him. Pretty much nothing he has done since winning has demonstrated to me that I was wrong.


We have had information - how else do you think I knew that the hacks had been traced back to known Russian hackers - even to the extent that the keyboard settings of the responsible machine are known (it had the Cyrillic fonts installed). Here for example is the report from Crowdstrike - the private organisation brought in by the DNC to investigate the Hacks.

Foreign news media from many countries had something to say about the American election. Here in the UK it was hardly out of the news. We had our own commentators and pundits having their say on who and who shouldn't become the American president and why.
With information being global there were influences from all over the world who put their ten penneth in.
The only difference is that Wikileaks had a news scoop that no one else had.
If investigative journalism was as healthy in America as it should be much of it was information which should have been out there and the American public deserved to know about.

So the narrative was "Clinton was scandal plagued", yet Trump was not then was he?
He was involved in more scandals in this election cycle then anyone in history, so it was hardly a one sided thing!

I am not believing Trump over anyone, you say that there have been reports issued, fair enough, where are they? What evidence in these reports is there to question the validity of this election, once again, why not make public this evidence, rather than keeping it to a very small amount of people? What good does that do?

You are just showing your bias by calling Trump names at the end, we are trying towage a sensible political debate here, name calling of a soon to be President is just not required here.

You haven't really read my post there. You've simply made a rebuttal to the points I put forward. But you're completely missing the point. I wasn't trying to prove that those were reasons why Clinton is awful (even though they're pretty good ones nonetheless). I was providing many points from which people will have based their vote on. You really missed the point completely there.

And I don't know where you saw constant refrains about Clinton being a crook on the news. I watched all the main British channels for the last few months and I didn't see that story pushed forward at all. Not by the BBC, Channel 4, ITV or Channel 5. None of them did what you say they did at all.

You can tell me how bad Trump is from now until the end of time. It means nothing to me. That's not what we're talking about. You can tell me how much of a nutcase he is, how arrogant he is, how unsuitable is, it's meaningless to me and I have no interest in defending him in terms of this discussion. You can keep describing how bad he is but it only serves as a means to avoid the point of what we're talking about.

Nearly every time Trump opened his mouth during the campaign it said "Crooked Hillary". The British news channels showed many of those utterances.

Most of the times Trumps scandals and behaviour was raised - up came the cry 'What about the emails!' - as I said previously repeat a lie often enough and it will come to be accepted as the truth.


Are you sure?


See above - I linked to one. I could find others but I am supposed to be working


The validity of the election is not being questioned - Trump won however disastrous that maybe. The point is was that result effected by the actions of a foreign power.


It has been made public - however it is worth noting that when dealing with any security matter some things do remain secret - simply to protect methods and sources.

Here is another report. The Crowdstrike report I have already linked to on a number of occasions.

I think you'll find that was in the context of showing Trump mouthing off amongst a myriad of other clips of Trump 'worst bits'. It was never the point of a news item itself.
Never, NEVER did I see any British news channel look into Clinton being a crook. It never happened and I think you know it.

The only thing I saw on a British news programme which appeared to show Clinton in an unfavourable light was the clip of her having a fit or something as she was unceremoniously bundled into the back of a vehicle. Which was pretty unavoidable as it had gone viral at that point.