EXCLUSIVE: The Freedom of the Press Foundation has routed half a million dollars to WikiLeaks. But Julian Assange’s embrace of Trump split the group’s board, which includes Edward Snowden, and now it’s on the verge of a major break https://t.co/sF5yLn2jh0
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 17, 2017
And it actually is a sad moment, for some of us — sure, Assange has always been weird, but I convinced myself that something useful might come from the organization he would, eventually, run into the sludge:
In the heat of the presidential election campaign last year, Xeni Jardin, a journalist and free speech advocate, developed a sickening feeling about WikiLeaks.
Jardin had been a supporter of the radical transparency group since at least 2010, when it published hundreds of thousands of U.S. military and State Department documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. In 2012, Jardin was a founding member of the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit established as a censorship-proof conduit for donations to WikiLeaks after PayPal and U.S. credit card companies imposed a financial blockade on the site.
But during the election season, Jardin noticed WikiLeaks veering violently off its original mission of holding governments and corporations to account. Beginning in July of last year, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ driving force, began releasing a cache of stolen email from the Democratic National Committee, and injecting WikiLeaks’ influential Twitter feed with the kind of alt-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories once reserved for Breitbart and InfoWars…
Her misgivings eventually led to a tense confrontation with Assange and touched off a year-long debate among the directors at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has handled around $500,000 in individual donations for WikiLeaks over the last five years. Now the foundation acknowledges it’s on the brink of ending its assistance to WikiLeaks, on the grounds that the financial censorship Assange faced in 2012 is no longer in place.
“At our last board meeting in October 2017, a consensus arose that we could not find any evidence of an ongoing blockade involving PayPal, Visa, or Mastercard,” wrote Trevor Timm, co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in a statement to The Daily Beast. “We decided we would therefore formally notify WikiLeaks that unless they could demonstrate that a blockade was still in effect, we would no longer provide a mechanism for people to donate to them.”…
The foundation hastens to point out that Assange’s personal actions and politics are irrelevant to its decision. “Like every board, our members have a variety of opinions,” said Timm, “but our primary motivation as an organization has never been whether we agree with everything that WikiLeaks does or says.” But there’s no denying that some on the board have soured on WikiLeaks. Snowden, sources close to him tell The Daily Beast, has felt for a long time that Assange has taken WikiLeaks far from a positive, constructive vision of what Snowden believes WikiLeaks could or should be.
The foundation’s angst mirrors that of the larger community of former WikiLeaks supporters. The leaked messages between Assange and Trump Jr. recently prompted Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire backer of The Intercept, to tweet that they “disqualify” WikiLeaks from being considered a media organization. After Assange defended his election-chaos pitch as intended to “generate a transformative discussion about corrupt media, corrupt PACs and primary corruption,” Omidyar shot back: “Isn’t this an invitation to conspire to knowingly and falsely accuse election officials and a variety of people of fraud?”…
“This is the final mark of someone who’s in it for himself,” says journalist James Ball, who once worked for WikiLeaks, of Julian Assange. “He’s a sad man in a broom cupboard” https://t.co/sF5yLn2jh0
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 17, 2017
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