Here’s the evidence refuting claim that Paul Manafort held ‘secret talks’ with Julian Assange
(National Sentinel) Fake News: On Tuesday The Guardian published a ‘blockbuster’ story claiming that onetime 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who has been convicted of unrelated financial crimes by special counsel Robert Mueller, “secretly met” three times with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.
According to The Guardian:
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.
Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.
It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but first things first.
It’s unclear who fed this story to The Guardian or why, even, the British news site was chosen for the “leak.” What is clear, however, is that the story is completely bogus.
Let’s start first with WikiLeaks’ priceless denial.
“Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange,” the whistleblower organization tweeted.
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That’s a pretty strong denial and while there may be some hyperbole involved, it’s important to note that nothing WikiLeaks has released in the past has been incorrect or successfully refuted. In short, Assange and his team just don’t get things wrong.
But there’s more here to point out than WikiLeaks’ denial, which one would expect.
We’re being told that Manafort had a trio of “secret meetings” with Assange at the same time we’re being told that he ‘lied’ to Muller and has broken his plea agreement — all with an eye towards ‘proving’ the claim that Manafort is the “link” between the emails hacked/stolen/downloaded from Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s account during the 2016 election cycle.
Mueller and his sycophantic allies are desperate to find evidence of this alleged link because that would directly connect the Trump campaign to Russia — seeing as how we’ve been told, without evidence, that Russia “hacked the election for Trump” in part by hacking Podesta’s email account. We might know for certain if the Democratic National Committee would have allowed the FBI’s cyber-forensic experts to examine Podesta’s and the DNC’s servers, but since they refused the FBI’s help…we now have to take a band of liars at their word.
As for the secret meetings, let’s recall that Manafort had been under FBI surveillance for quite some time before the 2016 campaign, as Fortune reminds us:
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had been under FBI surveillance since before the 2016 presidential election, CNN reported. The surveillance, which included wiretapping, searches, and other types of observation, reportedly began in 2014, when Manafort was the subject of an investigation into work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for the former ruling party of Ukraine.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court authorized a secret order that permitted the wiretapping.
The intelligence collected by the FBI led to officials’ concerns that Manafort encouraged Russian interference in the election. A second warrant obtained in 2016 required the FBI to provide evidence for the suspicion that Manafort was acting as an agent of a foreign power. That warrant was directly related to the FBI’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and people suspected of operating on behalf of the Russian government.
Forget the ‘Russian collusion’ narrative because that’s been a hoax from the outset. That comes from the bogus “Russia dossier” bought and paid for by the Hillary campaign and the DNC and was misrepresented as real intelligence by Obama’s corrupt FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.
But the fact that Manafort had been under FBI surveillance since at least 2014 over his lobbying efforts on behalf of a former Ukrainian president is significant because this is a period when The Guardian now says he had “secret meetings” with Assange.
How could have had those meetings without the FBI’s knowledge, since he was being watched? And who believes if it were true these secret ‘Russia-related’ meetings took place that information would not have leaked much sooner — like more than two years ago as Trump looked to lock up the GOP presidential nomination, given all of the media leaks aimed at damaging his campaign and his presidency?
Remember, the Washington establishment was attempting to convince electors not to cast their ballots to nominate Trump even though they were pledged to support him; releasing this damaging information that a former campaign manager was in cahoots with “The Russians” and was involved in the heisting of Podesta’s emails would have given those electors (and the establishment) political cover to dump Trump hard and fast.
Plus, this kind of bombshell, were it true, would have been fed to The New York Times, CNN, or The Washington Post — or all three. Not The Guardian.
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More likely what is going on is that Manafort is refusing to sign onto a bogus plea arrangement that Mueller’s Trump-hating prosecutors are pushing on him — and that refusal has angered the special counsel and his team because it deprives them of a huge political victory against the president.
And mind you, this Manafort/Assange story comes just a day after Dr. Jerome Corsi announced that he would not accept a Mueller plea deal because he, too, allegedly asked Corsi to sign onto a lie.
The one thing to always keep in mind regarding Mueller’s probe is that it is political, not criminal or even actionable — because there has never been any evidence that POTUS Trump was ‘colluding’ with Russia or was otherwise involved in illegal tampering leading up to the 2016 election (though there is plenty of evidence to tie such activities to the Clinton campaign).
We know it’s political because that’s how Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz described it over the weekend. He told a network news outlet that Mueller’s ‘upcoming report’ — if it really is upcoming — will be “devastating” for POTUS Trump.
But not “impeachment” devastating; politically devastating.
“When I say ‘devastating,’ I mean it’s going to paint a picture that’s going to be politically very devastating. I still don’t think it’s going to make a criminal case because collusion is not criminal,” he said.
Separating POTUS Trump from his congressional support and his base is the objective of Mueller’s witch hunt probe. This bogus Manafort/Assange story is just the latest attempt.
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