Rieder: The bizarre alliance of WikiLeaks and Trump
It is one of the truly bizarre developments in a presidential campaign that has had no shortage of them: the improbable alliance between WikiLeaks and the forces of one Donald J. Trump.
Once dedicated to ballyhooing the leaks of whisteleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks and its founder and panjandrum Julian Assange have emerged as a de facto arm of the Trump campaign.
When it comes to bolstering the Trump cause, WikiLeaks is right up there with conservative website Breitbart, aka Trump's Pravda, and the mogul's BFF, Fox News' Sean Hannity.
Whoever thought we would have a campaign in which WikiLeaks and Russian hackers would be far more enthusiastic about and dedicated to electing the Republican presidential standard bearer than the Republican speaker of the House?
Rieder: The casual cruelty of WikiLeaks
Assange, once known for disseminating devastating material about the U.S. misadventure in Iraq and working with top news organizations to get his material out there, has clearly timed this year's releases to benefit the Trump campaign and damage the prospects of Democrat Hillary Clinton, whom he seems to despise.
On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July, WikiLeaks unleashed a trove of documents, believed to have been unearthed by Russian hackers, that suggested the Democratic National Committee had done all it could to help Clinton prevail over challenger Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. The material, quite naturally, infuriated Bernie's legions and rapidly led to the humiliating ouster of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The discord got the Democratic convention off to a sour start, good news for the Trump forces, who had just finished up their own turmoil-plagued conclave in Cleveland. The Democrats righted the ship and ended up with a successful convention, no thanks to WikiLeaks.
When a DNC staffer was killed in Washington, D.C., over the summer in what police said was a street crime, Assange suggested to a Dutch news program the staffer may have been killed for providing material to his organization. Trump adviser Roger Stone hinted darkly that the Clintons may have been behind the murder.
The irrepressible Stone tweeted on Oct. 2 that Clinton would be "done" in three days after a WikiLeaks October surprise. But no kill shot emerged.
As Bloomberg Businessweek points out in an excellent piece on Assange, after Clinton collapsed at a 9/11 memorial service, WikiLeaks tweeted a poll asking the Twitterverse to decide whether Clinton had been felled by allergies and personality, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis or head injury complications. No mention of pneumonia, which the Clinton camp cited as the culprit. The tweet was subsequently deleted but preserved by Internet sleuth Andrew Kaczynski, late of BuzzFeed and now with CNN.
Last Friday, just after The Washington Post revealed the devastating tapes in which Trump is heard making exceedingly demeaning remarks about women, WikiLeaks posted another trove of pilfered emails, these from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. While they contained no game changer or campaign ender, they did include embarrassing excerpts from Clinton's crazily expensive speeches to Goldman Sachs, showing how comfortably she relates to corporate power. Clinton cited the importance of having both a public and a private position, furnishing her no help with voters who doubt her honesty.
Report: Wikileaks releases what appear to be excerpts of Clinton's paid speeches
WikiLeaks has continued to release material from the Podesta files, and the Clinton chairman has suggested that the episode indicates cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. There's little doubt we will see plenty more leaks in the days before the election as Assange continues to try to doom Clinton's candidacy.
And it's clear his contempt for the former secretary of State and first lady runs deep. “She’s a war hawk with bad judgement who gets an unseemly emotional rush out of killing people,” he wrote on WikiLeaks.
Assange's metamorphosis into political hit man in the service of Trump is a curious one indeed for someone said to have been motivated to launch WikiLeaks by the principled Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime enthusiastic supporter of the Vietnam War who was impelled to release the Pentagon Papers by his dismay over how horribly awry the war had gone.
Recent years have not been kind to Assange. Since June 2012, he has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, to which he fled to avoid returning to Sweden to face further proceedings over complaints of rape and molestation. Assange has said he fears he will be extradited to the U.S. if he goes back to the Scandinavian nation.
A report on a "psychosocial evaluation" in November 2015 paints a bleak picture indeed of Assange's life on the lam and its impact on the leakmeister. "The restrictions placed upon his liberty and the uncertainties surrounding his future and complexities of his legal position have had and will continue to have a deleterious impact on his physical and mental health," says the report, which is entirely sympathetic to Assange.
Meanwhile, Assange, once the darling of the left, has picked up unlikely new fans since his emergence as a Trump apparatchik. "I think Julian Assange is a hero," longtime GOP operative and Trump enthusiast nonpareil Stone said on C-SPAN. Tireless Trump cheerleader Hannity, who once accused him of "waging war against the U,S.," told Assange during a satellite interview in September, "you have done a lot of good in what you have exposed about how corrupt, dishonest and phony our government is, and I applaud that,"
Something about the enemy of my enemy is my friend, no doubt.
As for the immediate future, look for plenty more October surprises from WikiLeaks. They may not destroy Clinton and salvage Trump, but it won't be for lack of trying.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rem Rieder on Twitter @remrieder