The idea that Wikileaks took a non-partisan, journalistic attitude towards these leaks is a fantasy. He repeatedly contacted the Trump campaign and told them that he had "damaging leaks" on the way, and made it clear in internal chats that he wanted to use Wikileaks to sway the election outcome.
https://qz.com/1599384/mueller-report-on-trump-campaigns-con...
What matters is whether the information Assange published was true and in the public interest. Do you believe that it would have been better for Assange to cover up for the DNC and Hillary Clinton and decide not to publish their dirty laundry?
But that didn’t happen. Instead, it seems likely that closed and secretive intelligence agencies were able to effortlessly repurpose WikiLeaks into a weapon for pursuing the foreign policy of an unjust government. That isn’t a crime necessarily. It just completely undermines the core argument that Assange and Wikileaks made for the organization’s existence.
If your argument is that an organization like WikiLeaks fundamentally has no choice but to allow itself to be misused in this way, then I think it’s reasonable to ask why we need such an organization in our world.
> I think it’s reasonable to ask why we need such an organization in our world.
So that information like the DNC's bias against Bernie Sanders doesn't get covered up by less ethical journalists who don't want to harm their favorite candidate.
Here's the kicker that proves it: There was nothing salacious in the DNC/hillary emails. NOTHING!
But in the alt-right propaganda universe, just like Donald Trump is currently floating several Big Lies by repetition, you've consumed the "Big Clinton Lie" and are repeating here robotically.
As someone who actually read those emails, my favorite was when Hillary Clinton several years after meeting a poor girl in a country without much access to education for women remembered her and inquired about her life, trying to see if they had helped her, and trying to rekindle the interest in helping her.
Truly she was a demon.
And when I look around America today, how Donald Trump just threw his weight behind the demon butcher Eddie Gallagher, a SEAL so murderous that his own brothers in arms disabled his rifle because preventing his indiscriminate slaughter of women and children was preferable to having him be of any use in a firefight, it makes me realize what we lost.
Assange, Wikileaks and Russian intelligence didn't just steal an election, they stole America's soul. They stole our empathy. They stole our ability to be better.
Now, we're a dictator-idolizing, cruelty-is-the-point, concentration camping, murderous and evil people. There's no way around it.
Assange has done more damage to democracy, freedom and empathy in America than any human in history, I could wager. Our press freedoms near all time lows, use of our military to oppress and murder is skyrocketing, the concentration camps are filling up and the next population (homeless) are slated for encampment... Assange did his job, Russia is extremely impressed.
Let's assume for a moment that your premise is true, and Assange got the DNC documents from Russian intelligence.
Should he have buried the documents? He had in his possession documents that a huge number of Americans would find politically interesting. They showed, among other things, that DNC operatives were biased against Bernie Sanders and looking for ways to undermine him. They also contained transcripts of speeches to Wall Street firms that Hillary Clinton had refused to publish during the primaries.
Assange has always said that he will publish whatever documents are verifiable and of public interest. If he had decided not to publish the DNC documents, that would have been a violation of his stated principles. It would even look like he's hiding documents in order to help Hillary Clinton win the election.
What you're describing as "acting as an agent of Russian military intelligence" is actually the publication of documents of public interest - something journalists do. If what you're saying is correct, every NY Times journalist who publishes state secrets could be thrown in jail. Imagine if a NY Times journalist got a cache of documents about misdeeds of the Russian government, and the NY Times were to publish those documents. Imagine then that the Russian government claimed those documents came from a foreign intelligence service, and labeled the NY Times journalist a hostile intelligence agent. Would you support the extradition of that journalist to Russia to face charges of espionage?