It's not clear if you're missing some context. Nobody mentioned the government, and Troy Hunt is the owner of Have I Been Pwned - he's pretty authoritative and trustworthy when it comes to breaches, mainly because he has the largest dataset (as far as I am aware) of known breached accounts, so can connect dots that others cannot.

Can you elaborate, regarding your last paragraph?

The narrative spread far and wide is that Russia hacked the DNC and passed the emails to wikileaks, who distributed them in order to hurt HRC in the election and boost Trump. This was the premises for the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which took approximately 2 years and cost 26 million dollars and included "2,800 subpoenas, executed almost 500 search warrants, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses."

But nobody thought to go England (the FBI has a field office there, so no "going" necessary), where Julian Assange was under house arrest in Ecuador's embassy, and ask "Hey, where did you get those emails?" Oops!

Are you saying that Assange would just volunteer this information to the FBI? Even if they offered some sort of deal involving immunity from US prosecution, it's unlikely that Assange would have had any proof that the source of the emails was the Russian government. (Also, incriminating the Russian government in a crime can have negative effects on your life expectancy).

As for your statistics, it's worth noting that Mueller's investigation probably made a profit by uncovering millions of dollars worth of tax fraud[0], and it lead to indictments of or guilty pleas from 34 people and 3 companies.[1] That doesn't seem like it was a complete waste of time or money.

[0] https://www.inquisitr.com/5213408/robert-mueller-investigati...

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/m...

> Are you saying that Assange would just volunteer this information to the FBI?

I'm just wondering why they never bothered to ask? I mean, he committed the crime, why not interview him?

What crime did he commit?

I was speaking figuratively, since they were an investigation and Assange is the one who ran wikileaks when they released the DNC/Podesta emails.

No laws were broken by publishing the DNC/Podesta emails. It is not illegal to embarrass politicians by exposing their corruption.

The fact of him being investigated, also, is not evidence of guilt. So speaking figuratively is actually counter-productive to understanding the situation with regards to Wikileaks exposure of US government crimes against humanity.

>The narrative spread far and wide is that Russia hacked the DNC and passed the emails to wikileaks, who distributed them in order to hurt HRC in the election and boost Trump.

Yes. And as far as I know this is generally not really disputed by experts nowadays, no?

>This was the premises for the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which took approximately 2 years and cost 26 million dollars and included "2,800 subpoenas, executed almost 500 search warrants, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses."

Yes.

>But nobody thought to go England (the FBI has a field office there, so no "going" necessary), where Julian Assange was under house arrest in Ecuador's embassy, and ask "Hey, where did you get those emails?" Oops!

I'd be pretty surprised if US or US-aligned law enforcement or intelligence didn't try to ask him about it, if they were able to. I'm not sure if they would legally be able to while he was protected by the Ecuadorian embassy, though.

Regardless, of course Russian intelligence isn't going to tell Assange "hey, Russian intelligence here, here's some emails". Assange would just repeat what we all already know: someone using the name Guccifer 2.0 supplied him with the emails. Beyond that, he knows nothing about who may be behind that identity. Why would he and how could he?

And as another commenter said: he could just refuse to say anything at all. "Wikileaks doesn't reveal any information about our sources."

Either way, he's not really the source of truth on this issue. He was the broker that helped distribute the emails; there's no reason why he would know anything about the true identity of the culprits, or even if the person who emailed him was actually the culprit and not just a different broker in the chain, etc.

For those interested (or thinking a citation is needed), here is a summary from Snopes:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-server-tied-to-russi...

They conclude that the claim of the "Trump private back channel to Alfa bank" is "Unproven", as of 2017 at least:

"In March 2017, CNN reported that the issue was still under investigation by the FBI, but nothing substantive had yet been turned up"

Since most of hacker news is technically advanced, I'd encourage you all to take a look at the data and determine exactly "what" the back channel was (maybe a secret IRC server??).

First you have to find it, since it's buried in MSM reports and "maaaaybe it's true but who knows??" articles.