Julian Assange, an Australian, is the founder, editor-in-chief and director of WikiLeaks, an international non-profit journalistic organization that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. Within a year of its 2006 launching, WikiLeaks’ website claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents.
In November 2010, when Hillary Clinton was U.S. secretary of state, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global media organizations to release the State Department’s diplomatic “cables” in redacted format.
During the current presidential election season, WikiLeaks has been doing the job of America’s establishment media by exposing the corruption of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the release of their respective emails. See:
- Hacked emails show Democratic National Committee to be corrupt arm of Hillary
- Hillary aide talks about animal sacrifice to demon Moloch in WikiLeaks email
- New emails show Huma scheming for Hillary
Assange promises that WikiLeaks will release proof that Hillary has rigged the elections.
Yesterday, WikiLeaks sent out an alarming tweet that “Hillary Clinton strategist Bob Beckel called for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange to be assassinated”:
The tweet contains a video snippet of Beckel on FoxNews, saying:
“The way to deal with this is pretty simple — you get Special Ops (Operations) forces. I mean, a dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s [Assange] a traitor, treasonous, and and he’s broken every law of the United States. The guy ought to be — and I’m not for the death penalty, so if I’m not for the death penalty, the only way to do it is illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”
Blog and news sites, including big names like ZeroHedge and Pamela Geller, are reporting Beckel’s vile remarks as contemporaneous, in the context of WikiLeaks’ current exposés of Hillary and the DNC.
Not so.
Beckel actually made those remarks 5 years ago in December 2011. Here’s a longer FoxNews video, wherein Beckel was part of a panel discussing how the U.S. should deal with Assange and WikiLeaks for their release of the State Department’s diplomatic cables. Beckel’s “shoot the son of a bitch” remarks begin at the 0:57 mark:
That it was 5 years ago that Beckel had called for assassinating Julian Assange doesn’t make it less reprehensible. It’s also ridiculous for Beckel to call Assange “a traitor” and “treasonous,” because Assange is Australian, not a U.S. citizen.
So who is Bob Beckel?
According to Wikipedia, 67-year-old Bob Beckel is a political analyst-pundit who began his professional life as a Democratic administration official and Democratic Party operative. He was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (1977) and Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs (1978) in the Carter administration; the campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign; founder of the consulting & lobbying firm Bob Beckel & Associates (1984); campaign manager of a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Idaho (2002); USA Today columnist (2005-2015); FoxNews “token angry liberal” co-host (2011-2015); and since October 2015, CNN commentator on the 2016 election.
Wikipedia makes no mention of Beckel being a Hillary Clinton strategist, nor have I found confirmation that he is a Hillary strategist, other than what the WikiLeaks tweet claims. But all that doesn’t mean he isn’t a Hillary Clinton strategist, given Beckel’s history as a Democratic Party operative.
There must be a reason why WikiLeaks sent out its tweet of Beckel’s 5-year-old call to assassinate Assange. Perhaps Assange has received death threats and does not want the same fate that befell DNC staffer and WikiLeaks informant Seth Rich. (See “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: murdered DNC staffer was source of leaked DNC emails”)
H/t maziel
~Eowyn