DID HILLARY SUGGEST 'DRONING' WIKILEAKS FOUNDER?
Report: Assange was 'soft target, walking around freely and thumbing his nose without fear'
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2016/10/Assange-TruePundit.jpg
TruePundit reported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested ‘drone’ strike on WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange (Photo: Screenshot/TruePundit.com)
When she was secretary of state in 2010, did Hillary Clinton once suggest silencing WikiLeaks whistleblower Julian Assange by executing him with a planned drone strike?
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Clinton asked during a State Department meeting, according to a report from the True Pundit blog that was tweeted by the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks Monday.
According to the report, which remains unconfirmed, Clinton asked the question as WikiLeaks planned a document dump known as “CableGate,” which involved classified cables “unveiling damaging internal conversations between State Department personnel and its foreign assets and allies.”
True Pundit explains:
“Prodded by the looming CableGate, Clinton met with staff on Tuesday November 23, 2010 shortly after 8 a.m. on Mahogany Row at the State Department to attempt to formulate a strategy to avert Assange’s plans to release an enormous batch of 250,000 secret cables, dating from 1966 to 2010. Assange had professed for months to rain the internal cables down on Clinton and President Obama. The collective fear was the context of the secret cables would hamper U.S. intelligence gathering and compromise private correspondences and intelligence shared with foreign governments and opposition leaders. Splashing such juicy details on television news shows and the front pages of major newspapers in the country was great for the media but lousy for intelligence and foreign policy. Many, including Clinton and her elected boss, expressed fear these revelations would embarrass and expose intelligence allies of the United States and set America’s already fragile foreign policy back decades. …“Clinton’s State Department was getting pressure from President Obama and his White House inner circle, as well as heads of state internationally, to try and cutoff Assange’s delivery of the cables and if that effort failed, then to forge a strategy to minimize the administration’s public embarrassment over the contents of the cables. Hence, Clinton’s early morning November meeting of State’s top brass who floated various proposals to stop, slow or spin the Wikileaks contamination. That is when a frustrated Clinton, sources said, at some point blurted out a controversial query.“‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’ Clinton openly inquired, offering a simple remedy to silence Assange and smother Wikileaks via a planned military drone strike, according to State Department sources. The statement drew laughter from the room which quickly died off when the Secretary kept talking in a terse manner, sources said. Clinton said Assange, after all, was a relatively soft target, ‘walking around’ freely and thumbing his nose without any fear of reprisals from the United States.”
According to the report, sources claim Clinton had been upset that Assange had released other documents in 2010 concerning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Clinton was fuming, sources said, as each State Department cable dispatched during the Obama administration was signed by her,” True Pundit wrote.
WND requested more substantiating information about the claims from True Pundit, but the blog doesn’t list contact information for its staff. The report is also cited by Fox News, London’s Daily Mail and the Washington Examiner. Nonetheless, WikiLeaks apparently sees the threat as concerning, as the whistleblower organization has tweeted the report.
In 2010, then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. was conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks.
Aside from Clinton’s alleged suggestion to “drone” Assange, the report states, sources claim “another controversial remedy was floated in the State Department to place a reward or bounty for Assange’s capture or extradition to the United States … Numbers were discussed in the realm of a $10 million bounty.”
True Pundit continues, “A State Department source described that staff meeting as bizarre. One minute staffers were inquiring about the Secretary’s blue and black checkered knit sweater and the next minute, the room was discussing the legalities of a drone strike on Assange and financial bounties, sources said.”
Aide Ann-Marie Slaughter, then-State Department director of planning, emailed Clinton less than three hours after the meeting began. Her subject line: “An SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks.”
According to the unclassified email published by WikiLeaks, Slaughter wrote, “Following this morning’s meetings I activated my four legal eagles on the SP staff – Peter Harrell, Jen Harris, Bill Burke White, and Catherine Powell … They in turn reached out to people at the Berkmann Center at Harvard and other experts, working together with Alec Ross. … The result is the attached memo, which has one interesting legal approach and I think some very good suggestions about how to handle our public diplomacy.”
True Pundit questioned the use of the term “nonlegal” in the State Department communication and noted, “Slaughter’s cryptic email also contained an attached document called ‘SP Wikileaks doc final11.23.10.docx.’ That attached portion of Slaughter’s ‘nonlegal strategies’ email has yet to be recovered by federal investigators and House committee investigators probing Clinton’s email practices while at State. Even WikiLeaks does not have the document.”
At least one top Democrat strategist has openly suggested executing Assange.
“The way to deal with this is pretty simple,” said Democrat strategist Bob Beckel in a December 2010 filmed interview on Fox Business that was also tweeted by WikiLeaks Monday. “We’ve got special ops forces. I mean, a dead guy can’t leak stuff. This guy is a traitor, a treasonous [sic], and he has 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, there’s only one way to do it – illegally shoot the son of a b–ch.”
Watch Beckel’s statements:
Assange has appeared to be concerned for the safety of WikiLeaks sources and himself on at least a few occasions. On Aug. 23, WikiLeaks tweeted that the U.K. police took more than two hours to respond to reports of an intruder at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Assange had been.
“UK police took 2h to respond to Assange Embassy intruder despite 24h covert op & police station 2 mins walk away,” the WikiLeaks tweet said.
And over the weekend came news that Assange was reportedly planning to make an announcement from his London balcony Tuesday that could finish Clinton’s White House aspirations.
However, Assange’s announcement is now “up in the air,” according to the Washington Examiner, “due to security concerns.”
By Sunday evening, an NBC reporter tweeted that Assange’s announcement had been canceled “due to security concerns at the Ecuadorian Embassy.”
But on Monday morning, WikiLeaks tweeted: “Tomorrow’s press conf in Berlin proceeds. London speech by Assange has been moved to Berlin due to specific information. #wikileaks10”
A London Daily Mail report indicated Assange will make an announcement via video link during the Berlin event on Tuesday morning.
In August, Assange indicated that he has a bombshell that could change the 2016 race for the presidency.
“I don’t want to give it away,” he told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. “But it’s a variety of documents from different types of institutions that are associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles, some quite interesting, some even entertaining.”
After that interview, Assange told Fox News’ Sean Hannity the surprises are coming “reasonably soon.”
“The first batch is reasonably soon,” he told Hannity. “We are quite confident about it now.”
As WND reported, Assange hinted that Seth Rich, a murdered DNC staffer who was shot near his Washington, D.C., townhouse in July, may have been a WikiLeaks source. The suggestion came during an interview on the Dutch television program Nieuwsuur.
“Our whistleblowers go to significant efforts to give us material, at often very significant risks,” Assange said. “There was a 27 year old, works for the DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons other than that he was walking down the street in Washington.”
The interviewer interjected, “That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?”
Assange replied, “No, there’s no finding.”
The interviewer asked, “What are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that,” Assange continued.
“But was he one of your sources then?” asked the interviewer.
“We don’t comment on who our sources are,” Assange said. “We have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States. Our sources are, you know, our sources face serious risks. That’s why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity.”
Assange continued, “Others have suggested that [Rich was murdered]. We are investigating. If you understand what happened in that situation with Seth Rich, I think it is a concerning situation. There’s not a conclusion yet. We wouldn’t be willing to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it. More importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens.”
WikiLeaks is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Rich’s killer.
Watch the interview:
WND also reported that when Rich was gunned down near his affluent neighborhood in Washington on July 10, theories exploded in the news media about his possible involvement in the WikiLeaks dump of nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails.
Rich’s murder sparked speculation that the young DNC staffer could be one of the latest in a long string of mysterious deaths surrounding the Clintons and spanning more than two decades.
Rich’s name was included in an explosive WND exposé titled, “Clinton death list’: 33 spine-tingling cases,” which detailed how Bill and Hillary Clinton’s friends and associates have fallen off buildings, crashed planes and died in freak accidents.
Copyright 2016 WND
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/did-hillary-suggest-droning-wikileaks-founder/#Ji5mQD32dAK9eaFe.99
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