Thread by @micahflee

In case you missed it when it was happening, would you like to hear a story about that time @WikiLeaks attacked brave investigative journalists for exposing Vladimir Putin's corruption?

Follow along. 1/x

In 2015 an anonymous source leaked a massive trove of tax haven data to the German newspaper @SZ. This was #PanamaPapers. It was an ABSURD amount of data. So SZ enlisted help from an international network of investigative journalists @ICIJ, who shared it further

In all, reporters working at over 100 media organizations, in 25 languages, collaborated on #PanamaPapers, and reported on dozens of huge scandals around the world. One of these partner organizations is @OCCRP, and does reporting on organized crime

In 2016, OCCRP, in collaboration with a Russian newspaper that's critical of the Kremlin, Novaya Gazeta, broke several stories about Putin. Most were specifically about Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and businessman who also happens to be Putin's best friend occrp.org/en/panamapaper…

Roldugin was linked to 3 offshore companies that laundered up to $2 billion since the 1970s. One scandal showed that $230 million that was stolen from Russian tax payers in 2007 was actually laundered through offshore accounts, and ended up in Roldugin's account

Putin was not pleased. And neither, is seems, was the "transparency organization" WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks noticed that OCCRP (a non-profit of international journalists) received funding from the Open Society Foundation (Soros's foundation) and USAID (US government)

A non-profit receiving grants from US gov/Soros is ALL the proof WikiLeaks needed. Julian put on his conspiracy cap and took to twitter, claiming that the integrity of OCCRP is "seriously undermined" because US gov "directly funded" this "attack on Putin"

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by @wikileaks view original on Twitter

The next day, WikiLeaks tweeted another attack, again saying that the Russian journalists, who were exposing Putin's corruption within Russia, lacked integrity

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by @wikileaks view original on Twitter

To be clear: The corruption was real. It was backed up by legitimate leaked documents.

There's no evidence that the US gov had anything to do with these Putin stories, or that they knew Putin's friends were in the Panama Papers at all, before the stories were published.

This didn't matter though. WikiLeaks decided to defend Putin instead of the Russian investigate journalists that were exposing his corruption. Hmm... 🤔

(BTW, Reporters Without Borders placed Russia at #148 out of 180 in press freedom index in 2016)

But even if WL's conspiracy theory were true, and the US funded OCCR specifically to attack Putin, so what?

Doesn't WL argue that it doesn't matter who their source for DNC emails are as long as the docs are real? The hypocrisy is strong.

The day after WL attacked the journalists, Putin himself cited WL's conspiracy to dismiss the scandal.

"Besides," Putin said, "we now know from WikiLeaks that officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this."

nytimes.com/2016/09/01/wor…

While it's not clear if WikiLeaks has some sort of direct relationship with the Kremlin, it is abundantly clear that Julian Assange is a Putin fanboy, and that he doesn't actually give a shit about government transparency if the government in question is Russia.