Fake News: Assange Plea Deal Did Not Order Deletion Of DNC Emails

Posts on X (formerly Twitter) claiming that Julian Assange's plea deal contained the requirement to remove leaked emails of the Democratic National Convention Committee are false, yet continue to spread like wildfire throughout social media. In a turn of unprecedented irony, it's a testament to why reporting which publishes original source information, which Wikileaks pioneered, is more important than ever.

The claim that Julian Assange was ordered to delete the published archive of the DNC email leak originated with an out-of-context statement published in a live report of the Saipan court hearings by the Australian investigative news outlet The Age.

The Age reported that "The court hears the US lawyers are satisfied that Assange has undertaken a requirement to have WikiLeaks destroy the classified information." The statement refers to the part of Assange's plea agreement which addresses the "Return or Destruction of Information", which does not concern itself with information already in the public domain.

The plea agreement reads: "the Defendant shall take all action within his control to cause the return to the United States or the destruction of any such unpublished information in his possession, custody, or control, or that of WikiLeaks or any affiliate of WikiLeaks."

Despite widespread allegations that Wikileaks "just dumped all of the leaked disclosures", (we'll be getting to the rest of the misleading claims made in this deranged Telegraph op-ed in another article), the publication is known to have kept back documents too sensitive to release to protect the lives of individuals. It is such unpublished documents the parties to the plea deal have now agreed to be destroyed.

Cited as alleged evidence of the removal of the DNC email archive from the Wikileaks platform are internal server errors returned when attempting to retrieve the DNC email archive on wikileaks.org. However, the Wikileaks site has experienced server issues since at least the end of 2022, which includes returning internal server errors for the attempted accessing of the DNC email archive.

The protection of the DNC leaks under the first amendment have long been ruled upon with the dismissal of Democratic National Convention vs. Russian Federation, in which it was judged that "the First Amendment prevents such liability in the same way it would preclude liability for press outlets that publish materials of public interest despite defects in the way the materials were obtained".

What's worse is that many posters additionally appear incapable of differentiating between the DNC email leak and the Hillary Clinton email leak, which refer to two separate sets of documents obtained and released in two separate publications.

The persistent server issues of Wikileaks, and the consequent temporary inaccessibility of files, should be well known to any frequent users of the Wikileaks platform, just like it should be well known that the DNC email leaks and the Clinton email leaks are not the same thing to any citizen truly concerned about the state of US democracy.

The fact that people would rather spread misinformation on social media before reading a publicly available plea agreement seems an embarrassing attestation of those who have paid no more than lip service to the most important publisher of our time over the past 15 years.