Commentary
The mainstream media’s frantic desperation to pump new life into the dying Trump–Russia collusion narrative manifested yet again on Nov. 27, when the UK newspaper The Guardian published an article, entitled “Manafort Held Secret Talks With Assange in Ecuadorian Embassy, Sources Say.”
At least one anonymous source claimed to Guardian reporters Luke Harding and Dan Collyns that the former chairman of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, Paul Manafort, met at least three times inside the embassy with Wikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange, ostensibly to facilitate the later publication by Wikileaks of Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton campaign emails.
Any such meetings would have had to occur inside Ecuador’s London embassy, due to the fact that Assange has been living there since 2012.
To briefly sum up Assange’s current situation for those who don’t know it, and why it’s very relevant to this story:
In 2010, Sweden put out an international arrest warrant for Assange on charges of rape and sexual assault. Fearing he would be extradited to Sweden, or to the United States for publishing classified documents, Assange violated his bail in the UK and entered the Ecuadorian embassy in August 2012 and requested asylum, which was granted. So, for the past six years, anyone wanting to meet with Assange has had to travel to the embassy in London and pass through strict surveillance and security protocols before being granted access to him.
The Guardian’s report begins as follows:
“Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.
“Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016—during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.”
The Guardian insisted on publishing that story, despite the fact that Manafort and his legal team told the reporters, when asked for comment, that the allegation he went to the Ecuadorian embassy multiple times to meet with Assange was 100 percent false.
After the story’s appearance, this was the full statement released by Manafort:
“This story is false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to Wikileaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or Wikileaks on any matter. We are considering all legal options against the Guardian who proceeded with this story even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.”
With this thinly sourced story, the Guardian is attempting to sell the narrative that Assange was given the Clinton/DNC emails by supposed Russian hackers, Assange and Wikileaks then reached out to the Trump campaign with this information, and newly hired Trump campaign manager Manafort was dispatched to London to meet with Assange and set up the later publication of the documents.
As Conservative Review reporter Jordon Schachtel and others immediately pointed out on Twitter when this absurd story appeared, the entrances and exits to the embassy are watched by multiple intelligence and law enforcement agencies. There is intense scrutiny of the surrounding area as well. London has CCTV almost everywhere; it is one of the most highly surveilled places in the world. Manafort would have been spotted entering or leaving the building.
Recall what Assange has made his living doing since he launched Wikileaks in 2006: publishing classified documents from multiple countries. Who Assange meets with—and exchanges documents with—is a subject of intense interest to more than a dozen countries around the world.
What you’re watching today is the death throes of the mainstream media’s narrative about the Mueller special counsel investigation. The “Manafort/Assange/Russian Collusion” narrative they tried to launch with the Guardian article is a sign of sheer desperation.
The Guardian almost immediately began stealth-editing its story upon publication, changing the text from two anonymous sources to just “sources.”
Mueller and his special counsel team have no smoking gun after two years, so reporters are forced to print ever-increasingly absurd fictions such as this Guardian story to keep the narrative from going completely under.
We’re reaching the endgame, as two years of peddling Fake News —that many of the top players in the mainstream media knew was Fake News from the very beginning—reaches its inevitable conclusion. Those media journalists that didn’t know, who were true believers in all of these lies, are going to need therapy soon as their world comes crashing down.
Brian Cates is a political pundit and writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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