Trump, WikiLeaks and Russia

When a Fox News reporter asked Donald Trump about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange back in 2010, just after Assange had released a huge cache of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, the reality TV star had no doubts: "I think it's disgraceful, I think there should be like the death penalty or something."

Circumstances change, however, and smart people with big brains know when it's time to switch sides. It was WikilLeaks, once again, that revealed the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee that did such damage to Hillary Clinton's campaign last summer. But Trump now readily accepts Assange's word that he didn't get those emails from the Russians.

Trump has been having a problem with the main U.S. intelligence agencies, which unanimously insist that the Russians did indeed hack the DNC's emails, and that they passed them to WikiLeaks (through an intermediary) in order to damage Clinton's presidential election campaign. "Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump," as the joint intelligence report put it.
So Trump was very happy to be able to reply (in a tweet, of course) that "Assange... said Russians did not give him the info!" After all, what motive could Assange have for lying about it?

Well, there is the fact that Assange has been living in one room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the past four years, in order to avoid being extradited to the United States on espionage charges that could get him up to 45 years in prison. Donald Trump is the one person who could make all that trouble go away, once he becomes the president, so doing him a favor now might be a wise move on Assange's part.

Nevertheless, the U.S. intelligence agencies are probably right to blame their...