It Is Possible Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange. If True, There Should Be Ample Video and Other Evidence Showing This.
https://theintercept.com/2018/11/27/it- ... wing-this/
The Guardian today published a blockbuster, instantly viral story claiming that anonymous sources told the newspaper that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange at least three times in the Ecuadorian Embassy, “in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016.” The article – from lead reporter Luke Harding, who has a long-standing and vicious personal feud with WikiLeaks and is still promoting his book titled “Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House” – presents no evidence, documents or other tangible proof to substantiate its claim, and
it is deliberately vague on a key point: whether any of these alleged visits happened once Manafort was managing Trump’s campaign.
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While certain MSNBC and CNN personalities instantly and mindlessly treated the story as true and shocking, other more sober and journalistic voices urged caution and skepticism. The story, wrote WikiLeaks critic Jeet Heer of the New Republic, “is based on anonymous sources, some of whom are connected with Ecuadorian intelligence. The logs of the embassy show no such meetings. The information about the most newsworthy meeting (in the spring of 2016) is vaguely worded, suggesting a lack of certitude.”
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But the main point is this one: London itself is one of the world’s most surveilled, if not the most surveilled, cities. And the Ecuadorian Embassy in that city – for obvious reasons – is one of the most scrutinized, surveilled, monitored and filmed locations on the planet.
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This leads to one indisputable fact:
if Paul Manafort (or, for that matter, Roger Stone), visited Assange at the Embassy, there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof demonstrating that this happened. The Guardian provides none of that.
Then there are the glaring omissions in today’s story. As noted, every guest visiting Assange is logged in through a very intricate security system. While admitting that Manafort was never logged in to the embassy, the Guardian waves this glaring hole away with barely any discussion or attempt to explain it: “Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports. Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged.”
Why would Manafort visit three times but never be logged in? Why would the Ecuadorian government, led by leftist Rafael Correa, allow life-long right-wing GOP operative Paul Manafort to enter their embassy three times without ever once logging in his visit? The Guardian has no answer.
It’s an especially inexcusable omission for the Guardian not to discuss its significance given that the Guardian itself obtained the Embassy’s visitors logs in May, and – while treating those logs as accurate and reliable – made no mention of Manafort’s inclusion on them. That’s because his name did not appear there (nor, presumably, did Roger Stone’s).
The language of the Guardian story also raises all sorts of questions. Aside from an anonymous source, the Guardian claims it viewed a document prepared by the Ecuadorian intelligence service Senain. The Guardian does not publish this report, but instead quotes a tiny snippet that, as the paper put it, “lists ‘Paul Manaford [sic]’ as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions ‘Russians.'”
That claim – that the report not only asserts Manafort visited Assange but “mentions ‘Russians'” – is a rather explosive claim.
What does this report say about “Russians”? What is the context of the inclusion of this claim? The Guardian does not bother to question, interrogate or explain any of this. It just tosses the word “Russians” into its article in connection with Manafort’s alleged visits to Assange, knowing full well that motivated readers will draw the most inflammatory conclusions possible, thus helping to spread the Guardian’s article all over the internet and generate profit for the newspaper, without bothering to do any of the journalistic work to justify the obvious inference they wanted to create with this sloppy, vague and highly manipulative paragraph.
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It may be true. But only the evidence, which has yet to be seen, will demonstrate that one way or the other.
