Assange Smear 29: “He conspired with Nigel Farage.”
This is yet another smear geared toward painting Assange as a right-winger so as to kill his support on the left, this one marketed more to a UK audience.
Assange is known to have met with Brexit leader Nigel Farage one time, and one time only, in March 2017. Both WikiLeaks and Farage have said that Farage tried to secure an interview with Assange on his show with LBC Radio, and that the request was politely declined. That was the meeting.
There is exactly zero evidence anywhere contradicting this. There have been attempts to circulate a narrative that Assange met with Farage multiple times, which Farage dismissed as “conspiratorial nonsense” and WikiLeaks calls “fabricated intelligence reports” and “information fed from Ecuadorian intelligence agency SENAIN”.
WikiLeaks’ claim is obviously credible for a number of reasons, the first being that one of the times Assange is alleged to have been visited by Farage was the 28th of April 2018, by which time Assange had long been forbidden by the Ecuadorian government from receiving any visitors apart from his lawyers. This would have made such a visit impossible. Secondly, SENAIN was a source for the ridiculous Guardian story alleging that Assange had met repeatedly with Paul Manafort, now known beyond a shadow of a doubt to have been false. Thirdly, Glenn Greenwald has described the Ecuadorian embassy in London as “one of the most scrutinized, surveilled, monitored and filmed locations on the planet.” It wouldn’t be difficult for Ecuador or the UK to prove that Farage visited Assange apart from the March 2017 meeting, as determined as they’ve been to share information which smears him, but none of them ever have.
“Since the UK state engages in an illicit multi-million pound surveillance operation against my visitors, who are recorded using the hi-tech surveillance cameras it has emplaced on opposing buildings, I am sure it will be delighted to answer whether Mr. Farage visited me in 2016,” Assange tweeted in January 2018.
This was in response to congressional testimony made by former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, whose company Fusion GPS was responsible for the discredited Steele dossier. Here are Simpson’s actual words to the House Intelligence Committee:
“I’ve been told and have not confirmed that Nigel Farage had additional trips to the Ecuadorian Embassy than the one that’s been in the papers and that he provided data to Julian Assange.”
“I’ve been told and have not confirmed.” By the Fusion GPS guy. In the midst of a disinformation campaign from Ecuadorian intelligence. That’s not a thing.
This complete absence of anything tangible didn’t stop Russiagate kooks like Seth Abramson, Marcy Wheeler and the usual lineup of MSM conspiracy mongers from running around treating this as an actual fact, and not unconfirmed hearsay from a guy whose major claim to fame is association with a notorious dossier that has been completely debunked by the Mueller report.
The Guardian’s answer to Rachel Maddow, Carole Cadwalladr, took these entirely imaginary associations between Assange and Farage and shoved it into mainstream British consciousness with article after article after article filled with nothing but unsubstantiated conspiratorial innuendo and spin, and the smear was in the bloodstream. Cadwalladr has an established record of using dishonest and unprofessional tactics to deliberately smear WikiLeaks.
And so you can see that this is yet another example of a cluster of half-truths and outright fabrications being spun in a way to make Assange look awful and untrustworthy, then circulated and repeated as fact over and over until the illusory truth effect takes over.
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This is an excerpt from the mega-article “Debunking All The Assange Smears”.
