Fake News: Media say WikiLeaks emails, documents were doctored

With former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Donna Brazile making bombshell allegations pertaining to Hillary Clinton rigging the primaries and pretty much taking over the political group, the Democrats in the media are making some outlandish allegations.

This is probably the best one from the Clinton camp: Brazile has fallen for Russian propaganda.

Uh, what?

As the leftist media rev up their attacks on Brazile and continue to hype Moscow propaganda, new reports suggest that the thousands of documents dumped by WikiLeaks last year were doctored.

During the campaign trail, various Democratic officials and members of the press suggested that the documents were altered in some way, possibly by the Russians. They refused to provide any evidence of this, noting that they didn’t have the resources or manpower to comb through the treasure trove of information to confirm their allegations.

Ostensibly, they have some proof now: the Associated Press reports Guccifer 2.0 placed a CONFIDENTIAL watermark on a leaked document that was not found on the original. The newswire reports:

The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document .

Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.

Stop the presses!

Is this proof that the WikiLeaks documents and emails were fake? Hardly.

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept does a great job exposing this fake news:

First, Guccifer adding a watermark to a document he circulated does not mean that any of the emails published by WikiLeaks in its archive was altered. It’s long been known that Guccifer altered the documents’ metadata to hide its path, but nobody ever tried to cite that as proof that anything published by WikiLeaks was fraudulent (indeed, PolitiFact cited Guccifer’s alteration of metadata when concluding there was no evidence that the WikiLeaks documents themselves had been altered).

Second, this has no bearing on the content of the emails or documents themselves published by WikiLeaks, which to date nobody has demonstrated have been altered in the slightest. Third, if it were the case that any of the emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were fraudulent, it would still be incredibly easy to prove: all anyone would have to do is produce the original and show how the WikiLeaks version was altered; why – a full year after WikiLeaks began publishing these documents – has nobody done this, despite the overwhelming incentive that exists to expose this?

In sum, evidence that the content of any of the WikiLeaks emails was altered is nonexistent, while there is overwhelming reason to believe none has been (beginning with the fact that, as easy it would be to do so, no proof has been provided after all this time). Nonetheless, as a result of journalists’ conduct on Twitter this week, the false claim that emails and documents in the WikiLeaks archive were proven to be altered is now viral and will remain fixed in people’s belief system forever:

There’s no way to prove the negative: that no emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were altered. But one should demand actual evidence before affirming this claim. And despite the ease of providing that proof, and the long period of time that has elapsed, none has been provided. But, unsurprisingly, that did not stop the claim that it had been proven from going viral this week on Twitter – all based on the tenuous claim that Guccifer added a “Confidential” watermark to one of the documents he circulated.

Is Greenwald the only credible journalist left? He may be pretty bad on economics, but he’s superb on foreign policy, surveillance and weeding through the lies perpetrated by politicians and the press.