Craig Bannister tried to claim the moral high ground in an Oct. 27 CNSNews.com blog post:
After The Daily Beast reported that the head of a data analytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign had approached Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, liberal media pounced on the opportunity to condemn the connection. But, media haven’t always been so critical of Assange and Wikileaks.
[…]But, times have change – especially at The Times, which had previously framed pro-Wikileaks hackers as defenders of “freedom” and Assange a champion of “truth.”
[…]And, on another episode of “Today,” the show promoted Assange as one of “short list of finalists to be named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” in which Time’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel declared that Assange “absolutely” had a shot at winning because he had “an enormous year” of “changing the perception of secrecy.”
Time changes, indeed. We remember when Bannister’s colleagues at CNS used to despise Assange and Wikileaks before he was linked to Trump and hacked DNC emails.
In a December 2010 column, Bannister’s boss, Brent Bozell, denounced Assange as “the notorious radical mastermind of ‘WikiLeaks,'” and declared that “Americans the world over could die because of these intelligence betrayals” caused by Assange.
A December 2010 CNS column by Rich Galen called Assange “the creep behind, and the face of, Wikileaks” and huffed that “He has decided that he, among the 6.7 billion humans on the Earth, is solely qualified to decide what should be held secret and what should be made public.” He concluded that “It is not for Julian Assange to decide, not just that the system is flawed, but that he has the right to put thousands of people at risk of physical harm because he doesn’t like it.”
Galen further asserted in a 2012 column:
Wikileaker-in-chief, Julian Assange, is holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London asking for asylum so he can’t be extradited to the U.S. for leaking all those classified documents a couple of years ago.
At about the same time a Syrian Air Force pilot flew a MIG-21 to a Jordanian air base asking for, and being granted, asylum,
If Julian Assange can pilot a MIG-21 to Ecuador, I say let him stay.
If not, hang him.
Now that Assange is linked to helping Trump and attacking Democrats, Bannister certainly doesn’t want to follow Galen’s advice now.
See, Craig? Two can play that game — that’s how lame your gotcha attempt is.