Assange has been a thorn in the side of Democrats this entire election cycle and has personally helped spread some conspiracy theories around Clinton. Back in the summer, young DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed in Washington, D.C., in what police called a robbery attempt gone wrong. But there were some who claimed that Rich was killed either by the DNC or Clinton because of some secret he may have threatened to release.
Despite scant evidence to support the theory — and statements from Rich’s family asking that people stop spreading the baseless rumors — Assange jumped on the story. WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information abut Rich’s murderer, and Assange himself insinuated that Rich may have been the source of the DNC leak.
The Gateway Pundit had a transcript of Assange’s appearance on a Dutch television show in which he hinted about it.
Julian Assange: Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. As a 27 year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.
Reporter: That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn’t it?
Julian Assange: No. There’s no finding. So… I’m suggesting that our sources take risks.
A later report from a site called True Pundit claimed that Hillary Clinton wanted to order a drone strike against Julian Assange back in 2010, when WikiLeaks had released hundreds of thousands of sensitive diplomatic cables. The report has been called into question and there appears to be no evidence to support the account of Clinton trying to assassinate Assange.
Despite WikiLeaks posting on Twitter after the release of the so-called “dead man’s switch,” the rumors that Julian Assange may be dead have persisted online. Many people are still openly questioning his fate and calling on Assange to make a statement directly.
Much more confirmation needed on this story. I hope that it's bogus.
BBC has no mention of it, and given the embassy is in London, I think they would. Raiding an embassy is an open act of war, so no, I don't buy it. Fake story.
Someone thought Snowden was killed a few months ago because he tweeted some kind of cyber key. But he merely said later that some things are private.
These Cryptic Wikileaks Tweets Don't Mean Julian Assange Is Dead [Update]
Bryan Menegus Yesterday 11:41pm Filed to: RIP 248.1K 8
Image: AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth Earlier today, Wikileaks tweeted out a series of three terse, confusing messages, each containing a 64-character code. Now a lot of people think Julian Assange is dead.
In the absence of context, some users on Twitter, Reddit, and various image boards were quick to speculate that the tweets were the result of a “dead man’s switch,” triggered in the event of Julian Assange’s untimely end. Such switches do exist (both mechanically and electronically) and many speculated that all 349 gigs of the heavily-encrypted “Wikileaks
Much as these tweets provide great fodder for conspiracy speculation, the secret to their meaning is hidden in plain sight. “Pre-commitment” in this case is a references to a cryptographic scheme to prevent unreleased information from being tampered with. Essentially those unique codes are proof to anyone reading the documents in the future that their contents remain unchanged: alteration to the leaks will likewise alter those 64-character codes. insurance” from 2013 are intended for precisely that purpose. . . .
Further undermining claims of Assange’s death, the Wikileaks account retweeted something approximately 2 hours ago. In any case, we’ve reached out to them to confirm that Assange is still alive. What remains to be seen is when Wikileaks plans to make these three leaks public, and what they’ll contain.
Update 10/17/16 8:53 EDT: A volunteer with Wikileaks confirmed that Assange is very much alive, even tweeting out some photos of them together.
@JohnDeplo You can't go in without an appointment. Julian is confirmed to be perfectly fine. Thanks for your support and for checking :)
— Kelly Kolisnik (@kellykolisnik) October 17, 2016