In his Senate Committee hearing on Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey stated that WikiLeaks is no less than “intelligence porn” intended only to harm the United States.
Comey called WikiLeaks as an illegitimate and a corrupting news outlet. Comey made his statement when Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) requested him to explain why he does not consider the site; published by Julian Assange as a credible news outlet.
“To my mind it crosses a line when it moves from being about trying to educate a public and instead just becomes about intelligence porn, frankly — just pushing out information … without regard to the First Amendment values that normally underly press reporting, and simply becomes a conduit for the Russian intelligence services.”
Comey said that he very “deeply” cares about press freedom and believes that WikiLeaks pushes out “information to damage the United States.”
“Reasonable people can struggle to draw a line” between Wikileaks and real journalism, “but there’s nothing that even smells journalistic,” Comey told Sasse.
Comey even went on to say, “a huge portion of WikiLeaks has nothing to do with legitimate news gathering and is simply about releasing classified information to damage the United States.”
“American journalists do not do that,” he said.
Assange on the other hand, took matters to Twitter and tweeted, “James Comey just mislead the Senate while under oath when said Wikileaks ‘doesn’t call us’. We did over #Vault7 and I know he knows it.”
WikiLeaks reached their fame during the 2016 presidential election, more importantly when it published the emails hacked from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the emails from John Podesta, when he was actively serving as the chairman of the Hillary CIinton’s campaign.
The news source had recently leaked CIA hacking tools, which lead to their one time supporter Mike Pompeo to turn against them. “WikiLeaks walks like a foreign intelligence agency and talks like a foreign intelligence agency,” Pompeo said.
