In the heat of the presidential election campaign last year, Xeni Jardin, a journalist and free speech advocate, developed a sickening feeling about WikiLeaks.
Jardin had been a supporter of the radical transparency group since at least 2010, when it published hundreds of thousands of U.S. military and State Department documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. In 2012, Jardin was a founding member of the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit established as a censorship-proof conduit for donations to WikiLeaks after PayPal and U.S. credit card companies imposed a financial blockade on the site.
But during the election season, Jardin noticed WikiLeaks veering violently off its original mission of holding governments and corporations to account. Beginning in July of last year, Julian Assange, WikiLeaksâ driving force, began releasing a cache of stolen email from the Democratic National Committee, and injecting WikiLeaksâ influential Twitter feed with the kind of alt-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories once reserved for Breitbart and InfoWars.
âSuddenly the voice of WikiLeaks seemed to be all about questioning one candidateâHillary Clintonâand doing so in a way that was designed to benefit the other,â Jardin recalled to The Daily Beast. âThe tone also seemed to echo some of the language on the far right. So when the guy in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, who is normally of the extreme left, is echoing Nazi publications, something is wrong.â
Her misgivings eventually led to a tense confrontation with Assange and touched off a year-long debate among the directors at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has handled around $500,000 in individual donations for WikiLeaks over the last five years. Now the foundation acknowledges itâs on the brink of ending its assistance to WikiLeaks, on the grounds that the financial censorship Assange faced in 2012 is no longer in place.
âAt our last board meeting in October 2017, a consensus arose that we could not find any evidence of an ongoing blockade involving PayPal, Visa, or Mastercard,â wrote Trevor Timm, co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in a statement to The Daily Beast. âWe decided we would therefore formally notify WikiLeaks that unless they could demonstrate that a blockade was still in effect, we would no longer provide a mechanism for people to donate to them.â
***
The practical effect of the move is minimalâWikiLeaks donors in America may no longer be able to claim a tax write-off. The symbolic import is much larger. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is something of a Justice League for the online privacy, transparency, civil liberties, whistleblower, and press-rights communities. Its board of directors includes Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower; Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers; open-internet pioneer John Perry Barlow; Citizenfour filmmaker Laura Poitras and her fellow Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, the two journalists to whom Snowden provided his trove; the actor/activist John Cusack; Electronic Frontier Foundation activism director Rainey Reitman; technologist Micah Lee; and journalist/activist Timm, who founded the group with Reitman. (See the disclosures at the end of this article.)
Several members of the board, including Snowden, have grown disenchanted with WikiLeaks. Snowden has for some time considered it to have strayed far from its laudatory transparency and accountability missions, sources familiar with his thinking have told The Daily Beast.
The foundationâs impending split with Assange is a microcosm of a broader anxiety over him amongst his erstwhile allies now that WikiLeaks has made common cause with extreme right-wing forces, principally Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Some consider WikiLeaksâ transparency mission to dwarf Assangeâs personal crusades and transgressionsâwhich go beyond politics and into allegations of sexual assault. Others consider Assange to have brought WikiLeaks, its ostensible principles, and its advocates into disrepute.
WikiLeaksâ claims to be a transparency organization suffered a body blow on Monday night. The Atlanticâs Julia Ioffe published portions of a Twitter direct-message conversation the @WikiLeaks account, an account controlled at least in part by Assange, held with Donald Trump Jr.
The correspondence lasted from at least September 2016 to July 2017. In a series of pitches to Trumpâs son, @WikiLeaks provided the campaign with the guessed password of an anti-Trump political action committee. Just hours before Trumpâs victory, @WikiLeaks pitched the son of the eventual president of the United States to refuse conceding the election in the event of a Trump loss and instead âCHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred.â Doing so would have plunged the U.S. into a political crisis that pundits were warning could easily turn violent.
After the election, when Trumpâs fortunes had clearly turned, WikiLeaks took a new approach: It floated to Trump Jr. the trial balloon of convincing Australia to appoint Assange as its next U.S. ambassador.
The outfit that once prided itself on promoting transparency and accountability was now stirring election chaos. âItâs hard to see what principled cause is advanced by advising a losing presidential candidate to question the outcome of a democratic election,â said Ben Wizner, a senior ACLU attorney who also represents Snowden. âIt was not easy for even former defenders of WikiLeaksâ mission to see Assange as a regular guest on Sean Hannityâs show,â he added.

Xeni Jardin
Many of WikiLeaksâ left-wing and libertarian supporters have struggled over the years to reconcile the idea of WikiLeaks with the reality; to maintain a principled stand for free speech and transparency without seeming to endorse the whole of Assangeâs personal and professional behavior.
Each WikiLeaks defender has their own internal red line. In 2010, Assangeâs plans to post Army field reports that included the names of Iraqi informants led several of WikiLeaksâ key staffers, including Assangeâs second-in-command, to shut down the siteâs infrastructure and resign.
Later, a rape allegation in Sweden, and Assangeâs decision to take refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy rather than confront the case, cost him more support, particularly as he dodged a reckoning and portrayed himself as a political prisoner. (Assange claims he evaded the case for fear Sweden would extradite him to the U.S.) Last year, Assangeâs wholesale dumping of stolen DNC emails drew criticism from Edward Snowden. âDemocratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped,â Snowden tweeted. âBut their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.â The mild rebuke drew a sharp response from Assange: âOpportunism wonât earn you a pardon from Clinton.â
***
WikiLeaksâ support of Trump and the divisive rhetoric of the alt-right was the last straw for Jardin.
In July 2016, WikiLeaks began publishing the hacked emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. In October it started rolling out the emails taken from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. U.S. intelligence attributed both thefts to Russiaâs military intelligence arm, the GRU.
But Assange didnât content himself with the genuine news that emerged from the leaks. He supplemented it with occasional exaggerations and distortions that appeared calculated to appeal to Trumpâs base. On July 22, for example, while Trump was bogged down in sexual assault allegations, Assange announced a âplot to smear @realDonaldTrump by planting fake ads for hot women in Craigslist.â
But the DNC email referenced in the tweet didnât bear out WikiLeaksâ claim. Far from a âplot,â it was an internal proposal for a website that would highlight Trumpâs record on gender issues.
In August 2016, Assange even fanned the right-wing conspiracy theory around slain Democratic Party staffer Seth Richâa hoax thatâs inflicted endless pain on Richâs familyâwhen he went out of his way in a television interview to imply that Rich was WikiLeaksâ source for the stolen DNC emails.
While WikiLeaks merged into the right lane, Donald Trump was increasingly drawing on the DNC and Podesta leaks on the stump, sometimes describing them accurately, sometimes not. And Trump was generous with his praise for WikiLeaks. âWikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,â he declared at an Oct. 10 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Four days later in Charlotte, North Carolina: âThe Hillary Clinton documents released by WikiLeaks make it more clear than ever just how much is at stake come November 8.â In the final month of the campaign, NBC reporters found, Trump referenced WikiLeaks 145 times.
Jardin, like many Americans, found Trumpâs rallies deeply disturbing, with chants of âLock Her Up,â protesters being ejected, and Trump describing his growing list of women accusers as liars. She was dismayed and angered to see WikiLeaks incorporated into the mix. She knew Assangeâs embrace of Trumpism had been good for WikiLeaksâ bank account, bringing small donations back to the levels of the Chelsea Manning era for the first time in years, and it bothered her that a nonprofit she served was helping Assange reap that windfall.
She voiced some of her frustration in a tweet during the Charlotte rally. âTrump, his sons, and his surrogates are now dropping WikiLeaks into their anti-American rants like a hashtag,â Jardin commented. âStrangest of bedfellows.â
Assange was watching.

***
He responded in a series of direct messages to Jardin, at first referencing himself in the third person and the majestic plural, as he often does. âSince JA has never met or spoken to you we find it odd you should hold such a view,â read the message. âSo whatâs it based on?â
The messages went on to suggest Jardin praise Trump and his people for âdoing something useful for onceâ by promoting WikiLeaks, âinstead of, outrageously, suggesting that it is some form of anti-Americanism.â
âHi there Julian. Is that a command?â Jardin shot back.
âIf you canât support the organization FPF [Freedom of the Press Foundation] was founded to support perhaps you should resign,â wrote Assange. After a pause, he repeated the suggestion. âYou have a duty as a board member. If you canât dispense it, perhaps you should resign.â
Knowing Assangeâs reputation for vindictiveness, Jardin interpreted the messages as a personal threat.
She politely asked Assange not to contact her again, and then forwarded the exchange to the foundationâs board. âOh my god,â replied Cusack, a friend of Jardin whoâd joined the board at her invitation. âThe only thing one can say is the pressure on him is incredible and everyone has a breaking point.â (Cusack declined to comment for this story; Assange did not immediately respond to a request to do so.)
The next month, nine days after Trumpâs election victory, Freedom of the Press Foundation held its board meeting. Jardin brought up the issue of Assange, his messages to her, and the foundationâs continued support of WikiLeaks.
Much had changed since the foundation was formed. Today it has a $1.5 million annual budget and a staff of 15. Taking donations for WikiLeaks and other groups has become only a tiny part of the foundationâs work. In 2013, for example, the foundation took over development of SecureDrop, an open-source tool designed to make it safer for whistleblowers to submit information to reporters. Under the foundationâs stewardship, SecureDrop today is running in dozens of newsrooms, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg.
The question for the board at that post-election meeting was straightforward, if not simple: Should the foundation continue to process payments for WikiLeaks and Assange? Was there still a need, and was WikiLeaks still âa multi-national media organization and associated library,â as described on the foundationâs website, or had it become something else, something less journalistic, during the election?
âWhen the election reached its conclusion and WikiLeaks kept doing what it was doing publicly, I felt a sense of revulsion,â recalled Jardin, telling her story for the first time. âWhen our board meeting came up, I assumed that everybody else felt the same way.â
To Jardinâs dismay, they did not.
There was support and empathy on the board for Jardin, according to multiple sources, and a spectrum of perspectives on WikiLeaks. But Micah Lee was the only board member at the meeting to agree the time had come to cut ties. âProtecting free press rights for publishers we disagree with is important,â Lee told The Daily Beast, âbut that doesnât mean WikiLeaks should be able to harass our board members without consequences.â
While several on the board acknowledged that Assange had flown off the handle at Jardin, years of experience with the WikiLeaks founder had built up a certain emotional callus toward his histrionics. âAt one point or another, we have all felt personally aggrieved by Julian,â Greenwald told The Daily Beast. Sympathy for Jardin over Assangeâs DMs couldnât become a reason for a free-press organization to take action.
âThe contributions that WikiLeaks receives come from individual donors,â board member Rainey Reitman said in an interview. âWe would be silencing readers of WikiLeaks who were trying to show their support.â
Similarly, WikiLeaksâ support for Trump could not become a reason for the foundation to cut off Assange. It would, several felt, set a dangerous precedent if the board tacitly affirmed that only some forms of published political content deserved press-freedom support. Such a move could risk undermining the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

***
But there was substantial support for taking up a more pragmatic question, one that hearkened back to the very reason the Freedom of the Press Foundation came into existence in the first place: whether WikiLeaks still needed the foundation to route donations to it.
In 2012, WikiLeaks had been facing financial strangulation after PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard bent to congressional pressure and stopped accepting donations for the secret-spilling site, and for the German Wau Holland Foundation, which handled most of WikiLeaksâ finances. That financial censorship, effectively imposed by the U.S. government, but without the checks and balances of a judicial process, appeared no less ominous four years later.
By all evidence, though, that financial blockade dissolved years earlier, in 2013, after an Icelandic technology firm that processed payments for WikiLeaks won a lawsuit against the credit card companies. An archived copy of WikiLeaksâ donation page from just before the 2016 board meeting shows the organization once again accepting credit card and PayPal donations through Wau Holland, in addition to taking contributions through Freedom of the Press. WikiLeaks was no longer even claiming the blockade was still an issue.
BitCoin, too, has emerged as a popular conduit for WikiLeaks cash, and records indicate the group has received a total of 4,025 BTC through its public wallet addressâroughly $29 million by current exchange rates.
Lee argued to his fellow board members that the rationale for supporting WikiLeaks had become obsolete. By the end of the meeting, the board had agreed to study the issue. âWe resolved as a board to investigate this question to determine whether such a blockade still existed,â Timm said.
Jardin says she felt unsupported in the meeting, and four days later she told the foundation she was taking a leave of absence. Jardin is a cancer survivor, and she was then battling life threatening side-effects from treatment. âThere is nothing like the threat of death to help you clarify what you spend your time on,â she says. On Dec. 2, she quietly resigned from the board, citing her health.
After Jardin stepped down, the board continued to chew over the issues sheâd raised, albeit slowly. By the boardâs last meeting late this summer, it determined that it couldnât verify that the blockade against WikiLeaks still existed. The foundation drew up plans to tell WikiLeaks that if it couldnât present evidence of a blockade, the Freedom of the Press Foundation would end its WikiLeaks donation channelâa decision that will mark a milestone for both organizations.
The foundation hastens to point out that Assangeâs personal actions and politics are irrelevant to its decision. âLike every board, our members have a variety of opinions,â said Timm, âbut our primary motivation as an organization has never been whether we agree with everything that WikiLeaks does or says.â But thereâs no denying that some on the board have soured on WikiLeaks. Snowden, sources close to him tell The Daily Beast, has felt for a long time that Assange has taken WikiLeaks far from a positive, constructive vision of what Snowden believes WikiLeaks could or should be.
The foundationâs angst mirrors that of the larger community of former WikiLeaks supporters. The leaked messages between Assange and Trump Jr. recently prompted Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire backer of The Intercept, to tweet that they âdisqualifyâ WikiLeaks from being considered a media organization. After Assange defended his election-chaos pitch as intended to âgenerate a transformative discussion about corrupt media, corrupt PACs and primary corruption,â Omidyar shot back: âIsnât this an invitation to conspire to knowingly and falsely accuse election officials and a variety of people of fraud?â
James Ball worked for WikiLeaks before becoming a journalist with The Guardian and BuzzFeed U.K. It has become astonishing, he said, to watch someone who has thundered against journalists for unethical behavior turn around and pitch a potential source on securing an ambassadorship for himself.
What Ball called âthe tragedy of WikiLeaksâ is that transparency and accountability âare good principles, and lots of people have defended WikiLeaks because they believe in those principles and hoped [Assange] did, too. This is the final mark of someone whoâs in it for himself,â Ball said. âHeâs a sad man in a broom cupboard.â
For her part, Jardin takes no satisfaction in WikiLeaksâ potential expulsion, which she thinks comes at least a year too late.
âI donât think that Julian Assange should be in solitary confinement,â says Jardin. âI feel awful for him, I bear him no ill will. But my loyalty is to my country. My loyalty is to my community⌠You canât fight the kind of repression Trump represents and indirectly assist it.â
DISCLOSURE: One of this articleâs co-authors helped develop the open-source project that became SecureDrop, and later handed it off to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Additionally, he formerly sat on the foundationâs technical advisory panel, and has made small donations to the organization. The other co-author reported on Edward Snowdenâs leaks with Greenwald, Poitras, and Ball at The Guardian, where Timm is a columnist.