PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2016-09-09 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Julian Assange Said Bernie Sanders Won Race, Was Threatened (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • On 29 August 2016, the unreliable web site USA Supreme published an item claiming that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told journalist John Pilger that Bernie Sanders won the Democratic presidential nomination but dropped out of the race after he was threatened. That claim was aggregated to a number of questionable web sites and rocketed to the top of Facebook's trending topics list on 9 September 2016. However, all iterations of the claim traced back to the original USA Supreme article, which stated: Although multiple articles had repeated this claim as of 9 September 2016, we found no other appearance of the alleged quote anywhere online other than USA Supreme as of 30 August 2016. Moreover, USA Supreme provided no information pertaining to the date of the interview, no link to the interview itself, nor an explanation of how they supposedly came into possession of information that would be headline news had it been credible. Neither Pilger nor WikiLeaks made any reference on Twitter (through which Assange frequently communicates) to the bombshell claim. Pilger did mention Sanders by name on his official web site on 23 August 2016, but he made no reference to his presumably newsworthy interview with Assange: Another massive red flag in the original item was that the words attributed to Pilger indeed stemmed from an interview with Assange conducted back late July 2016 (shortly after the DNC leaks controversy), but those words were spoken by Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman, not by Pilger: What Assange actually said in response to that query in no way resembled a claim that Sanders had been threatened to drop out of the race: Interview questions and answers attributed to Pilger and Assange on 29 August 2016 by USA Supreme matched much of Goodman's 25 July 2016 interview with the WikiLeaks' founder, and verbatim repetition of the very same queries and responses in a separate setting is highly implausible. Moveover, prior to starting the rumor that Julian Assange had proclaimed Bernie Sanders was threatened, USA Supreme similarly falsely attributed remarks made by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url