The
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) was set to break ties with
WikiLeaks amidst concerns among the foundation’s board, which
includes such well-known figures as Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden,
Laura Poitras, John Cusack and Glenn Greenwald, among others. The
news was confirmed less than a month later when the nonprofit’s
board officially voted to stop accepting U.S. donations for
WikiLeaks, which had been blacklisted for years by Visa, MasterCard
and PayPal after publishing leaked U.S. government documents provided
by Chelsea Manning. WikiLeaks took to Twitter to suggest that
something more nefarious was behind the board’s decision to cut
ties. Once the news became public, WikiLeaks and its associated
accounts linked the FPF’s decision to the fact that many of its
members now work for organizations financed by eBay billionaire and
PayPal co-founder Pierre Omidyar. In addition, the FPF itself has
received large sums of money from Omidyar and his various businesses
and foundations. Pierre Omidyar, prior to the founding of The
Intercept, was known not for any commitment to journalism or free
speech but rather for his connections to the U.S. government and his
role in the financial blockade of WikiLeaks that began in 2010. Sibel
Edmonds, FBI whistleblower and founder of the National Security
Whistleblowers Coalition, told MintPress News that the FPF has a
reputation for being a “very, very partisan organization and
populated with ideologues.” She further asserted that the “number
one reason” for the FPF’s decision was directly related to
Wikileaks’ releases in 2016, namely the DNC leaks and the Podesta
emails.
Part
3 - Omidyar’s connections and agenda
Pierre
Omidyar, prior to the founding of The Intercept, was known not for
any commitment to journalism or free speech but rather for his
connections to the U.S. government and his role in the financial
blockade of WikiLeaks that began in 2010.
Indeed,
publicly available records reveal Omidyar’s close connections to
the U.S. political establishment. For example, Omidyar made more
visits to the Obama White House between 2009 and 2013 than did
Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon’s
Jeff Bezos. He has also donated $30 million to the Clinton global
initiative. He directly co-invested with the State Department,
funding groups – some of them overtly fascist – that worked to
overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014. He
continues to fund USAID, particularly its overseas program aimed at
“advancing U.S. national security interests” abroad.
Omidyar
has a vested interest in advancing the interests of the U.S.
political establishment for a variety of reasons. Sibel Edmonds, who
was among the first to note Omidyar’s background upon The
Intercept’s founding, noted that the PayPal executive “has
been in bed with the CIA and NSA” and even the Department of
Defense — further noting that the Snowden documents that The
Intercept, and thus Omidyar, controls “contain information about
PayPal’s direct partnership not only with the Treasury Department
but also the CIA.”
Edmonds
further stated that Greenwald had confirmed Omidyar’s
long-running partnership with the CIA and other government agencies
on Twitter during a heated exchange between the two in 2013.
Omidyar
is also well-connected to Snowden’s former employer Booz Allen
Hamilton, a major government contractor known as the “world’s
most profitable spy organization,” whose former executives
include James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, and
Michael McConnell, former Director of the NSA. Omidyar’s Ulupono
Initiative, a venture capital fund that operates in his home state of
Hawaii, cosponsors one of the Pentagon’s most important contractor
expos, in which Booz Allen Hamilton – and the Department of Defense
– have a major stake. In addition, a former Booz Allen Hamilton
vice president, Kyle Datta, is General Partner of Omidyar’s Ulupono
Initiative.
Also
striking was Omidyar’s decision to accept Snowden’s former boss
at Booz Allen Hamilton, Robert Lietzke, into the Omidyar Fellows
program in 2015 after personally interviewing Lietzke as part of the
program’s application process. What was unusual in Lietzke’s case
was that Omidyar also oversees The Intercept, which has exclusive
publishing rights over the Snowden cache – which was taken from
under Lietzke’s nose at Booz Allen Hamilton by his former employee,
Edward Snowden. Snowden himself has remained silent on Omidyar’s
decision, despite the mixed signals it sent and continues to serve as
the president of the FPF — which, as mentioned, is also funded by
Omidyar.
The
Intercept was founded in 2014 with some $250 million in seed money
from Omidyar. Its first hires were Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras,
the only journalists in possession of the full Snowden cache.
According to former Intercept writers, Omidyar – despite funding
and founding an enterprise dedicated to “fearless” and
“adversarial” journalism – is “shockingly [un]interested
in the actual journalism” of the paper. If this portrayal of
Omidyar’s interest — or rather, lack of interest — in
journalism is accurate, it is strange that he would also fund
organizations — like the FPF, the Center for Public Integrity, and
ProPublica — ostensibly dedicated to investigative journalism,
transparency, and the First Amendment.
Omidyar’s
supposed devotion is also hard to square with the fact that he and
PayPal were a major part of the financial blockade against WikiLeaks,
which – as mentioned above – deprived WikiLeaks of 95% of its
revenue at the time. Though Omidyar –- and now the FPF -– have
argued that the blockade has long been lifted, WikiLeaks has publicly
disagreed, maintaining that it remains in effect. Interestingly, when
Omidyar was asserting that the blockade had ended, the FPF – at the
time – had also publicly disagreed with his assessment and claimed
that the blockade was still in full effect.
Omidyar
has also, in the past, been rather candid about his views on leakers.
He asserted in 2009 that organizations that publish stolen — or
leaked — information “should help catch the thief” and
shouldn’t publish such information in the first place. Omidyar even
defended this view after The Intercept’s founding and refused to
speak in “absolutes” about whether or not a source should be
turned in — a troubling perspective to have in light of The
Intercept’s debacle in the Reality Winner case.
What
then caused him to create The Intercept, only a few years after
making that assertion? Given Omidyar’s connections to the U.S.
government, particularly the NSA, and top government contractors,
including Snowden’s former employer, it was likely an effort to
privatize and thus thwart or slow the publication of the Snowden
leaks in which PayPal is allegedly implicated — and not a sudden
change of heart.
Edmonds
went a step further, stating that: “The Intercept is a
continuation of that blockade [of WikiLeaks]. [It] was set up with
that purpose. Specifically, it was set up to block true, real
information and put forth narrative that has already gotten the
approval of special interests including the U.S. government. It made
perfect sense for him [Omidyar] to move from that to setting up a
news organization and posing as an outlet for investigative reports
depending on whistleblowers.”
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