The obvious answer is that you end up as a useful idiot for the United States's enemies. Yes, the Podesta leaks were probably largely true, but this one-sided airing of dirty laundry in the lead up to the 2016 election obvious impacted the result. So if you endorse this, aren't you just opening the door for every election cycle whereby the US's enemies get to wade in and strategically release information that they've obtained through espionage? And don't you also therefore, start to create a dynamic in the election that candidates have to attempt to appease foreign adversaries in order to avoid damaging their election hopes?
What if Hilary had come out in February of 2016 and said "Hey, Putin's not so bad, he's got legitimate interests in Ukraine and I think we should leave Europe to stand on it's own" - do you think the campaign of leaking hacked material to wikileaks would've happened? Or do you think maybe Trump's tax returns might have come out instead?
And what is stopping those patriotic principled leakers from leaking things to just about anyone else? If the republican party e-mails were leaked for example I can guarantee you'd have a huge amount of journalists willing to publish them, even if in the theoretical wikileaks wouldn't do it.
At the end of the day the US is most likely the country with the highest amount of espionage in the world, maybe barring china, it's not like they can't do the same as some supposed FSB spy.
Expecting anyone to be impartial is a big mistake, especially when you can conveniently persecute and try to kill said person and with that pretty much force them to cease being being "impartial" at the very least in the public perception. Under the circumstances laid out all it takes to discredit someone as an "useful idiot" is to persecute and corner them into "enemy territory".
Also let's take a step back and differentiate between something being of interest to exclusively US enemies, that would be a detriment to the US directly, or a matter of international policy, which is the case of the Ukraine position you cited. The Ukraine position is not a threat to the US either way, it's just a position in foreign policy.
There's a big difference between principled citizens who choose to leak information, and foreign adversaries of the US. I would have thought this was obvious but it's down to US citizens to decide the US election, and external interference should be met as the attack on the US that it is.
>At the end of the day the US is most likely the country with the highest amount of espionage in the world, maybe barring china, it's not like they can't do the
Absolutely, they could, this weird whataboutism doesn't help your position. Either what I'm saying is correct - and you concede that, in which case we can talk about the US capabilities - which we can view in the correct context of capabilities operated under a free accountable democratic society. Or you don't agree, in which case your whatabouttery is moot, since you think it's fine, and therefore the US intelligence could just intervene to get their way. As you say, they probably have more capabilities.
>There's a big difference between principled citizens who choose to leak information, and foreign adversaries of the US. I would have thought this was obvious but it's down to US citizens to decide the US election, and external interference should be met as the attack on the US that it is.
I can't agree with that, the election was decided by the US citizens, they saw the information and made their choice. Unless you're arguing that said leaks are fake as far as I'm concerned information is information, if the candidate did something the voter base wouldn't approve of and it was unveiled the source is completely irrelevant. Under those pretenses any kind of leak can be trivially attributed to some enemy and now its discredited, call those who report on it pawns of the $enemy_state and there you go. You can see this being attempted in real time in US politics, thankfully with waning success.
My point about the capabilities of the US espionage comes in when you factor counterintel and exposing falsehoods, as I said before my position is that information is information and the only thing that can be argued against information is whether it was fabricated or not. For an example, as far as I'm concerned the entire hunter laptop scandal being completely pushed under the rug by intel agents[0] is far closer to actual manipulation than the DNC e-mail leaks, because it was a lie that it wasn't real and conveniently no journalist wanted to fact check it, just to come out now 2 years later after the election is done and walk back on it. I'm citing this to try and make clear that the veracity is far more important than the source.
I do concede the point that arguing that just because the US can do the same supposed leaking of documents to another country doesn't change much, although assuming they're actual leaks i'd like them to.
> So if you endorse this, aren't you just opening the door for every election cycle whereby the US's enemies get to wade in and strategically release information that they've obtained through espionage?
If there's no dirty laundry to air, this strategy doesn't work. Clean up your act at home and your enemies will have no ammunition. Guess what's the first step to do that...
Even if this was a Russian ploy, you should be thanking them.
My politicians ideally shouldn't. And absolutely should lose elections when their dirty laundry is aired if that's what the voters think when seeing the truth.
"one-sided airing of dirty laundry in the lead up to the 2016 election"
Are you talking about the mainstream media here? They leaked every scrap of dirty laundry about Trump that they could find (not all of which were true), yet Wikileaks was the only one willing to leak the DNC leaks.
Ok, if your position is that you want ideological purity at the cost of all practical considerations, then fine, you'll end up with whoever Russia/Saudi Arabia etc wants you to have. I don't think that's a good practical trade off, but it's one you're welcome to make.
Practical considerations? Hm, if I consider it practically I feel like Europe shouldn't consider the US an ally. (And before someone assumes something wrong: nor should it consider Russia, China or Saudi Arabia an ally.)
It's game of thrones in the truest sense and I personally don't think the track record of the US is much better for Europe in the last 7 decades, so...
When it comes to meddling with elections I think nobody has as much experience in doing so than the US.
So part of me was quite happy that this super power could have a taste of their own medicine at some point.
While at the same time I wish all the people in the world the best, including the US and Russia :)
What an absurdly stupid position. Fine, you openly want to encourage foreign adversaries to determine the outcome of US elections. Fine. That's a position you advertise widely, because it makes you look absurd.
As long as the published work is the truth, even if just "one side" of it, it's better than lies all the way down.
Would it be better if we had leaks about every regime? Sure!
Wouldn't it even be better if we had no regimes and no need for Wikileaks at all? Definitely!
But "one-sided" truth is still (part of the greater) truth.