Shortly after the Times recently published a lengthy—and largely anonymously-sourced—report making the case that Russia often benefits from WikiLeaks' actions (which was criticized as "McCarthyist" by Glenn Greenwald and others, a claim supported by lines in the Times story like "United States officials say they believe with a high degree of confidence that the Democratic Party material was hacked by the Russian government, and suspect that the codes may have been stolen by the Russians as well") the Daily Dot unearthed evidence in sealed court records that WikiLeaks elected not to release a €2 billion money trail from the Syrian regime to a Russian government-owned bank in its "Syria Files" cache. In response to questions from the Daily Dot, WikiLeaks threatened retaliation against the reporters and made the same "neo-McCarthyist" argument.

It's no secret, though, that regardless of Assange's publicly stated devotion to total transparency of the documents he's released—which is a recent stance, as he previously reached out to the State Department to solicit its help in redacting cables, and has since lead to the deterioration of his relationships with Times and Guardian editors—has roots in a political maneuver perfected in Russia: "information warfare," or what the Russians call kompromat, or the well-timed release of compromising material.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the material WikiLeaks has released over the years has grown more and more compromising, revealing credit card and social security numbers of Democratic Party donors, private information about nearly all female voters in Turkey (along with dozens of malware links), and the identities of hundreds of Afghan citizens who acted as American informants.