Soplones: heroes or villains

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(Credit: DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP / Getty Images)

Editor's Note: Roberto Izurieta is director of Latin American Projects at George Washington University. He has worked in political campaigns in several countries in Latin America and Spain and has been an advisor to the presidents Alejandro Toledo of Peru, Vicente Fox of Mexico and Álvaro Colom of Guatemala. Izurieta is an analyst of political issues at CNN in Spanish. Both Roberto Izurieta and Sandra Torres worked on the Álvaro Colom campaign

(CNN Spanish) - A comparative analysis of the call of Donald Trump to the president of Ukraine, with other famous leaks offers us a series of ethical references that help us to better analyze the facts.

Snowden believed in the total privacy of citizens' information and when he learned that the intelligence agencies he worked for were collecting information from U.S. citizens without his permission (spying on them according to him), he reported it outside the agency where he worked and then outside the US from Hong Kong - I think he intended to go to Cuba or Ecuador in the time of President Correa who granted Assange asylum. Snowden ended up staying in Russia, a US enemy country.

On the contrary, the person who leaked the conversation between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky first denounced this fact within his agency and when not getting an answer and seeing that rather his superiors tried to file that complaint on another much more secret platform, he decided to send that information (not to WikiLeaks or the Russians) but to an intelligence entity in your country. That is the big difference between one and the other, between being a villain or a hero.

It could be that Donald Trump believes that the son of his opponent Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, has committed acts of corruption that should be public knowledge, but for this he called Zelensky and asked the prosecutor of Ukraine (not the US .) to investigate. At the beginning of the conversation, Trump talked about money (the formal contributions to Ukraine) and then when they agreed on that, he said: "However, I have to ask you a favor": to investigate Biden! In our continent we recognize that kind of conversation very well; We know what they mean, we know their logic and sequence. Many times they try to be quite discreet; but if it is offered and accepted, in both cases, it is a crime.

It may be that Donald Trump has believed that the investigation of the alleged crimes of Joe Biden could be noted in the expenses of his campaign under the heading of "investigation expenses on the opponent." These expenses have their specific laws and are very strict. As president, Donald Trump also cannot go directly to the justice system because he would have a conflict of interest, would have been abuse of his power and would be an attempt to politically influence the justice system. Perhaps, to avoid incurring these crimes and after attempting meetings through his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani with Ukrainian authorities, Donald Trump made the request directly to the President of Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden.

But the latter is a much more serious crime, considering the fact of Russian interference that occurred in the last presidential campaign. Robert Mueller fully investigated that interference with very clear results. With that call, Donald Trump affected two bases of the democratic system: an independent justice system and an election without foreign interference.

Beyond that, and we go to the political level, since when are American citizens willing to give up their right to defense and judicial investigation (or judicial process) in their country and grant that right to a foreign country (and worse still , not ally)? Since when did the president of the USA Do you trust the justice system in Ukraine more than your own? Isn't it because he knows very well that these are much more manipulable?

Why didn't they filter it to the national media to see if someone (Congress, Prosecutor) picked it up and assumed the investigation, why didn't this happen? Because they tried many times and it didn't work out, why didn't it work out? Because nobody found that the son of former Vice President Biden has done anything wrong. That is, what is known in law: it was “discarded ex officio”; as it should be, but we would all be subject to endless judgments.

When a serious and professional source, discards a story is for journalistic and ethical reasons. But when this is not enough for a politician, he goes to a source whose financing and objectives are not transparent. That's why Trump's campaign went to WikiLeaks and Russia: "I love WikiLeaks." “Russia, if you are listening (of course they are listening), […] find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” As I mentioned in another article, the big difference between what Assange did and other journalists fighting for freedom of expression is that they tell us what their sources of funding are (example: work for the Washington Post, New York Times, etc). So far we do not know where WikiLeaks financing comes from. Most likely, it will also come from Russia.

The leak of the content of the call between Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine, is a case similar to Watergate (which ended with the resignation of Nixon): for me they are heroes. What Snowden did is of villains, he ended up sheltered by Russia. Assange is not a journalist because he does not make public how WikiLeaks is financed (ironic because he supposedly defends that we should know everything).

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