Assange: Russian Government Not the Source of WikiLeaks Emails. "Our Source is Not a State Party"

January 2, 2017

THE HILL - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says there's an "obvious" reason the Obama administration has focused on Russia's alleged role in Democratic hacks leading up to Donald Trump's election.

“They’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House,” Assange said during an interview with Fox News's Sean Hannity airing Tuesday night, according to a transcript of excerpts from the network.

“They are trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate president," Assange said during the interview, which was conducted at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been staying.

"Our publications had wide uptake by the American people. They’re all true,” Assange continued. “But that’s not the allegation that’s being presented by the Obama White House.”

Assange reiterated the group's denial that Russia was the source of the Democratic documents released over the summer.

“Our source is not a state party, so the answer for our interactions is no,” he said.

In December, Assange told Hannity that the documents the anti-secrecy group received looked “very much like they’re from the Russians” but said his source was not them.

When asked if he thought WikiLeaks influenced the 2016 election, Assange pointed to private comments from members of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign in documents published by the group.

“Did [WikiLeaks] change the outcome of the election? Who knows, it’s impossible to tell," Assange said.

"But if it did, the accusation is that the true statements of Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, and the DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, their true statements is what changed the election.”

January 6, 2017

THE HILL - Toward the end of the campaign for president, WikiLeaks leaked many thousands of emails from the accounts of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign.

Those emails presented a very unflattering picture of the inner workings of the Clinton campaign and the DNC.  

 

The Obama administration believes that the emails were originally hacked by agents of the Russian government to damage the Clinton campaign and enhance the chances of a Trump victory. President-elect Trump has been very skeptical of those claims, insisting that the administration and the intelligence community could be mistaken.

WikiLeaks is a self-described “multi-national media organization” that “specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials[.]” 

Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, has been in self-imposed exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than four years, because the UK wants to extradite him to Sweden, where he is the subject of an investigation into alleged sexual assault.

Mr. Assange fears that Sweden might hand him over to the US, where he might be subject to prosecution relating to classified documents illegally taken from the U.S. Army and published in 2010 by WikiLeaks.

Recently, Mr. Assange gave an interview to Sean Hannity of Fox News; the interview has been airing this week. Mr. Hannity asked whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could assure the American people “one thousand percent” that they “did not get [the leaked emails] from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?”

Mr. Assange gave what, on close examination, seems to be a very careful, well-rehearsed, and lawyerly answer to the question: “We can say, we have said repeatedly over the last two months, that our source is not the Russian government and it is not [a] state party.”

The Hill reported that, very soon after Assange gave this answer, President-elect Trump tweeted: “[Assange] said Russians did not give him the info.”

Other Republicans were unconvinced. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called Assange a “sycophant for Russia [who]…steals data and compromises national security.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said that he has “a lot more faith in our intelligence officers” who blame Russia for the hacks “than I do in people like Julian Assange.”

There are two related, but nevertheless distinct, questions that should be considered here. Were the emails hacked by agents of the Russian government? Were the emails hacked and then leaked for the purpose of helping Trump defeat Clinton in the election?

In the course of his interview with Hannity, Assange asserts: “[T]here is one person in the world — and I think it’s actually only one — who knows exactly what is going on with our publications … And that’s me.”

It is impossible to believe that a man who has been confined to one small building in London for the last four years could know who hacked into servers in the US and stole thousands of emails that were then given to WikiLeaks.

We can safely assume that Assange did not obtain the leaked emails from someone who walked into the Ecuadorian embassy and handed him a memory device. And, even if that incredible event did occur, how could Assange know with “1000%” certainty where that person had obtained the documents?

The Ecuadorian embassy in London does not span the globe.

The CIA, on the other hand, does have agents all around the world. Certainly some of them are operating in Russia. It is much more likely, I submit, that the CIA would have accurate information regarding Russian involvement than would Mr. Assange.

But Mr. Trump insists that the Democratic Obama administration has a partisan interest in convincing Americans that Russia aided his campaign, so that his victory will be seen as illegitimate. One hopes the CIA is sufficiently independent of political influence to be free of that kind of bias.

Probably the only ones who will ever know with certainty the identity and affiliation of the persons who hacked the emails that were ultimately leaked by WikiLeaks are those persons themselves. The rest of us can only make educated guesses.

Some guesses, however, are more educated than others. At this point, I think it makes sense to accept the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russian agents were involved in the hack, while reserving the right to reconsider in light of any new facts that emerge.

That leaves the question of motive: were the emails leaked to help Trump and hurt Clinton? Supporters of Clinton say that, because they did hurt Clinton, it’s obvious they were leaked with that intention.

But that picture is clouded by reports that Russian hackers also attempted to penetrate computers of the Republican National Committee and were thwarted by security defenses installed in the RNC system.

There are indications that the RNC had more robust defenses than the DNC, but also that the attempts to hack into the RNC were not as aggressive as the hack into the DNC.

So, identifying motive is certainly going to be even more difficult than identifying the hacker. The identity and affiliation of the original hacker is a matter of objective fact; the motivation for the hacking is necessarily subjective.

And whose motive, precisely, are we seeking? The motive of the person or persons who actually hacked into the emails, or the motive of any intermediary to whom the emails might have been transferred, or the motive of Assange in leaking them to the public? (Assange has expressed very negative views of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.) 

It’s possible they all had different motives.

As I’ve said, based on current information, I think the hackers probably were Russian agents. Whether their motive for hacking was to interfere in our election just for the sake of interfering or for the sake of helping Trump, and what Assange’s motive was in leaking the documents—I simply can’t say.

David E. Weisberg is an attorney and contributor on politics and law with The Hill. His work has also appeared in Social Science Research Network and The Times of Israel.

Assange addresses the FBI, DHS report on Russian hacking

January 4, 2017

FOX NEWS - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Fox News' Sean Hannity in an exclusive interview that a teenager could have hacked into Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's computer and retrieved damaging email messages that the website published during last year's election campaign.

"We published several ... emails which show Podesta responding to a phishing email," Assange said during the first part of the interview, which aired on "Hannity" Tuesday night. "Podesta gave out that his password was the word ‘password’. His own staff said this email that you’ve received, this is totally legitimate. So, this is something ... a 14-year-old kid could have hacked Podesta that way."

Assange also claimed that Clinton herself made "almost no attempt" to keep her private emails safe from potentially hostile states during her tenure as secretary of state.

"Now, was she trying to keep them secure from Republicans? Probably," Assange said. "But in terms of [nation-] states, almost no attempt."

Hannity interviewed Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. The Australia native has been holed up there for five years battling extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, which Assange denies.

WikiLeaks published more than 50,000 emails detailing dubious practices at the Clinton Foundation, top journalists working closely with the Clinton campaign, key Clinton aides speaking derisively of Catholics and a top Democratic National Committee (DNC) official providing debate questions to Clinton in advance.

Assange has repeatedly denied claims by the Obama administration that Russia was behind the cyberattacks that exposed the DNC and Podesta emails. Assange also has repeatedly insisted that WikiLeaks' source for the emails was not the Russian government or any "state party," and said the outgoing administration was attempting to "delegitimize" President-Elect Donald Trump by making those claims.

In the first part of the interview, Assange criticized a Dec. 29 joint analysis of the cyberattacks by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. After the report was released, President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and closed two Russian compounds.

"On the top [of the report], there is a disclaimer, saying … there is no guarantee that any of this information is accurate," Assange told Hannity. "There’s nothing in that report that says that any information was given to us. Nothing."

Assange also criticized the mainstream media for what he called the "ethical corruption" displayed in the Podesta emails.

"The editor of the New York Times ... has come out and said that he would do the same thing as WikiLeaks, [that] if they had obtained that information, they would have published it," Assange said. "Now, unfortunately, I don’t believe that is true."

Assange added that he doubted that partisan sympathy explained the cozy relationship between Podesta and reporters covering the Clinton campaign.

"It’s more like, ‘You rub my back, I’ll rub yours. I’ll give you information, you’ll come to my – I’ll invite you to my child’s christening or my next big party.’"

Assange said that the website would not have hesitated to publish embarrassing information about Trump if they had received it.

"There’s no sources coming out through other journalists … and saying, 'We gave WikiLeaks all this information about Donald Trump or … Vladimir Putin and you know what? They didn’t publish it.' No one has come out and said that," Assange said. "If they did, that would hurt our reputation for trust for our sources."

The WikiLeaks founder also warned Democrats that criticizing the website for publishing the emails was a "stupid maneuver."

"It’s the same reason why they lost the election, which is instead of focusing on substance, they focused on other things [like] this attempt to say how outrageous it is that the American public received true information before an election," Assange said. "The public doesn’t buy that. They want as much true information as possible."

Related:

• WikiLeaks: Clinton Bribed FBI To Cover-Up Classified Data Breach
• Assange confirms that /r/WikiLeaks is not under WikiLeaks control.
• Assange AMA: Black Ops to discredit wikileaks.org
• Julian Assanage AMA is being hijacked, massive upvoting of questions trying to discredit him and tie him to Russia.

I am Julian Assange founder of WikiLeaks -- Ask Me Anything

I am Julian Assange, founder, publisher and editor of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has been publishing now for ten years. We have had many battles. In February the UN ruled that I had been unlawfully detained, without charge. for the last six years. We are entirely funded by our readers. During the US election Reddit users found scoop after scoop in our publications, making WikiLeaks publications the most referened political topic on social media in the five weeks prior to the election. We have a huge publishing year ahead and you can help!

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