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 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.
The Ecuadorian embassy in London does not span the globe.
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.
WikiLeaks – Kristinn Hrafnsson, Official WikiLeaks representative: +35 4821 7121
