WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had spoken about hurting Democratic US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s chances of entering the Oval Office, reports The New York Times. Assange had made the comment six weeks before WikiLeaks released 19,000 emails of the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) as a part of the ‘Hillary Leaks’ series.
The emails released on Friday included some that suggested party officials had favoured Clinton over rival Sanders during the primaries.
It was not immediately clear how WikiLeaks got the emails – and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange proudly told Democracy Now! that he’d never tell.
Was It From the Russians?
Clinton’s campaign didn’t hesitate to make the connection, with campaign manager Robby Mook saying cyber experts believed “Russian state actors were feeding the email to hackers for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”
Trump’s team went out of its way to dismiss the alleged Russian connection as outlandish. Trump senior policy adviser Paul Manafort called the Clinton campaign statements “pretty desperate” and “pretty absurd.”
Assange, living in London to avoid extradition, spoke to CNN about the new leaks and said:
I think this raises a very serious question, which is that the natural instincts of Hillary Clinton and the people around her, that when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, that she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, etc. If she does that when she’s in government, that is a political, managerial style that can lead to conflict.
On Wednesday, WikiLeaks released files of what it said were audio recordings pulled from the DNC’s emails that were obtained by hacking its servers.
The incident prompted the organisation’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to step down.
See more of The Quint’s US Elections 2016 coverage.
(With inputs from The New York Times, AP)
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