Julian Assange on Russian hacking claims

Julian Assange: Obama trying to ‘delegitimize’ Trump with Russian hacking claims

By Andrew Blake - The Washington Times - Tuesday, January 3, 2017

The Obama administration is attempting to “delegitimize” President-elect Donald Trump before his inauguration this month by emphasizing the Russian government’s alleged role in the recent White House race, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange indicated in an interview airing Tuesday.

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity from London, the 45-year-old WikiLeaks publisher accused the current administration of propagating claims concerning Russia’s purported election meddling in order to raise questions about Mr. Trump’s standing as president before he even takes office, according to excerpts released prior to broadcast.

While the U.S. intelligence community has blamed Kremlin-tied hackers with infiltrating the email accounts of Democratic targets and then providing the stolen contents to WikiLeaks for publication, Mr. Assange reiterated to the interviewer that the website’s source wasn’t any nation state, Russia included.

“We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government, and it is not a state party,” Mr. Assange said.