The Russian government did not provide emails taken from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in an interview set to air Saturday.
“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false. We can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange said in the interview with Dartmouth Films.
By saying “Russian government,” however, Assange left open the possibility that the hackers were still Russian, but not state-sponsored.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and the Department of Homeland Security have said that emails published by WikiLeaks appear to be part of a larger effort to “interfere with the U.S. election process.”
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the statement said.
The U.S. intelligence community comprises 17 groups that “work both independently and collaboratively to gather and analyze the intelligence necessary to conduct foreign relations and national security activities,” according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s website.
The interview, conducted in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where Assange has been granted asylum, is set to air on Russia Today. Assange expressed sympathy for Clinton in a preview made public on Thursday, claiming she was “eaten alive” by her “ambitions,” and adding Donald Trump would not have been “permitted to win” in the absence of a game changer.
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“Hillary Clinton is just one person. I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person, because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick, for example faint, as a result of going on, and going with their ambitions,” Assange said.
“But she represents a whole network of people, and a whole network of relationships with particular states,” he added. “Trump would not be permitted to win.”
Assange’s WikiLeaks has published more than 40,000 emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta since the beginning of October, and nearly 20,000 from the Democratic National Committee over the summer. It has widely been speculated the emails were taken through hacking, and potentially by Russia. WikiLeaks had taken mild issue with the first claim, but had never issued a strong rebuke of the second.
