In a videolink appearance from London Tuesday morning hyped as a U.S. election “October surprise,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange presented no bombshells, instead promising weekly releases of documents over the next two months.
Assange had indicated in July and in August that he had “significant” information about Hillary Clinton that would damage her campaign for the presidency.
CNET reported his news conference focused on the top 10 leaks on the site over its 10 years of operations.
But the much-expected dirt on Clinton, whose campaign was disrupted in July when WikiLeaks released 20,000 hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of its convention, didn’t materialize.
Assange did promise Wikileaks would release new information every week for the next 10 weeks related to Google, arms trades, mass surveillance and military operations.
He also promised all documents related to the U.S. presidential election would be published before the Nov. 8 vote.
Assange insisted he had been misquoted and rejected claims that he intends to harm Clinton’s campaign.
“A decade ago, we knew a lot less about the world’s leaders and institutions. We knew only what they wanted us to know,” he said.
Wikileaks was registered as a domain name on Oct. 4, 2006, and published its first document several weeks later.
It has released classified documents about Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan military operations and the surveillance of world leaders by the National Security Agency.
Among its key sources was U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning, who now is in prison for leaking military documents.
Assange, who has been protected behind the walls of Ecuador’s embassy in London since 2012 from allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, spoke to the news conference in Berlin through a videolink from London.
He said he’s is creating an “army” to defend his website.
In July, Assange promised “a lot more material” about the U.S. election, and in August, he said that sum total of information is “significant.”
However, the expected details never materialized Tuesday.
At Breitbart, Patrick Howley noted the news conference’s video montage commemorated the site’s “biggest hits” over the last 10 years.
A “woman, referencing the Democratic National Committee email leak that complicated the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, said that WikiLeaks is now getting hit with another major propaganda attack. The woman outright denied that anyone at Wikileaks is a ‘Russian spy,’ citing thousands of documents that Wikileaks has published ‘exposing’ the regime of Bashar al Assad, a Russian ally.”
WND reported Monday claims from a blogger that Clinton once suggested silencing Assange with a planned drone strike.
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Clinton asked during a 2010 State Department meeting, according to a report from the True Pundit blog that was tweeted by WikiLeaks.
The report remains unconfirmed.
“Prodded by the looming CableGate, Clinton met with staff on Tuesday November 23, 2010 shortly after 8 a.m. on Mahogany Row at the State Department to attempt to formulate a strategy to avert Assange’s plans to release an enormous batch of 250,000 secret cables, dating from 1966 to 2010. Assange had professed for months to rain the internal cables down on Clinton and President Obama. The collective fear was the context of the secret cables would hamper U.S. intelligence gathering and compromise private correspondences and intelligence shared with foreign governments and opposition leaders. Splashing such juicy details on television news shows and the front pages of major newspapers in the country was great for the media but lousy for intelligence and foreign policy. Many, including Clinton and her elected boss, expressed fear these revelations would embarrass and expose intelligence allies of the United States and set America’s already fragile foreign policy back decades. …
“Clinton’s State Department was getting pressure from President Obama and his White House inner circle, as well as heads of state internationally, to try and cutoff Assange’s delivery of the cables and if that effort failed, then to forge a strategy to minimize the administration’s public embarrassment over the contents of the cables. Hence, Clinton’s early morning November meeting of State’s top brass who floated various proposals to stop, slow or spin the Wikileaks contamination. That is when a frustrated Clinton, sources said, at some point blurted out a controversial query.
“‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’ Clinton openly inquired, offering a simple remedy to silence Assange and smother Wikileaks via a planned military drone strike, according to State Department sources. The statement drew laughter from the room which quickly died off when the Secretary kept talking in a terse manner, sources said. Clinton said Assange, after all, was a relatively soft target, ‘walking around’ freely and thumbing his nose without any fear of reprisals from the United States.”
According to the report, sources claim Clinton had been upset that Assange had released other documents in 2010 concerning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Clinton was fuming, sources said, as each State Department cable dispatched during the Obama administration was signed by her,” True Pundit wrote.
WND sought substantiating evidence from True Pundit, but the blog doesn’t list contact information for its staff.
WND also reported in September Assange complained of being misquoted by the media.
An interview with the New York Times produced media reports about an alleged Wikileaks link to the Russian government and his description of Hillary Clinton as a “demon.”
He immediately blasted both the Times and Clinton.
On Twitter, he posted, “What we were drawing attention [to] is the amazing transformation that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are by becoming the national security party and the national security candidate by whipping up a neo-McCarthyist hysteria about Russia.
“Any serious analyst understands that China and the U.S. are the only real games in town. China has ten times the population of Russia, seven times the GDP. Russia has the GDP of Italy. It’s interesting in that it makes provocative statements and so on. It’s interesting, and of course in its own neck of the woods – countries between Russia and China, the Caucasus and so on—of course Russia is very significant for them, but in the world stage Russia is a bit player.
“That attempted re-framing by Hillary Clinton to declare media organizations that are publishing material that shows illicit behavior in the DNC to fix the election for her as somehow us being Russian agents, similar criticism has emerged from people connected to her campaign against the Intercept, where Glenn Greenwald works,” he said.
“Her campaign has effectively, and maybe even directly, called Donald Trump, the opposition leader in this case, a Russian agent. … Jill Stein, the Greens Party candidate, effectively the 4th candidate in terms of numbers – has also been called a Russian agent,” he continued.
“This is a neo-McCarthyist hysteria. What kind of press environment is this going to lead to, post-election? The American liberal press, in falling over themselves to defend Hillary Clinton, are erecting a demon that’s going [to] put nooses around everyone’s necks when she wins the election which she is almost certainly going to do.”
The International Business Times said the missive followed Assange’s interview with the Times and its online conversation with investigative reporter Jo Becker.
Assange said WikiLeaks “and I are not defending Donald Trump,” explaining he has obtained “some interesting information” about the GOP.
“It is difficult to compete with the controversial statements coming out of [Trump’s] mouth, but he has extensive business relationships and some of those can be interesting.”
Further, he noted at the time, there is “more interesting and entertaining material” becoming available about the Clinton Foundation.
