Assange Interview: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Says Democratic Party Emails Didn’t Come From Russia

In an interview on Fox News, Tuesday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange repeated his claim that Russian forces did not provide WikiLeaks with the hacked DNC documents that became the primary focus of the election season.

“Our source is not a state party. So the answer — for our interactions — is no … Our source is not the Russian government. It is not state parties,” the Assange interview revealed on the show when asked about the origin of the documents, according to CNN. According to the Assange interview, the WikiLeaks founder said the White House, and President Barack Obama, have been aggressively pursuing the Russian option in order to “delegitimize” President-elect Donald Trump.

Obama in particular, Julian Assange said in the televised Assange interview, was acting like a “lawyer” in response to the claims. “If you look at most of (Obama’s) statements, he doesn’t say… WikiLeaks obtained its information from Russia, worked with Russia,” Assange said on Fox.

President Obama issued sanctions against Russia Dec. 29. “These actions follow repeated private and public warnings that we have issued to the Russian government, and are a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior,” he said in a statement about expelling 35 accused Russian spies and issuing sanctions against the nation, according to USA Today.

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange said the information wasn’t necessarily as vital to the election as everyone has claimed. “Was it influential? Did it have a lot of influence? Statistically, yes. It was the No. 1 topic on Facebook throughout October. The No. 1 topic on Twitter, also, throughout October. Did it change the outcome? Who knows. It’s absolutely impossible to tell,” the Assange interview revealed about the leaked information, according to CNN.

The incoming president responded to the information with agreement. “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’ – why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning in response to Assange’s interview.

Trump has tweeted a number of times about his disbelief in the hacking claim. On Dec. 12 he tweeted, “Unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn’t this brought up before election?”

Despite Julian Assange’s interview and Trump’s claims to the contrary, the U.S. intelligence community continues to maintain that Russians definitely influenced the elections. State department spokesman John Kirby said the administration is “100 percent certain in the role that Russia played” to CNN on Tuesday.

Kirby said there was “no question” about Russia’s effort to “sow doubt and confusion, and getting involved through the cyber domain, into our electoral process … And that’s not just an assessment by the President or by Secretary Kerry or other Cabinet officials. It’s an assessment by the entire intelligence community.”

“The information is there, and it’s rock solid. And we obviously would not have pursued the measures that we pursued without that level of certainty. So, yes, we are a 100% certain,” Kirby said in the interview with CNN.

The information regarding the DNC leak has been made unusually public, according to the BBC, allowing multiple parties to investigate evidence of hacking. The general conclusion was, according to the Assange interview, that two separate entities, both identified as parties in the Russian government, collected information regarding data inside the DNC network and information from DNC political figures.

CrowdStrike, the company that investigated the DNC hacking soon after the Podesta emails were released said they came to the conclusion that Russians were involved long before the election was over, according to the BBC. “We did attribution back to the Russian government. We believed with a high level of confidence that it was tied to Russia,” said CrowdStrike representative Shawn Henry before the Nov. 8 election.

[Featured Image by Carl Court/Getty Images]