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WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Slams Obama Over Russia Hacks [Video]

By Nick Younker
Published on: 17:00 PST, Jan 2, 2017

In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is not pulling his punches in regards to the Obama administration and the fallout over the Russian hacks and their resulting influence over the U.S. election that ended up with Donald Trump elected as President of the United States.

Sean Hannity traveled to England to meet with Julian Assange, who has been closed in at the embassy for Ecuador since his website published classified documents leaked to him by Chelsea Manning. He has also been accused of rape in Sweden but claims it is a smokescreen to get him extradited to the United States. So he stays within the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy until such time that it is safe for him to travel without the threat of arrest held over his head.

In the interview with Sean Hannity, which is expected to air on Tuesday night on Fox News, as reported by The Hill, the transcripts show a side of Julian Assange that is not too forgiving of the Obama administration and the way he has handled the post-election fallout. This ties directly into the intelligence that has been declassified that claims Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and released private e-mails to Wikileaks, which Julian Assange claims to be untrue.

“They’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House,” Julian Assange told Sean Hannity, according to a transcript of excerpts from Fox News that were obtained by The Hill.

“They are trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate president.”

The main focus that Julian Assange said he and WikiLeaks were trying to present to the world, and to the American people during the election, was the truth in the e-mails that they obtained and published. Although Julian Assange did not reveal who gave them the hacked e-mails, he did say that it was not Russia.

“Our publications had wide uptake by the American people, they’re all true,” Julian Assange told Sean Hannity.

“But that’s not the allegation that’s being presented by the Obama White House.”

But there is another side to that argument. Although he has said that Russia did not give him or WikiLeaks the hacked e-mails for publication, he did freely admit that they appeared to be from a Russian source to start with, saying that the hacked documents did look “very much like they’re from the Russians.”

There is a wide consensus in the United States that Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks publications of the e-mails directly influenced the outcome of the election that will put Donald Trump in the White House on January 20, 2017. But the Obama administration is not really going after Julian Assange or WikiLeaks for this incident. Instead, they have been looking at the source of the hack and going after the people they believe to be responsible.

“Did [WikiLeaks] change the outcome of the election? Who knows, it’s impossible to tell,” Julian Assange told Sean Hannity.

“But if it did, the accusation is that the true statements of Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, and the DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, their true statements is what changed the election.”

Last week, President Obama took the unprecedented steps of issuing sanctions on Russia and certain top officials. He also ordered the closing of two Russian compounds in the United States, one in Maryland and one in New York on Long Island, as well as ordering the expulsion of several Russian diplomats from the United States.

The new comments from Julian Assange seem to indicate that he is telling Obama that they made the wrong decisions on this matter and that Russia did not give them the documents, which essentially seems to be an attempt to embarrass Obama just before he leaves office.

[Featured Image by Carl Court/Getty Images]

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