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Bill Maher, Julian Assange Duel Over WikiLeaks Attacks On Hillary Clinton

By Aric Mitchell
Published on: 17:03 PST, Aug 5, 2016

Bill Maher hosted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, via satellite, on the Friday night, August 5, edition of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO.

While Maher has frequently been a supporter of the government email hacker extraordinaire, he took a sharp tone with Assange on the episode wondering why WikiLeaks was doing this to “the one person that stands between us and a Donald Trump presidency.”

Bill Maher is, or at least was, a Bernie Sanders supporter before Clinton clinched and accepted the nomination. Realizing that Sanders now has no chance of becoming the next President of the United States, he shifted his allegiance to Clinton along with Bernie.

Now Maher’s major objective is to stop a Trump win in November, though after this week, Trump appears to be way ahead of him on that front.

The conversation between Bill Maher and Julian Assange began with the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails showing there was, as Sanders had supposed, a concerted effort to undermine him on the campaign trail.

“It was definitely good fun,” Assange said of the release, before reminding Maher that they had done the same things to conservatives and neo-Nazi groups across the world. Assange celebrated that “we’ve had four people in the DNC resign, which shows a kind of instant accountability, though perhaps not proper political accountability for making sure that Bernie Sanders didn’t win.”

When Maher said he wasn’t sure if Assange’s assessment on that was true, the hacker doubled down.

“I know that it’s true,” he said, claiming the DNC communications director “instructed his staff to pump out, in an unattributable manner, statements and an article saying that Bernie Sanders supporters were engaged in acts of violence,” thus likening Sanders to the Trump campaign.

What seemed to annoy Bill Maher is that Clinton was the sole target of WikiLeaks and not the Trump campaign. He said that in Russia, it appeared WikiLeaks was “working with a bad actor to f*** with the one person who stands in the way of us being ruled by Donald Trump.”

PREVIOUS BILL MAHER COVERAGE FROM THE INQUISITR:

Bill Maher Shuts Down ‘Bernie Or Bust’ Supporters Once And For All

Bill Maher Blasts Bill Clinton, Loretta Lynch For Ill-Advised Private Meeting

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Bill Maher Slams Millennials Over False Socialism Views

This drew cheers, but Assange stayed the course reminding Bill Maher of WikiLeaks’ 10-year history of accuracy and that the leaks were not manufactured from other sources.

“The source is the Democratic Party,” Assange said. “I know you’ve defended atheists, and included in there is a plot to frame Bernie Sanders as being an atheist.”

With that, Bill Maher came back to why not hack Donald Trump’s tax returns?

“We’re working on it,” Assange said, but at the end of the day, he reminded Maher that the U.S. is now looking at “two very bad presidential candidates.”

Ultimately, the conversation ended on a cordial note as Bill Maher is a proponent of what WikiLeaks is doing; he’s just not too crazy about it when the end result could be Donald Trump, the man who once sued him for over a million dollars, in the White House.

But what do you think, readers?

Is this one of those things where Bill Maher and other Hillary Clinton supporters have to take the good with the bad, or is WikiLeaks unfairly targeting Democrats to throw the election into Trump’s favor? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Image via Sharon Graphics | Flickr Creative Commons | Resized and Cropped | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

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