With or without WikiLeaks, Americans do not trust Hillary Clinton, and that's a great reason why she suffered a devastating loss in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
That sums up the sentiments of incoming White House counselor and former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway as she reiterated that they did not really need WikiLeaks to convince the American public that " they did not like Hillary, they did not trust her and that they did not find her honest".
Conway is far from exaggerating as the issues about Hillary were already out there during the campaign- controversies and nagging questions that haunted her, which she herself has created in the first place. Issues such as her using a private email server to send and receive sensitive classified information crucial to national defense which even became the subject of FBI and DOJ investigations, conflict of interest with her family-run Clinton Foundation and her previous post as Secretary of State that has resulted to an official probe, receiving donations from foreign sources with questionable reputations like dictators and human rights violators, failures on foreign policy as Secretary of State, lying about Benghazi, speeches for elite businessmen that paid her exorbitant rates where she admitted to having dual and contrasting public and private positions on burning issues, bullying and oppressing women her husband Bill had affairs with, among so many other red flags about Hillary. All these would still be discussed and logically exploited during the campaign because most of these issues were already on record, anyway. At most, WikiLeaks merely added more validation to what is already confirmed in people's minds: that Hillary could not be trusted. Besides, Hillary would have still faced the same inescapable issues even if her opponent did not turn out to be the firebrand Donald Trump.
It was also not the fault of WikiLeaks that Hillary just did not have the charm and positive energy and vibrance to inspire voters as people refused to flock to her rallies in contrast to the massive crowds that Trump's rallies attracted. WikiLeaks can also not be blamed if Hillary failed to rally enthusiasm to her campaign from her own suposedly already secured following- the Democrats- especially millennials and minorities, two forces that came out strong before for President Barack Obama.
Conway also pointed out that assuming there were indeed efforts by Russia to interfere in the election, in the end, they failed to to carry out this supposed objective.
WikiLeaks published during the campaign hacked emails of Hillary's campaign chairman John Podesta and from the Democratic National Committee. The whistle-blower site founder Julian Assange has repeatedly denied that Russia was their source for the hacked emails.
The U.S. intelligence community published a report that concluded Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered to influence the election and help Trump win, but curiously the report did not assess the impact of Russia's supposed actions on the election outcome.
