An announcement was made by WikiLeaks at a press conference on Monday morning. The press conference was themed, “respond to the CIA report on the US election”. The whistle blowing site asked its readers to tweet questions using the #AskWL hashtag on Twitter. The conference was streamed live from the Ecaudorian embassy in London, on Periscope via an audio feed.
The founder of WikiLeaks slammed the recent report by the CIA as a press release, adding that only five pages of the report had substantial content that’s worth considering. Assange said that the real question that ought to be addressed is whether the Russians hacked the Democratic Party with the intention of favoring the President-elect Donald Trump. Adding that despite the lack of evidence in the report issued and claims that Russia hackers were involved, the crucial question is what was the intention of the Russian attacks and were they connected to WikiLeaks. He also emphasized that WikiLeaks did not get the DNC and Podesta emails from state actors.
Assange also accused the CIA report of deliberately obscuring the timeline of the email leak as it regards to the timeframe in which the President-elect Donald Trump became serious about running for presidency. The WikiLeaks founder also noted that DNI director JAMES Clapper has confirmed that the intelligence community does not know when the whistle blowing site obtained the emails.
Assange also contended with the insinuation that WikiLeaks engaged in direct hacking and the possibility of information which altered public opinion. Assange insisted that Donna Brazile and other DNC and Hillary campaign officials lied to the public by stating that the emails were fake as he cited the track record that WikiLeaks has maintained for ten years.
The conference also had a segment where Assange answered questions on twitter. Some of the questions that Assange was asked include: “On a scale of one to ten, how fabricated was the CIA report?” The WikiLeaks founder emphasized that it was an interesting question since the report issued by the CIA had very little information and most of its content was speculative.
“Your whole premise has been that you don’t know sources and therefore can’t endanger them. Now you say you don’t know your source.” Assange answered the question by clearly stating that such a statement was never made adding that the source was not a state party. Adding that WikiLeaks treats their source with care and that will remain to be the case since it maintains the track record. “Is Wikileaks sure that the go-between didn’t get the information from the Russians or a private hacking group on order from the Russians?” Assange stated that “we can’t play 20 questions with sources, for obvious reasons.”
