by Amna El Tawil
Founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said it was Hillary Clinton’s own words that destroyed her efforts to win the election for the 45th President of the United States, not the decision of WikiLeaks to publish them. Hillary Clinton’s supporters blamed WikiLeaks, as well as Russia, Trump, FBI, and many other people and events for her loss. However, instead of pointing fingers at other people and blaming them for her major defeat in November, they should take a few moments to realize that her actions caused her downfall.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, Assange was asked about the accusations that he helped to elect President-elect Donald Trump by publishing documents on Hillary Clinton and Democrats. He said: “What is the allegation here exactly? We published what the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, and Hillary Clinton herself were saying about their own campaign, which the American people read and were very interested to read, and assessed the elements and characters, and then they made a decision. That decision was based on Hillary Clinton’s own words, her campaign manager’s own words. That’s democracy“.
Julian Assange also responded to claims that decision to publish confidential documents during the time when Clinton was “vulnerable” saying: “We have been publishing about Hillary Clinton for many years, because of her position as Secretary of State. We have been publishing her cables since 2010 and her emails also. We are domain experts on Clinton and her post-2008 role in government. This is why it is natural for sources who have information on Hillary Clinton to come to us. They know we will understand its significance“.
He also confessed he has mixed feelings about Donald Trump’s presidency as well: “Hillary Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilizing the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better.”
Assange on the US election: “Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed.” t.co/ZzwL0Bq02a
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 23, 2016