Julian Assange New Interview: Podesta Email Leaks are Not From Russia and Much More

A few days ago, Julian Assange head of WikiLeaks sat down with John Pilger for an interview. After a few days of teasers, the interview is being played on Russia Today today. Russia Today is a government sponsored television station available on cable services and online.

Julian Assange says claims that Russia was behind the John Podesta emails are “false.” He talks about Barack Obama and how CitiBank helped choose his cabinet. He describes intervention in Libya as Hillary’s war. Julian Assange also tells us what he finds to be the most important release from the Podesta emails. (Interview highlights below)

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

Here are direct quoted highlights from the interview. See an entire transcript here.

  • Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.
  • Hillary stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false. We can say that the Russian government is not the source.
  • WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years. In that ten years we published ten million documents — several thousand individual publications several thousand different sources and we have never got it wrong.
  • There’s an early 2014 email … to her campaign manager John Podesta. That email — it states that ISIL, ISIS is funded Saudi Arabia and Qatar — the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar [not some rogue princes]. Now this is actually I think — this is the most significant email in the whole collection.
  • Under Hillary Clinton … the largest ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia, more than 80 billion dollars.
  • Hillary Clinton represents a whole network of people … She’s a centralizing cog… [with] big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis and so on … the DC consensus.
  • One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed. And half of the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from CitiBank which is quite amazing.
  • Libya more than anyone else’s war was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the one who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails.
  • Trump would not be permitted to win [the White House] … Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, et cetera [are] all united behind Hillary Clinton — and the media as well.
  • We have published over 800,000 documents [on] Russia. Most of those are critical.
  • Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, deplorable and irredeemable … There’s a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with that — a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting in any way Trump, including by criticizing Clinton.

julian-assange-interview-podestaJulian Assange talks at length about his confinement in the Ecuadorian Embassy. He notes that he was cleared of the original rape charges that pushed him into the embassy. Now, people are “pretending” that he has been charged with a crime.

Julian Assange refuses to directly answer whether he prefers Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.