Julian Assange Interview, Russian Connections, MSNBC “Black Propaganda,” and More Documents Coming

In a 28-minute interview this week with Afshin Rattansi on RT program Going Underground, Wikileaks editor Julian Assange indicated that hundreds of additional documents relating to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation are coming soon.

Julian Assange also denied Democratic charges that there was a Russian source for the DNC email leaks, suggesting that other leaks to other sources were implicated with weak Russian connections. Rather, he described Clinton Foundation connections to a Russian company and coordination between the Clinton campaign and MSNBC to create “black propaganda” against Bernie Sanders. Here is the interview and highlights below.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

Julian Assange explains that the “Russian” connection to leaks did not apply to the Wikileaks disclosures.

Everyone accepts that the emails that we have published, the twenty thousand DNC leak emails, are completely accurate. The content itself is unquestionable so you have to bring in some other actor… [There is] a series of Word documents and PDFs published by The Hill, by Gawker, by The Smoking Gun. This is a completely separate batch of documents compared to the 20,000 pristine emails that we had that we released. In this batch of documents released by these other organizations, there are claims that in the metadata there’s, someone’s done a document to PDF conversion, and the — in some cases, the documents, the language of the computer that was used for that conversion was Russian. That’s not the case for the material that we released.

Julian Assange describes Russian connections. Hillary Clinton has connections, Donald Trump apparently does not.

Hillary Clinton has done quite well strategically to try and draw connections between Trump and Russia because she has so many connections of her own. Now, my analysis of Trump and Russia is that there is no substantial connection. Why do I say that? Well, because Trump was trying to invest in Russia before Putin in the 1990’s, after Putin, in fact, nearly all the way up to the present moment — and he’s had no success. He did not manage to build hotels and so on in Russia. So that shows the, how insubstantial his contacts are.

There’s an extremely well documented pattern of, when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, those people — companies, governments — who wanted a decision by the Secretary of State in their favor, making large donations to the Clinton Foundation, or in some other cases, business deals with the people around Hillary Clinton.

One particular instance is the approval by Secretary Clinton of selling 20 percent of the U.S. uranium reprocessing rights to a Russian company to be exported to Russia. So at that time, a large donation was made by those Russian interests to the Clinton Foundation. In addition, Clinton’s campaign manager, [John] Podesta, was on the board of a company called Joule Unlimited. And Joule Unlimited held some of these rights and received a 35 million dollar investment from Russia… Russians were on the board also with Podesta…

Q: So the [kind?] of email revelations from Wikileaks reveal that Hillary Clinton is a Kremlin stooge.

I wouldn’t say Kremlin stooge. But there is a much deeper connection on record with Hillary Clinton and Russia then we are presently aware of with Donald Trump…

Q: The media of course is fascinated about whether the Kremlin is working with you — whether you work for the Kremlin basically.

Julian Assange defends credibility of Wikileaks documents over those “simply making claims.”

No. But, but, it’s very, I think it’s a genuine question you should, you should ask the sources of your information. The least however in the case of Wikileaks publications. Why do I say that? Well, the principle reason why you want to know the source of some statement is to understand whether it’s true or not. [???] big issue in the case of other media organizations who are simply making claims and not publishing original documents.

There are other questions to assess credibility which Julian Assange does not describe. For example, a partisan may provide perfectly good facts in such a one-sided way as to distort the big picture.

Julian Assange notes “black propaganda” examples of MSNBC claims.

I’ll give you an example. Very very interesting example. I’ve done some research on the [recent] Turkish coup… In the middle of the coup, NBC published that [Turkey president] Erdogan was on his way to Germany to seek asylum, and they say this was told to them by a U.S. military source. So what the — what the hell is going on there? Because that went all the way around the world and was used to further the chances of success of the coup within Turkey. Because if the president has fled, then he’s lost control…

Where MSNBC on its most influential morning program, Morning Joe, was defending Bernie Sanders. Then Debbie Wasserman Schultz called up the president of MSNBC. Amazingly, this is not reported in the U.S. media. It is reported in the U.S. media that they called up Chuck Todd who’s the host of Meet The Press. Something much more serious is not reported — that Debbie Wasserman Schultz herself personally called up the president of MSNBC to apply pressure in relation to positive coverage about Bernie Sanders on Morning Joe…

To my mind, what is the most serious from an evidentiary point of view? It is the communications director Luis Miranda making an instruction to his staff to pump out a black propaganda story against Bernie Sanders saying that his supporters were violent. And to put this out in a quote unattributable [sic] unquote manner.

Why do I say that is the most serious? Because it is an instruction given through the chain of command to his staff. It’s not a discussion. It’s not any one person calling up another person. And it is to depict Bernie Sanders supporters as violent… It is to demonize a Democrat in the eyes of the public … through covert means…

Q: Did Hillary Clinton use Libya as a conduit to sell arms to ISIS-Daesh in Syria?

The U.S. government at the time that Hillary Clinton was in charge of foreign policy did use Libya as a conduit to get arms to jihadists in Syria. That’s well established… even published in The New York Times…