Julian Assange kept his supporters waiting for more than two hours early Tuesday morning, only to inform them that he was not releasing any major scoops about Hillary Clinton at his Berlin press conference.
Assange appeared via satellite from his perch at London’s Ecuadorian embassy at 5:02 AM Eastern Time wearing a black “truth” T-shirt, two hours after Wikileaks’ tenth anniversary press conference convened in Berlin.
“I’ve seen the Internet and there’s enormous expectation in the United States,” Assange said. “Some of that expectation is partly answered but you have to understand that if we’re going to make a major publication in relation to the United States at a particular hour, we don’t do it at 3 AM.”
“We have a great many upcoming publications,” Assange promised, noting that “Our sources have suffered terrible consequences in the United States.” Assange has implied that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source.
Assange said that Wikileaks will be publishing once a week for the next ten weeks with a special interest in the “U.S. election” and topics like war, surveillance, and Google.
“There’s been a lot of misquoting of me,” Assange said when asked if his upcoming publications would destroy Hillary Clinton.
“In this particular case, the misquoting has to do with, we want to harm Hillary Clinton, or I want to harm Hillary Clinton.” Assange said that some in the United States want to “personalize” his upcoming publications.
Expectant watchers filled the comments on Right Side Broadcasting’s Youtube livestream of the event with taunts of “Boring,” “ZZZZZZ,” and “Assange is a no show.” One commenter compared the event to Geraldo Rivera’s ill-fated entry into Al Capone’s secret vault, where Rivera found nothing interesting inside.
The press conference convened at 4:06 AM Eastern Time in Berlin from a dimly lit auditorium with a rudimentary projection screen.
A woman representing Wikileaks introduced a video montage commemorating the organization’s biggest hits over its ten-year run, including its publication of documents and videos pertaining to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — some of which were leaked to the group by Bradley Manning — and the operating procedures at Guantanamo Bay prison. The woman extensively recapped some of Wikileaks’ most divisive cases, claiming that the group has endured dDos cyber attacks and “propaganda attacks” from enemy forces.
The woman, referencing the Democratic National Committee email leak that complicated the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, said that Wikileaks is now getting hit with another major propaganda attack. The woman outright denied that anyone at Wikileaks is a “Russian spy,” citing thousands of documents that Wikileaks has published “exposing” the regime of Bashar al Assad, a Russian ally.
“For us, these kinds of attacks are quite interesting,” she said. “The lesson we’ve learned through these propaganda attacks is just to keep publishing … And so we will keep publishing.”
A small panel ensued, with Wikileaks officials talking about their biggest cases.
Wikileaks then showed a video collecting Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and C-SPAN segments in which U.S. politicos, mostly Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove, called for Assange’s arrest and prosecution. One of Assange’s attorneys spoke about Assange’s “indefinite detention” at the Ecuadorian embassy. The lawyer made reference to the “smear campaign caused by the DNC leaks” and to Hillary Clinton’s desire, stated in a private meeting, to drone Assange.
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