If Obama Lying About Russian Hack To Damage Trump Relations With Putin?

WikiLeaks founder: Obama trying to ‘delegitimize’ Trump presidency with Russian hack claims

Chris Enloe Jan 3, 2017 9:18 am

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange participates in a news conference via videolink in October 2016. (AP/Markus Schreiber)

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange believes there’s a very “obvious” reason President Barack Obama and Democrats have been focusing their post-election efforts on trying to legitimize the narrative that the Russian government interfered in the election to help President-elect Donald Trump win.

Obama is using Russia to “delegitimize” Trump, Assange told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview set to air Tuesday night.

“They’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House,” Assange said, according to The Hill. “They are trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate president.”

Assange spoke to Hannity from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been staying for the last several years after he requested political asylum there in order to avoid prosecution by the U.S. government.

Later in the interview, Assange also contended that Obama hasn’t been honest with Americans about Russia’s impact on the election.

Obama and Democrats — with the support of the U.S. intelligence community — have said that Russia did, indeed, play a role in the election by hacking into the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign’s chairman, John Podesta, and then leaking the emails to WikiLeaks.

Obama has gone so far as to levee sanctions against Russia over the allegations in addition to expelling more than two dozen Russian diplomats from the U.S.

But Assange still says that Russia was not their source of information, despite Obama’s insistence that it was.

“Our source is not a state party,” Assange told Hannity, according to the Washington Examiner. “But if we look at our most recent statement from the U.S. government, which is on the 29 of December, OK, we had five different branches of government, Treasury, DHS, FBI, White House presenting their accusations to underpin Obama’s throwing out 29 Russian diplomats.”

“What was missing from all of those statements? The word WikiLeaks,” he added. “It’s very strange.”