The GOP Has Gained an Unexpected Ally

During a recent interview with Robert Peston of the United Kingdom’s ITV network, Julian Assange of Wikileaks became an unlikely—and very likely incidental—ally of the Republican Party in the 2016 election.

He was briefly asked during the interview about his “interest” in the U.S. presidential race and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a “home-brew” email server. His response is likely to give her presidential campaign even more fires to put out in the coming weeks.

“Taking interest is probably putting it mildly. We have published 32,000 [emails],” he said. “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great. Wikileaks has a very big year ahead. We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton, which are pending publication.”

Asked by the host directly about the current FBI investigation into Clinton’s private email use, Assange said he doubted there would be an actual indictment, although he said Wikileaks has “accumulated a lot of material” that could lead to one. But, he said Attorney General Loretta Lynch will not indict the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting.

“But the FBI can push for concessions from the new Clinton government in exchange for its lack of indictment,” he said. “There’s very strong material, both in the emails and in relation to the Clinton Foundation.

“For example, we’ve published an email in which Hillary Clinton is instructing her staff to remove the ‘Classified’ header off a classified document and send it by a non-classified fax. So that just requires one more thing, showing that the document was sent, but she instructed her staff to violate those classification procedures in the United States.”

Assange tried to dispel the notion he was working on behalf of Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting Donald Trump, who directly benefits from the Wikileaks exposure. He said Trump is “unpredictable” in terms of what he would do in office, although the Republican Party in general is much more predictable.

“From my personal perspective—well, the emails we’ve published show Hillary Clinton is receiving constant updates about my personal situation,” he said. “She has pushed for the prosecution of Wikileaks, which is still in train. So, we do see her as a bit of a problem for freedom of the press more generally.”

But Assange didn’t stop there. Before getting cut off for “lack of time,” he unloaded on Clinton’s record with relation to war, particularly her involvement in Libya and the overthrow of the Islamic dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

“In the emails we’ve revealed about her involvement in Libya—and statements by Pentagon generals—show that Hillary was overriding the Pentagon’s reluctance to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi,” he said. “They predicted the post-war outcome would be something like it is, which is ISIS taking over the country.

“It was Hillary who was the leading champion in office to do that. She has a long history of being a liberal warhawk. We presume she’s going to proceed in that same manner.”