Assange Masterminded Hilary Clinton Leaks in 2016: CNN

CNN released a new report on Monday that alleged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange masterminded the 2016 Hilary Clinton leaks.

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The documents are said to have originated from security companies conducting surveillance on Assange on behalf of Ecuadorian officials. The cited documents were not published by CNN.

According to CNN, the WikiLeaks founder sought asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to escape rape charges in Sweden. The report said Assange enjoyed close coordination with Ecuadorean senior official, including the former foreign minister Ricardo Patino.

In the CNN report, Assange allegedly used his relationships with the Ecuadorean government to force embassy staff to install a better internet infrastructure and allow numerous non-diplomatic visits to grant his WikiLeaks colleagues immunity from searches.

The report alleges that Assange, despite his powers, occasionally conducted meetings in women’s bathrooms, in order to escape surveillance.

According to documents CNN claims to have in its possession, in June 2016, the Ecuadorian embassy in London turned into a beehive of operations against Clinton, the Democratic candidate, as the WikiLeaks founder had some 75 visits, including those with Russian nationals, who, of course, had “Kremlin ties,” according to the US news outlet.

One visitor is named “Yana Maximova”, and no other information on her is provided. Another is Nikolai Bogachikhin, RT’s London division head. In 2012, Julian Assange hosted a TV show on RT.

At the time, WikiLeaks allegedly established contact with “online personas” that US Special Counsel Robert Mueller believes are Russian hackers on the Military Intelligence Directorate payroll. Following the alleged contact, Assange demanded that the embassy beef up his Internet connection, CNN says.

The surveillance footage, which CNN says was provided by security companies, show a man wearing a balaclava, a large backpack and shades enter the embassy on July 18, handing - presumably - a flash drive to an embassy guard. On the same day, WikiLeaks allegedly informed the purported Russian hackers that they had received information and were preparing to release it soon. The visit caused security companies to raise red flags, but the guard kept his job, the report says. The actual footage is not included in the report.

“It's not clear if these incidents are related, and the contents of the package delivered to the embassy are unknown,” the CNN report says.

According to CNN, data released by WikiLeaks turned the Democratic Party into a “chaotic mess,” as thousands of Clinton emails revealed how the Democratic National Committee conspired to undermine Bernie Sanders in favor of Clinton. Later leaks of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta also revealed potentially embarrassing details on the Democratic nominee, including transcripts of her closed-door Wall Street speeches, which are believed by some to have buried her chances of winning.

The CNN report says that shortly after the publication of the Clinton emails, U.S. officials rolled out an ultimatum to Ecuador demanding that the nation cut Assange’s ability to influence the elections. In October 2016, Assange was subsequently cut off from the Web and from his phone. On October 18, Assange overrode a visit ban issued by then-Ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz, resulting in two WikiLeaks staffers who had been granted with search immunity, to remove a box containing approximately 100 hard drives from the embassy in the middle of the night. This late-night visit also made security companies raise alarms to Ecuador, the CNN report says.

According to CNN, US intelligence agencies “have said from the very beginning” that WikiLeaks received the stolen emails from the Russian government.

“But the suspects are all living safely in Russia, so the U.S. will likely never publicly produce a smoking gun or prove in court that Russia worked with WikiLeaks,” the report added.