Trump backs Assange over US intelligence over Russian hacking claim

Donald Trump has sided with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange against the United States’ own intelligence agencies in casting doubt on claims by the FBI and CIA that Russia had interfered in the US election.

“Assange…said Russians did not give him the info!” Trump, who will take over as US President in 16 days, said in a tweet.

Assange has insisted that Russia was not the source for WikiLeaks’ mass leak of emails from the Democratic Party during Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The e-mails shone an embarrassing light on practices at the Clinton Foundation, relationships between top journalists and the Clinton campaign, and derogatory internal memos. It also revealed that Donna Brazile, the Democratic National Committee’s interim chair and a CNN contributor, had alerted the Clinton campaign to one of the questions ahead of her CNN debate with competitor Bernie Sanders.

Several US agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, have said that Russia had masterminded the hacks. Last week, outgoing President Barack Obama expelled Russian diplomats and closed Russian-controlled sites in the country as retaliation for the alleged hacking.

Assange, speaking from the Ecaudorian embassy in London, told Fox News on Tuesday night that Russia had not provided WikiLeaks with the emails.

“We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” he said.

He added that a 14-year-old boy could have carried out one of the hacks, on the email account of John Podesta, one of Clinton’s top aides.

Reports suggested that Podesta had as his password the word “password”. The New York Times reported last month that the hackers had also tried to hack the Republican National Convention, but were unable to do so.

Trump tweeted: “Somebody hacked the DNC but why did they not have ‘hacking defense’ like the RNC has and why have they not responded to the terrible things they did and said (like giving the questions to the debate to H). A total double standard! Media, as usual, gave them a pass.”