WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cancelled a planned appearance to mark the 10th anniversary of his organization from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London over security fears on Monday.
He had been planning to give a speech – amid claims he was about to release damaging information about Clinton which some claimed could be an ‘October Surprise’ which would swing the presidential election.
However, Assange, who is wanted by Swedish authorities for questioning in connection with an alleged rape, will make an announcement via video link to an event in Berlin on Tuesday morning.
In a tweet on Monday afternoon, WikiLeaks said Assange’s speech in London was moved to Berlin due to ‘specific information’ but did not elaborate further. Donald Trump’s former right-hand man Roger Stone claimed the new WikiLeaks revelations would destroy Clinton’s campaign.
The speech that got Andrew Breitbart killed:
Be aware, Julian Assange, and remember what happened when Andrew Breitbart had an ‘October Surprise’. He never lived to see it released. Back in 2012, Breitbart said he “had videos” that would change the course of the Obama election. Less than 24 hours later, he was dead of a “heart attack”. And in an AMAZING coincidence, the coroner who performed the autopsy on Andrew died before the results could be released. Mr. Assange, if you are not dead by this time tomorrow it will be a miracle.
In August this year, Assange told Fox News that he was holding information on Clinton which yielded ‘some quite unexpected angles, that are quite interesting, some even entertaining’. He said he would release the information before the November 8 election.
Assange claimed the information could alter the election result, adding: ‘I think it’s significant. It depends on how it catches fire in the public and in the media.’ Meanwhile, a new report claims that Clinton once proposed a military drone strike to take out Assange in a bid to silence WikiLeaks.
Hillary Clinton has called for the assasination of Julian Assange:
Clinton discussed the possible assassination while she was Secretary of State in a meeting with her staff in 2010 about how to prevent a WikiLeaks document dump dubbed ‘CableGate,’ TruePundit reports.
At the time, Assange had been declaring his intention to release 250,000 secret cables – revealing a huge amount of damning communications between State Department officials and its foreign allies between 1966 and 2010.
‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’ Clinton asked during the meeting on November 23, 2010, the website reports citing State Department sources.
The sources said that her controversial query drew laughter in the room, but that it quickly died down when Clinton continued to speak in a ‘terse’ manner. She allegedly called Assange a soft target as he was walking around freely at the time and not fearful of any reprisals.
Hillary Clinton on Assange “Can’t we just drone this guy” — report https://t.co/S7tPrl2QCZ pic.twitter.com/qy2EQBa48y
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 3, 2016
Clinton and the Obama administration feared the content of the cables would damage US intelligence gathering operations as well as compromise private communication and intelligence shared with foreign governments.
In 2010, Assange had already released records that divulged secret US documents about the war in Afghanistan in July and about the war in Iraq in October.
After Clinton allegedly proposed a drone strike, another solution was reportedly brought up to solve the WikiLeaks problem: place a bounty for Assange’s capture and extradition to the United States. Figures discussed were in the area of $10million, according to TruePundit.
Democrat Bob Beckel also called for the assasination of Julian Assange:
Democrat strategist Bob Beckel, now at CNN, called for Julian Assange to be assassinated after Clinton cable leak pic.twitter.com/9L2ixl24Er
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 3, 2016
And following that meeting, one of Clinton’s top aides – Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department’s director of policy planning – wrote an email to Clinton, Clinton’s aides Huma Abedin and Jacob Sullivan as well as Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills with the subject line ‘an SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re Wikileaks.’
This year, WikiLeaks has already released information stolen by unknown hackers from the Democratic leadership in advance of the party’s convention.
The 20,000 leaked emails showed how party officials had tried to undermine Clinton’s rival Bernie Sanders. The release of the emails forced the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Assange said: ‘In the case of the DNC leaks for example, we pushed as fast as we could to try and get it in before the Democratic Nomination Conference, because obviously people had a right to understand who it is that they’re nominating.
‘The same is true here for the US electoral process.’ Tuesday’s anniversary party in Berlin will commemorate the 2006 registration of the domain name wikileaks.org.
WikiLeaks launched in January 2007, with Assange saying it would use encryption and a censorship-proof website to protect sources and publicise secret information. The site has since published more than 10 million leaked documents.
It first caught the world’s attention when it released manuals for prison guards at Guantanamo Bay.
But it really hit its stride in 2010, unveiling logs of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and a video showing a US helicopter crew mowing down a group of unarmed civilians – including two journalists – in Baghdad.
That same year, it also published a cache of diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world, deeply embarrassing Washington. In an interview with Der Spiegel over the weekend, Assange said: ‘The most important single collection of material we have published is the US diplomatic cable series.’
But 2010 also saw grave blows to the organization. Assange was accused of having sex with a woman while she was asleep after the two met at a Stockholm conference. The white-haired WikiLeaks founder took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador, London – which granted him political asylum in 2012 after he lost a legal battle to block his extradition to Sweden.
The 45-year-old has always maintained the allegations are false and has refused to travel to Stockholm for questioning due to concerns that Sweden will hand him over to the US to stand trial for espionage.
WikiLeaks has been accused of allowing foreign powers to influence November’s presidential election by publishing information which may have been gathered by Russian hackers.
He said: ‘We’re not going to start censoring our publications because there is a US election. Our role is to publish. We believe in what we’re doing. The attacks only make us stronger.’ source
