Leaked conversations from a private WikiLeaks chat group reportedly reveal founder Julian Assange as favoring a Republican Party candidate in the last US presidential election.
Rumors have been swirling for some time that the whistleblowing site in some way colluded with Russia over the leaking of hacked Democratic Party emails during the race for the White House.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is also investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, which is said by the CIA, NSA and others to have leaked the damaging emails under the “Guccifer 2.0” moniker.
Hillary Clinton has described the efforts of “Russian WikiLeaks” as contributing to her election loss.
The leaked transcripts from the direct message group chat would seem to support her suspicions.
“We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” Assange is reported to have written. “[Clinton]’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.”
The private group chat with several WikiLeaks supporters was leaked to The Intercept by the person who originally set it up in 2015; someone who goes by the pseudonym 'Hazelpress'.
That person is said to have decided to go public after reports were published claiming that Donald Trump Jr had secretly contacted the site ahead of the election, during which correspondence he was advised to tell his father to reject the results as rigged if he lost and to ask if he could get Assange an Australian ambassadorship.
WikiLeaks claims to be a neutral transparency organization.
The leaked transcripts also reveal an underlying current of misogyny and anti-Semitism.
There's no direct evidence that Assange penned the WikiLeaks entries in the chat log, although as founder he’s widely believed to be in control of the site’s Twitter feed.
He’s currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he’s been hiding from the police since 2012.