'Assange trying to curry favour with Donald Trump's inner circle,' suggests journalist on WikiLeaks messages
This week, The Atlantic magazine published correspondence between WikiLeaks and Donald Trump Jr. from before and after last year's presidential election.
Trump Jr. released the series of private Twitter exchanges soon after The Atlantic's report.
In a series of direct messages, someone at the controversial leaked-document website suggested to Trump Jr. that his father contest the election results if he didn't win. .
Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill has been reporting over the years on documents released by WikiLeaks.
"Hillary Clinton, when she was secretary of state, was like public enemy number one for WikiLeaks and was pursuing Julian Assange," Scahill explains.
"Part of what I think we're seeing is Assange trying to curry favour with Donald Trump's inner circle, maybe to try to harm Hillary Clinton. It was part of the agenda. But I think in a bigger picture, Assange and WikiLeaks were primarily concerned with their own survival."
Scahill tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti what he found most disturbing in the direct messages published was Julian Assange suggesting to Trump Jr. that if his father lost the election, he "should blast the news media for its role in election rigging and in that way would keep alive his ideas."
"The Trump campaign was waged on a kind of overtly fascist, authoritarian, racist agenda. WikiLeaks is supposed to be this transparency organization that's about justice. It's like, 'What are you doing hopping into bed with these people?'"
What's missing in these direct messages, Scahill points out is anything about collusion with Russia.
"Yet everyone's off to the races with that narrative in the United States. In order to say it's about Russia collusion, you have to then believe something that there actually is no documented proof for, and that is that Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin is somehow running Julian Assange, " he explains.
"Quite frankly, knowing Julian Assange and covering WikiLeaks for all these years, I don't think he is being directed by anyone except Julian Assange."
Listen to the full conversation above.
This segment was produced by The Current's John Chipman and Pacinthe Mattar.