UPDATED: After canceling a planned announcement in London, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is now planning to appear via video link Tuesday morning at Wikileak’s tenth anniversary celebration in Berlin. He’s a last-minute addition to the roster of festivities taking place this week in Germany.
Sources close to the event tell Heat Street that Assange may be planning to release some new information his organization has obtained about the U.S. Democratic Party. But Heat Street has yet to receive independent confirmation that Assange plans to dump information specifically on Hillary Clinton.
The news that Assange plans to appear (remotely) in Berlin comes after Wikileaks abruptly canceled a much-anticipated announcement in London that was to be made from the balcony of London’s
Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has sought sanctuary for years. The cancelation was first reported by NBC News. According to NBC’s Jesse Rodriguez, the announcement was canceled due to “security concerns”.
There had been widespread anticipating that Tuesday’s announcement might have been Assange’s long-promised document dump on Hillary Clinton.
Assange appeared on Fox News last month, repeating his assertion that Wikileaks has damaging documents on Clinton and suggested WikiLeaks may soon release “teasers”. More than three weeks later, that release has yet to take place.
Clinton’s more fervent opponents have hoped for weeks that the promised document dump would be an “October surprise” – damaging and revelatory emails or the like — and inflict a mortal wound on her campaign. There’s no evidence however that such damaging information even exists.
It was only this summer that Assange’s group leaked thousands of embarrassing emails from the Democratic National Committee which showed their disdain for Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The uproar over the disclosures forced DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to resign in disgrace on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.
The political provocateur and bomb-thrower Roger Stone, a fervent Donald Trump supporter, predicted Sunday morning that Wikileaks’ revelations would doom Clinton’s campaign.
It’s unclear if Stone was aware that Wikileaks, according to NBC News, has canceled their Tuesday announcement.
Assange and his supporters have long claimed that his personal safety is at risk due to the danger he (supposedly) represents to Clinton’s presidential ambitions. In August, liberal commentator Bob Beckel suggested in a TV appearance that Assange be murdered, proclaiming that someone should “shoot the son of a bitch!”
Assange himself has also recently hinted publicly that low-level DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered this summer in Washington DC, had been the source for Wikileaks’ document dump on the DNC. And that Rich’s alleged role in the leaks was linked to his death.
There has been no evidence linking Rich to the leak and no evidence that his murder was anything more than a botched robbery.
Nonetheless, the Wikileaks’ cancellation of Tuesday’s announcement in London — and the scheduling of the Tuesday video link in Berlin — has anti-Clinton conspiracy theorists working up a frantic stew of speculation.
— Challenger (@bakedinapie) September 27, 2016http://heatst.com/politics/october-surprise-thwarted-wikileaks-cancels-highly-anticipated-tuesday-announcement-due-to-security-concerns/