Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who is now working with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after being leaked by whistleblowers, and not actually hacked by Russia.
“Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,” Murray told Dailymail.com. “The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.”
Murray’s version contradicts in its entirety that of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election was developed by U.S. intelligence.
He explained that he was handed a package in a wooded area near American University by a “disgusted” Democratic whistleblower amidst the White House trying to put the blame on Russian hackers for tampering with the presidential election.
WikiLeaks published thousands of emails that were stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that caused a media frenzy of the Democractic presidential nominee leading up to the final weeks of the campaign. Murray, a controversial figure who was stripped of his British ambassador title due to allegations of misconduct, said the leakers were driven by “disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.”
U.S. intelligence officials have urged their confidence that Russians passed the documents to WikiLeaks in order to swing the election in Donald Trump’s favour, but Murray claims that the DNC and Podesta emails WikiLeaks published were given to them by Americans who had authorized access to the information, and that the person he met with was not the original person but was an intermediary as to keep the person who originally obtained the information safe.
“I don’t understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn’t true,” Murray said. “Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.”
It was Murray’s vocal criticism of human rights abuses occurring in Uzbekistan that outcasted him from the U.K. Foreign Office. He now calls himself a “close associate” of Julian Assange, having spoken out to support Assange, who faces rape allegations and is restricted to the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange has long been acknowledging that WikiLeaks did not receive the emails at hand from Russian sources. “The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,” Assange said. “Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”
The Obama administration has been working to reveal Russia’s potential role in influencing the presidential election. Yet amid a general consensus on Capitol Hill that Russia hacked U.S. political groups and officials, there are some holdouts from the Republican side who do not believe the motive is clear enough to claim it was an attempt to swing the election, or just to gather intelligence.
“Now whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that’s the subject of investigation,” said Senator John McCain. “But facts are stubborn things, they did hack into this campaign.”
via IFTTT