Julian Assange has been calling the Ecuadorian embassy in London home for quite some time now, but that doesn’t mean he can’t dish out the body blows to political hopefuls across the pond in the U.S.

Case in point are the damning emails WikiLeaks released to the public in the days before the Democratic National Convention kicked off – just the 20 000 emails or so, contained in which was a damning indictment on the behaviour of many within the party.

Chief target was the now resigned Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the emails showing how the party favoured Hillary over Bernie and actively worked to discredit and defeat the latter.

Assange conducted an interview with the site DemocracyNow, and we’ll pull a few juicy morsels from what he had to say below:

Often it’s the case that we have to do a lot of exploration and marketing of the material we publish ourselves to get a big political impact for it. But in this case, we knew, because of the pending DNC, because of the degree of interest in the U.S. election, we didn’t need to establish partnerships with The New York Times or The Washington Post…

…we took the data set, analyzed [sic] it, verified it, made it in a presentable, searchable form, presented it for all journalists and the public to mine. And that’s exactly what has happened.

I think the most significant [emails] haven’t been reported on…And this is the spreadsheets that we released covering the financial affairs of the DNC. Those are very rich documents. There’s one spreadsheet called “Spreadsheet of All Things,” and it includes all the major U.S.—all the major DNC donors, where the donations were brought in, who they are, identifiers, the total amounts they’ve donated, how much at a noted or particular event, whether that event was being pushed by the president or by someone else.

That effectively maps out the influence structure in the United States for the Democratic Party, but more broadly, because the—with few exceptions, billionaires in the United States make sure they donate to both parties. That’s going to provide a scaffold for future investigative journalism about influence within the United States, in general.

Follow the money trail and you often find the root of the problem, although those billionaires donating to both parties are ensuring they end up having scratched the right back.

Back to Julian:

In relation to sourcing, I can say some things. A, we never reveal our sources, obviously. That’s what we pride ourselves on. And we won’t in this case, either. But no one knows who our source is. It’s simply speculation. It’s, I think, interesting and acceptable to speculate who our sources are. But if we’re talking about the DNC, there’s lots of consultants that have access, lots of programmers. And the DNC has been hacked dozens and dozens of times.

You would think Hillary would have pleaded with the DNC to ramp up their email security, given that she has already walked that plank once, but I guess where there’s a will there’s a way.

[source:democracynow]