WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is out to settle a score with Hillary Clinton according to a former colleague of his.
Buzzfeed News special correspondent James Ball, who worked for Assange for three months in 2011, wrote on Sunday that Assange dislikes "taking advice, anyone else having a power base, and being challenged – especially by women" and that anti-Clinton leaks are getting bigger play because of comments she made in 2010 condemning the release of classified documents by the organization.
"Assange would not, in my view, ever knowingly be a willing tool of the Russian state: if Putin came and gave him a set of orders, they’d be ignored," wrote Ball. "But if an anonymous or pseudonymous group comes offering anti-Clinton leaks, they’d have found a host happy not to ask too many awkward questions: he's set up almost perfectly to post them, and push for them to have the biggest impact they can."
Clinton said in 2010 that the release of documents puts "people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems," adding that the exposure of those confidential communications was an attack on the international community.
In March of this year and, during the Justice Department's investigation into Clinton's handling of classified information, WikiLeaks published 30,322 emails sent to and from Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state, making all documents easily available in a searchable format. FBI Director James Comey eventually recommended no criminal charges for Clinton but called her "extremely careless" and questioned her judgment in her handling of the information.
WikiLeaks on Oct. 22 also released additional e-mails from the account of Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta.
Ball wrote that the approach by Assange, who is currently inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, "has taken WikiLeaks from the most powerful and connected force of a new journalistic era to a back-bedroom operation run at the tolerance (or otherwise) of Ecuador's government. This is his shot at reclaiming the world stage, and settling a score with Hillary Clinton as he does so."
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