What is Barack Obama up to?
He’s fully embraced the conspiracy theory that Russian hackers influenced the 2016 election.
And WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange thinks he knows the reason.
In an interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, Assange contended that Obama’s goal is to delegitimize a Trump Presidency.
The Hill reported:
“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says there’s an “obvious” reason the Obama administration has focused on Russia’s alleged role in Democratic hacks leading up to Donald Trump‘s electoral win.
“They’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House,” Assange said during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity airing Tuesday night, according to a transcript of excerpts from the network.
“They are trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate president,” Assange said during the interview, which was conducted at the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been staying.
“Our publications had wide uptake by the American people, they’re all true,” Assange continued. “But that’s not the allegation that’s being presented by the Obama White House.”
So far, the Obama administration has not produced any evidence tying Russian hackers to WikiLeaks, or the hacks at the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
A report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI repeated the assertions that the Russians were behind the hacks, but offered no evidence to back up the claim.
Trump – for his part – has tried to move beyond Obama’s conspiracy theory.
The Boston Globe reported Trump briefly spoke with his press pool at his Mar-A-Lago estate and dismissed the claims while maintaining the U.S. needed to beef up cyber security:
“In a brief written statement, Trump’s first response to President Obama’s sweeping action against Russia, the president-elect reiterated his call for “our country to move on to bigger and better things.”
But he said that “in the interest of our country and its great people,” he would get the briefing “nevertheless.”
In otherwise opaque comments, Trump appeared to concede the need to make computers more secure.
“I think we ought to get on with our lives,” he said. “I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly.
“The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind, the security we need.”
Many critics agree with Assange that Obama is trying to weaken Trump so the Democrats can more easily defeat him when he runs for re-election.
Trump has alluded to this as well.
His calls to move beyond the desperate claims that Russian hackers cost Hillary Clinton the election – a conspiracy theory Clinton herself has pushed – has been interpreted as a slap in the face to the Democrats’ schemes to delegitimize his win.
