Julian Assange Would Be No Safer Under a Clinton Administration, Cannes Audience Hears

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange peers outside before speaking on the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in February. (Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP)

Journalist, hacker and WikiLeaks representative Jacob Appelbaum said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would find life no easier under a Hillary Clinton administration.

The Guardian reports:

Speaking at a Q&A after the Cannes film festival premiere of Risk, Laura Poitras’s documentary about the WikiLeaks activist, Appelbaum said Clinton’s representatives had made it clear that, thanks to Cablegate – the 2010 leak of more than 250,000 classified US State Department messages by WikiLeaks (published by media partners including the Guardian) – Clinton’s office was in no mood to rethink their strategy when it came to Assange.

“I had a meeting with someone from then secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s office some time after the Cablegate,” Appelbaum said. “He let me know that Clinton did not like Julian or myself. I think that if Hillary Clinton were to run for president, she would continue to assert her political will and bitterness about the exposure of diplomatic cables that documented crimes.” …

“Julian is a political prisoner who has been demonised in the press,” said Appelbaum to applause. “There’s a real split between journalists who are working to reveal information and journalists who are propagandists. And in the United States most of the journalists are propagandists. They’re stenographers for the state.”

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—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.