Sean Hannity Is Now a Big Julian Assange Fan

Sean Hannity used to believe that Julian Assange should be arrested for publishing classified U.S. military and diplomatic documents. These days, however, the documents that Assange is WikiLeaking are unflattering to Hillary Clinton—and, wouldn’t you know it, Sean Hannity now believes that Julian Assange should be a free man. On Tuesday night the WikiLeaks founder—who is wanted in Sweden for questioning in a sexual assault case but has been granted asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London—appeared on Hannity’s Fox News program. It was a real bro-out.

HANNITY: In other news, Julian Assange has said he has, quote, significant documents that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Here to join us, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. How are you, sir? Welcome to the program.

ASSANGE: Well as can be expected for being detained for six and a half years.

HANNITY: I understand—you know, part of me in the beginning was conflicted about you, and I’ll tell you why. I believe in privacy, I believe that people especially when it comes to private emails, personal emails, et cetera, I think people have a right to that privacy. On the other hand, you have done a lot of good in what you have exposed about how corrupt, dishonest, and phony our government is. Do you understand people when they talk about the privacy issue?

ASSANGE: I do. And we have exposed a lot of governments. Wikileaks has—we specialize in bringing the First Amendment to the world, and we were always very surprised one of our biggest battles would be trying to bring it to the United States under an Obama administration.

HANNITY: That’s interesting to say. Why do you say that’s a surprise to you?

ASSANGE: Well, because if you see the rhetoric from coming out of the Democrats is that they’re pro-civil liberties, and an important part of civil liberties is respect for the First Amendment and the rule of law, and that has broken down under the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton was part of that process. She has—the Obama administration has attempted to prosecute more journalists and journalistic sources under the same Espionage Act she was being investigated under in all previous presidencies combined.

HANNITY: Yeah.

ASSANGE Not just more than any one of them. More than all of them combined. So there’s, under Obama, an epidemic has developed of abusing national security laws to crack down on legitimate use of the First Amendment.

HANNITY: You said to PBS that you have a significant amount of information, the information itself is significant, pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You will be releasing it in several batches as you’re finishing it from a journalistic standpoint. How many batches do you think you’ll be releasing and how soon?

ASSANGE: Tricky question, Sean.

HANNITY: That’s actually a pretty simple one. That’s not tricky.

ASSANGE: The first batch is reasonably soon. We are quite confident about it now. We might put out some teasers as—I don’t want to promise anything because you have to see how the formatting goes. But we might put out some teasers as early as the next week or the week after.

HANNITY: Last question. It’s not really hard to hack into these even secure systems, is it? I’ve talked to some real smart computer friends of mine. They say it’s far more simple than anybody would ever know. Is that true?

ASSANGE: It is. I just want to say one thing. In the FBI report released Friday, I agree with your analysis. It is very strange that was released Friday afternoon on a Labor weekend. I do think it draws questions to what sort of game the FBI is trying to play. Hillary Clinton says she can’t remember what a (C) in brackets stands for. Everyone in positions of government and in WikiLeaks knows it stands for classified, confidential. And in fact, we have already released thousands of cables by Hillary Clinton [holds up document]—here she is, Clinton see, hat’s her signature. Clinton with a (C) in brackets right there.

HANNITY: Wow.

ASSANGE: Thousands where she, herself, has used a (C) in brackets and signed it off, and more than 22,000 times that she has received cables from others with this (C) in brackets. So it’s absolutely incredible for Clinton to lie. She is lying about not knowing what that is. But it’s a bit disturbing that James Comey goes along with that game.

HANNITY: Wow. Julian Assange, fascinating. I do hope you get free one day. I wish you the best. Thank you for being with us.

ASSANGE: Thank you, Sean.

Best buds! You can read more here about Hillary Clinton telling the FBI that she didn’t know what (C) meant—and more here about Assange’s recent, absurd speculation that a young Democratic National Committee staffer who died in July in what appeared to be a failed robbery was in fact murdered for nefarious political purposes.