Wikileaks boss appeals for ‘any’ information regarding Donald Trump

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has made a public appeal for “any” information relating to US President Donald Trump.

Speaking from the cupboard in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has for the past few years been hiding from trial on several well-substantiated rape charges, the Australian-born hacker asked for “anyone out there” to provide his organisation with “any” details relating to Trump’s “public life or private dealings”.

“We at Wikileaks would be very grateful if anyone could google Mr Trump’s name, do a screen shot of the results page and email it to us”, he said. Referring to Wikileaks’ “stainless” reputation for exposing corruption among public figures and its track-record of campaigning for transparency, he requested details such as Mr Trump’s place and date of birth, his middle name and information relating to any major controversies or scandals he may have been involved with in the past.

Mr Assange also specified that his organisation is “very interested” in allegations of Russian collusion in the recent US election (won by Mr Trump) and asked that anyone sympathetic to the aims of his organisation visit the New York Times or BBC websites, find articles containing the basic facts as they stand, print them out and send them to ‘Wikileaks, Utility Cupboard, Ecuadorian Embassy, London’.

He also urged supporters of Wikileaks to look beyond the “mainstream media” and visit sites such as Reddit and Twitter in order to track down any information relating to Mr Trump, particularly in relation to the sort of business activities he may have engaged in before becoming President and also what political program he campaigned on during the election.

Asked why, given that Wikileaks normally works by drawing on an extensive global network of secret informants, hackers and whistleblowers, he did not use other more surreptitious means to investigate Mr Trump and his alleged Russian contacts, Mr Assange paused and said that he “hadn’t thought of doing that” but that he “didn’t want to get in trouble with (at this point he appeared to adopt a comedy Russian accent) ‘you-know-who’. 

Mr Assange stressed that Wikileaks will continue to do “whatever it can” to expose misdeeds in public life, “regardless of political bias”. In response to questions as to why his organisation had not sought to investigate allegations of corruption against far-right French Presidential Candidate Marine Le Pen, and had instead endeavoured to diffuse disinformation against her centrist opponent, Mr Assange was nonplussed, explaining that he personally had been “away” for the last few weeks in another part of his utility cupboard, and that Wikileaks must have been “hacked, or something”. He appealed to anyone possessing or with access to any basic biographical information on Le Pen or any details regarding France (its geographical coordinates, the name of its capital city and any major landmarks generally associated with it) to send it marked for his personal attention at “the usual address”.

Mr Assange then excused himself, explaining that he had a “very important health-data related project” to complete for “a group of private clients”.