Assange warns of forthcoming ‘significant’ Hillary leaks

WASHINGTON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has warned that his anti-secrecy campaign will release new documents concerning Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, which could be "significant" for the election.

Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday, Assange, who has been sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012 while fighting extradition, said WikiLeaks was combing through thousands of pages of material.

A variety of documents from various institutions that are associated with the election campaign had yielded "some quite unexpected angles, that are quite interesting, some even entertaining," he said. Assange reported the documents would "absolutely" be released before the November 8 election.

Asked whether the leaks would be a game changer for the vote, Assange said: "I think it's significant. It depends on how it catches fire in the public and in the media."

Ahead of the Democratic National Convention last month, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 emails gleaned by hackers who apparently raided the accounts of seven DNC leaders. The emails showed the nominally neutral party staff trying to undermine Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders's campaign and caused the resignation of Democratic Party leader Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

"In the case of the DNC leaks for example, we pushed as fast as we could to try and get it in before the Democratic Nomination Conference, because obviously people had a right to understand who it is that they're nominating," Assange said. "The same is true here for the US electoralprocess," he added. Assange, 45, recently marked the start of his fifth year inside Ecuador's mission in Britain in his bid to avoid extradition to Sweden. The anti-secrecy campaigner is wanted there for questioning over a 2010 rape but fears that he could then be extradited to the United States to be tried over publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents.