WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been promising a damaging leak about Hillary Clinton for weeks now, and Donald Trump's most ardent supporters had high hopes for a WikiLeaks event live from Berlin early Tuesday morning. "HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks," Trump advocate Roger Stone Jr. tweeted in anticipation. The Trump-friendly Drudge Report warned in its main headline: "ASSANGE COMES FOR HER: WIKILEAKS DANGER." And the expected bombshell was a topic of discussion on Monday's Hannity.
The event itself, streamed over Facebook, was underwhelming. After more than an hour of talk about WikiLeaks' history, track record, and legal battles, Assange finally appeared via video chat from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He discussed changes to how WikiLeaks will solicit donations, plugged some new books, then mentioned that if he were going to release a bombshell about the U.S. election, "we don't do it at 3 a.m." in the U.S. When asked, he said WikiLeaks planned to publish about a million documents, including "significant material" on the U.S. election, before the end of the year, but said that material wasn't specifically aimed at Clinton, suggesting he'd been misquoted.
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