By Tom Kludt
CNN
Donald Trump supporters who awoke early Tuesday morning hoping to discover a race-altering bombshell might wish they hit the snooze button instead.
While most of America was sound asleep, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had scheduled a major news conference for 3 a.m. ET. It was billed as an “October surprise” by Trump backers like Roger Stone and Alex Jones, who promised that the forthcoming WikiLeaks revelations would undo Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
“I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon,” Stone tweeted on Monday.
But the two-hour news conference on Tuesday produced no new disclosure. Assange, speaking over a video feed from the Ecuadoran embassy in London — where he has spent more than four years in self-imposed exile to avoid questions about a rape allegation — instead used the opportunity to commemorate WikiLeaks’ tenth anniversary and ask for donations. He said WikiLeaks will publish new information every week for the next 10 weeks, but he downplayed the notion that his disclosures will derail Clinton’s candidacy.
In the summer, WikiLeaks released hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee showing officials actively favoring Clinton over her primary rival Bernie Sanders.
“There’s been a lot of misquoting of me and WikiLeaks publications,” he said during a question-and-answer portion of the news conference. “In this particular case, the misquoting has to do with that we intend to harm Hillary Clinton or that I intend to harm Hillary Clinton, or I don’t like Hillary Clinton — all those are false. They come about as a result of (inaudible) it seems of this campaign and this trying to personalize our publications. Our upcoming publications are significant in relation to the US election, yeah, we think they’re significant. Do they show interesting features of US power factions and how they operate? Yes, they do.”
That might not satisfy the Trump backers who set their alarms. Several observers on Twitter complained early Tuesday that Assange had failed to deliver the goods.
“Release the documents NOW @wikileaks! We only have a month before #Election2016 comes to an end!” Jones, the founder of alt-right outlet InfoWars, tweeted.
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