Cholera or gonorrhea...

Assange: 2016 election is like choosing between 'cholera or gonorrhea'

By POLITICO Staff

An election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is like been asked to choose between "cholera or gonorrhea," Julian Assange said in a new interview aired Wednesday.

"Personally, I would prefer neither," the WikiLeaks founder and frontman told Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now."

Assange, who previously acknowledged he had timed the released of hacked documents and emails between Democratic National Committee staffers to harm Clinton, now said he didn't see much difference between the former secretary of state and the Manhattan billionaire vying to defeat her in November.

"Look, I think — you know, we know how politics works in the United States. Whoever — whatever political party gets into government is going to merge with the bureaucracy pretty damn fast. It will be in a position where it has some levers in its hand. And so, as a result, corporate lobbyists will move in to help control those levers. So it doesn’t make much difference in the end," Assange said.

"What does make a difference is political accountability, a general deterrence set to stop political organizations behaving in a corrupt manner," he said. "That can make a difference, because that changes the perception of what you can do or not do. And so, always — well, almost always, you should choose the principled position, which is to set a disciplinary signal about acting in a corrupt way, and take a philosophical position, which is our institutions can only be as good as our understanding of our institutions."

Assange, who remains holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid prosecution in Sweden on sexual assault charges, said the documents indicated the DNC was sending instructions "to go out and covertly spread anti-Bernie Sanders propaganda ... It’s not simply expressing a sentiment. It is expressing an instruction within the DNC to subvert the Bernie Sanders campaign."

He also alleged that the hacked emails showed collusion between the media and the Democratic Party.

"The Washington Post involved in a co-fundraising party, an off-list co-fundraising for the DNC, calling up MSNBC during the middle of a program and saying, 'Pull that segment now,' Debbie Wasserman Schultz calling up the president of MSNBC in order to discipline Morning Joe, etc. That’s, you know, of course, something that we’ve all suspected happens, but this is concrete proof of it," he said.

But the heart of the documents, Assange said, are the leaked files that detail the DNC's fundraising activities.

"That has the real core, the financial core, of the power structure and the exercise of monetary influence over the DNC. And that’s something that’s going to seed journalistic investigations for years," he said.