Julian Assange hits back over claims he backed Trump: ‘It’s an obscenity laden campaign!’

, the co-founder of WikiLeaks, wrote a series of angry Tweets about the accusations made by The Intercept, which is a publication dedicated to “adversarial journalism”.

The story claimed Mr Assange supported the Republican Party during the election and called Hillary Clinton a “bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath”. 

The article, which came out on February 14, focused on private Twitter messages from WikiLeaks staff from November 2015 onwards. 

According to the leaked messages, Mr Assange wrote: “We believe it would be much better for the GOP to win.

“Hillary has greater freedom to start wars than the GOP and has the will to do so.” 

Another time, he wrote: “Perhaps Hillary will have a stroke”. 

The Intercept article said: “Assange’s thinking appeared to be rooted not in ideological agreement with the right wing in the US, but in the tactical idea that a Republican president would face more resistance to an aggressive military posture than an interventionist President Hillary Clinton would.”

However, Mr Assange has said WikiLeaks does not keep such messages, had not been contacted by the authors and cannot confirm any Twitter supporter group messages. 

He slammed the authors of the report for failing to carry out “basic fact checking” to realise that WikiLeaks is run by rotating staff. 

Mr Assange said: “The article uses messages from late October 2016 when I infamously had no internet access.”

The WikiLeaks founder said Micah Lee, who wrote the article, was “formally behind cutting off WikiLeaks’ US tax deductible donations”. 

He said: “Lee has become hysterical. The conflict of interest is obvious. Such a story should have been given to someone else. By failing to do so the story’s credibility has been marred.”