Quito, November 5 (RHC)-- In an interview conducted by John Pilger, Julian Assange – founder of the whistle-blowing WikiLeaks website – denied that the source of the leaked e-mails plaguing Hillary Clinton was the Russian state, as her campaign has frequently claimed.

“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false and we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange told Pilger as part of a documentary set to air this weekend on RT.

WikiLeaks has been slowly releasing e-mails connected to John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, with the latest batch having been released Thursday. The e-mails, which included Clinton's paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, have caused considerable damage to Clinton's White House ambitions. Other e-mails revealed Clinton's contempt for trade unions and workers, while others still showed close coordination between her campaign and Super PACs, illegal under U.S. law.

Moscow has long rejected the accusation it is connected to the Podesta e-mail leak. Homeland Security Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence have both previously said they were “confident” the leak came from Russian sources.

It is unusual for WikiLeaks to comment on its sources in order to protect them, but in this instance, Assange said he felt compelled to comment since the alleged source of the e-mails was distracting people from its content.

“Saying nothing leads to a vacuum into which false claims about our sources can be projected. We tolerate such claims until they are used to distract from the publication. After careful consideration of the source protection requirements involved, we are confident that eliminating state parties does not appreciably increase the risks to our sources for this publication,” said Assange in a statement.

Assange's claim was backed up by Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who told Sputnik News that the emails came from a Washington insider.

“The source of these e-mails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all.  I discovered what the source was when I attended the Sam Adam's whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these e-mails comes from within official circles in Washington, D.C.  You should look to Washington, not to Moscow.”