In an op-ed for '' The Intercept '' , James Risen chided the media for its lopsided reporting on emails : To their disgrace , editors and reporters at American news organizations greatly enhanced the Russian echo chamber , eagerly writing stories about Clinton and the Democratic Party based on the emails , while showing almost no interest during the presidential campaign in exactly how those emails came to be disclosed and distributed ... The hack was a much more important story than the content of the emails themselves , but that story was largely ignored because it was so easy for journalists to write about Clinton campaign chair John Podesta . On July 27 , 2016 , the '' New York Times '' reported that Julian Assange , in an interview on British ITV on June 12 , 2016 , had " made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton 's chances of winning the presidency " , and that in a later interview on the program Democracy Now ! on July 25 2016 , the first day of the Democratic National Convention , he acknowledged that " he had timed their release to coincide with the Democratic convention . " In an interview with CNN , Assange would neither confirm nor deny who WikiLeaks ' sources were ; he claimed that his website " ... might release " a lot more material " relevant to the US electoral campaign ... " Following the publication of the stolen emails , NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden criticized WikiLeaks for its wholesale leakage of data , writing that " their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake . " The '' Washington Post '' contrasted the difference between WikiLeaks ' practices and Snowden 's disclosure of information about NSA : while Snowden worked with journalists to vet documents ( withholding some where it would endanger national security ) , WikiLeaks ' " more radical " approach involves the dumping of " massive , searchable caches online with few — if any — apparent efforts to remove sensitive personal information . " On July 25 , 2016 , Anne Applebaum , columnist for the '' Washington Post '' , writes that ... with the exception of a few people on Twitter and a handful of print journalists , most of those covering this story , especially on television , are not interested in the nature of the hackers , and they are not asking why the Russians apparently chose to pass the emails on to WikiLeaks at this particular moment , on the eve of the Democratic National Convention . They are focusing instead on the content of what were meant to be private emails ... She goes on to describe in detail other Russian destabilization campaigns in Eastern European countries
Democratic convention
2016 Democratic National Convention
2016 Democratic National Committee email leak