If Clinton isn’t Assange’s target, then what’s in all those documents he’s about to leak?

The online rumors, certainly on politically right-wing websites, had been that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was preparing to deliver a killing blow to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign during the organization’s press conference in Berlin Tuesday.

The reality was somewhat less. Assange made a rare public appearance, by video uplink, at an event to mark the 10th anniversary of the registration of the WikiLeaks domain name. In it, he noted that beginning this week and continuing for the next 10, they would be releasing a total of 1 million documents. Some of those documents, he said, would deal with the U.S. elections.

“There have been a lot of misquotes,” he said during his appearance, which lasted just under an hour. Among the rumors: “I’m going to destroy Hillary Clinton, or harm Hillary Clinton, or that I don’t like Hillary Clinton. That’s not true.”

When asked if the materials that are expected to be released as early as this week (he wouldn’t be specific on the timing, but said some documents would be released this week) included information affecting both Democrats and Republicans in the coming election, he said: “There are a lot of fascinating angles.”

He was speaking from the Ecuadorean Embassy to the United Kingdom, where he has been living since seeking political asylum there in June, 2012. The video was broadcast live at the Berlin Volksbuehne, or People’s Theater, but also streamed online.

But it fell short of the expected bombshell many conservatives had expected, and appeared to be hoping for. Before the event, Republican political consultant Roger Stone had tweeted:

While Assange did not deny there would be a damaging revelation coming this week, he did not say that there would be one. In fact, he spoke more about his global organization’s continuing efforts to expose “corporations who act more and more like states.”

The next 10 weeks means the document releases would extend into December, so obviously not all will involve U.S. elections. He noted that the release schedule was ambitious. He made an open request for potential journalist partner organizations to contact WikiLeaks if they were interested in reporting on the coming documents.

The event included videos explaining the impact the organization has had, as well as their notion of their top 10 document releases. That top 10 included files on Guantánamo, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, illegal chemical dumping in Ivory Coast, a video of U.S. military helicopter killing 18 civilians, including two Reuters employees, 250,000 diplomatic cables that arguably helped spark the Arab Spring and those exposing the extent of National Security Agency spying on foreign heads of state, including the tapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cell phone.

This story was originally published October 4, 2016 at 10:53 AM with the headline "If Clinton isn’t Assange’s target, then what’s in all those documents he’s about to leak?."