Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange goes on the offensive over claims Russia was behind Clinton email hack, saying Kremlin is NOT its source

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has flatly rejected U.S. intelligence claims that his organization received leaked Clinton emails from the Russian government
• He says the allegations are part of a 'foolish' and 'dangerous' effort by Democrats to overturn Donald Trump’s election victory
• Said group has a strict policy against commenting on sources, but he wanted to dispute allegations Wikileaks was involved in a Russian-orchestrated campaign

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange flatly rejected U.S. intelligence claims that his organization received leaked Clinton emails from the Russian government, saying the allegations are part of a 'foolish' and 'dangerous' effort by Democrats to overturn Donald Trump’s election victory.

'Our source is not the Russian government,' Assange told Sean Hannity on his radio show on Thursday, in his first U.S. interview since the election. 'We have U.S. intelligence saying that say they know how we got our stuff and when we got it, and us saying we didn’t get it from a state.'

Assange said his group has a strict policy against commenting on its sources, but he wanted to dispute allegations that Wikileaks was involved in a Russian-orchestrated campaign to swing the election for Donald Trump.

The CIA believes the Russian government gave Wikileaks hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton's campaign Chief John Podesta to intentionally damage Hillary Clinton. But that view has been questioned by the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence, who say there is not enough evidence to determine Russia’s motivation and whether it gave the documents to Wikileaks.

Assange declined to confirm or deny comments from former UK Ambassador Craig Murray – a close Wikileaks associate – who told Dailymail.com this week that the group's email sources were American and that he met with one of them in Washington, D.C.

'We don’t comment on sourcing,' said Assange. 'Craig Murray is a former UK ambassador. He is a friend of mine. He is not authorized to speak on behalf of Wikileaks.'

Murray told Dailymail.com that he traveled to Washington, D.C. in September and met with a Wikileaks source in a wooded area near American University.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

Murray is a controversial figure. He was removed from his posting in Kazakhstan amid allegations of misconduct. He was cleared but quit the U.K. diplomatic service and is now a critic of successive British governments.

Although Assange said Murray does not speak for Wikileaks, the ex-diplomat's links to the organization are well known.

Assange speculated that Clinton supporters were promoting the Russia allegations to raise doubts about the election's legitimacy, in a last-ditch effort to block Trump from getting instated by the Electoral College.

Democrats have been urging electors in states that voted for Trump to flip their support when the Electoral College meets on Monday. If enough electors were to switch their votes, it could block Trump from taking office – although experts say the strategy is a long-shot and would almost certainly be overruled in congress.

'It's foolish because it won't happen,' said Assange. 'It's dangerous because the argument that it should happen can be used in four years' time, or eight years' time, for a sitting government that doesn't want to hand over power. That's a very dangerous thing.'

The Wikileaks founder said he was surprised by Trump's victory, and that the inaccurate polling – which predicted a comfortable Clinton victory – might have actually helped him win by giving Clinton a false sense of security.

The Clinton campaign 'got fooled by the polling and therefore didn't spend the amount of money that they needed to on the campaign, and didn't recruit even more mainstream media sources to beat up Trump and defend Clinton.'

He also called the mainstream media 'a paper tiger in this election' and 'increasingly not very important.'

'There was intense pressure in the United States from the mainstream media to make people feel ashamed for wanting to vote for Donald Trump, and to make them feel that they had to vote for Hillary Clinton, even though they didn't want to,' said Assange.

'The degree of bias they've been showing during this election…this is the other reason why Trump won,' he added. 'That kind of hectoring from the liberal media in the United States, and the tide of advertising that Hillary Clinton was putting out, really put a lot of people off.'

Assange spoke with Hannity's radio show by phone from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He has been confined to the embassy since 2012, when Ecuador granted him asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations.