Wikileaks' Assange: Governments 'hate transparency. They loathe it'

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Assange: Secrecy leads to incompetence in government

WikiLeaks founder discusses his efforts to bring transparency to governments on 'Hannity'

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Fox News' Sean Hannity in an exclusive interview that his organization published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman "to give the American people true information about the players that they were going to have to deal with."

"We’re in the business of publishing information about power," Assange said. "Why are we in the business of publishing information about power? Because people can do things with power, they can do very bad things with power. If they’re incompetent, they can do dangerous things. If they’re evil, they can do wicked things."

In Part III of the interview, which aired Thursday on the Fox News Channel, Assange also said that governments "hate transparency. They loathe it. Because they have to work harder."

Assange sat down with Hannity for the exclusive at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange has been holed up for the past five years as he battles extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.

Governments are "full of incompetent people," Assange told Hannity. "And the more secretive the area is, the more incompetent it becomes because there’s no proper oversight."

However, the Australian conceded that secrecy was necessary in some areas. Assange noted that Wikileaks keeps its sources confidential, but added that secrecy "should be as small as possible [in terms of] how much it encompasses and for how long it’s encompassed."

"If you don’t know what’s happening in the world with powerful individuals, corporations and governments ... immoral actors within the state or within those big corporations prosper," Assange said at the conclusion of the interview.

"[But] if you have true information coming out about how people actually behave, what’s the result? The rest of the society goes 'You know what? I don’t want to deal with you.'"