Julian Assange gave an interview to Sean Hannity of Fox news. Fox news hosts the transcript on their website. The relevant exchange starts with:
HANNITY: From what we understand, the Podesta emails were hacked through a phishing scheme where it said, Click on this, give us your information, and he did so.
ASSANGE: Well, there's a number of hacks of the DNC and Podesta based on the publicly available information. This is not something coming from our sources. We published, as part of our policy of full disclosure and not interfering with the material...
Here Julian asserts that according to public information multiple people hacked the DNC and hacked Podesta.
Assange makes it clear that he isn't revealing any information that comes from his source about how his source got the data.
He starts to point to his general policy of dealing with sources and that policy isn't to comment about how the source got the information. Given that Assange previously already said that he doesn't reveal any nonpublic information about how Wikileaks got the data, Hannity cuts that explanation off by saying:
HANNITY: Right.
Then Assange starts to commit on the public evidence of how Podesta E-Mails got compromised. It worthwhile at this time to remember that Assange asserts that multiple people hacked it.
It continues with:
ASSANGE: ... we published the -- several Podesta emails which shows Podesta responding to a phishing email. Now, how did they respond?
Podesta gave out that his password was the word "password." His own staff said, This email that you've received, this is totally legitimate. So it's -- so this is something a 14-year-old kid -- a 14-year-old kid could have hacked into Podesta that way.
Assange speaks here about how bad the Clinton campaign was at Cybersecurity. He speaks about why he thinks multiple people hacked Podesta. If the skills of a 14-year old kid are enough to hack the information, that suggests that multiple capable actors hacked the mails.
It's worth remembering what former CIA/NSA director Hayden said about the Clinton hacks:
So, without concrete evidence, which I don’t have, and apparently the FBI doesn’t have either, what I have felt comfortable saying about this is that I would lose a whole lot of respect for a whole bunch of intelligence agencies around the world, if they hadn’t penetrated that server and gotten access to the emails.
Given how bad the information security at the campaign was, Hayden would lose respect for the Russian, the Chinese and maybe other intelligence agencies if they failed to read the mails.
Let's get back to the issue of the password of password. There seems to be no direct public evidence of this being an email password. Given that Assange himself says that he speaks about public evidence it's likely that he speaks about the Windows 8 password that was set to "p@ssw0rd". That means Assange got the facts slightly wrong. An IT system were passwords like "p@ssw0rd" are set is however one that isn't held to high security standards and thus this supports the allegation that the IT security was low enough that Podesta got hacked multiple times.
