In an interview with Sean Hannity on Thursday, founder Julian Assange officially and definitively declared Russia did not provide hacked documents to WikiLeaks — directly contradicting nebulous intelligence reports from unknown officials with the CIA.

"Our source is not the Russian government," Assange told Hannity.

"In other words, let me be clear," Hannity asked, "Russia did not give you the Podesta documents, or anything from the DNC?"

"That's correct," Assange replied.

WikiLeaks has been accused by the U.S. government of working in some sort of tandem with Russian state actors during the presidential election to hack Democratic Party organizations and provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton in order to sway the election in favor of Donald Trump.

Recently, and utterly absurdly, the Obama administration went so far as to accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of being personally involved in this putative hacking — and that Trump had been aware of the effort since its supposed inception.

Despite innumerable attempts by Trump, Russian officials, and Putin to denounce those claims as completely invalid, the controversy has continued to rage and has driven a deepening cleft in the intelligence community.

One criticism of WikiLeaks publishing of the documents and emails has been its seeming lopsided disclosing of information only damaging to the Democratic establishment — and seemingly nothing of the same about the Republican Party.

Asked to confirm whether or not WikiLeaks had received hacked information from the Republican National Committee, Assange explained,

"We received about three pages of information to do with the RNC and Trump, and … but it was already public somewhere else."

Hannity asked for the WikiLeaks founder's thoughts on claims from the CIA that Russian officials had actively and purposefully influenced the election, Assange said:

"Well, I think it's very interesting. The key quote … is from James Clapper, on the 17th of November — James Clapper is the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, who oversees all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies — and so his statement is (this is made to the House Intelligence Committee) 'as far as the WikiLeaks connection, the evidence is not strong, and we don't have a good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided. We don't have good insight into that.'"

Assange also noted, without being prompted to the topic, that the ongoing effort to 'flip' electors away from Trump toward Clinton marks a dangerous precedent, as future administrations could employ the same method to stay in power after being voted out.

"Our publications," Assange continued, "did make a significant influence during the elections — lots and lots of Americans talked them up, read them, analyzed them, forwarded them to each other. It was the most discussed topic, according to Facebook, throughout October.

"Then you have U.S. intelligence saying they don't know how we got our stuff or when we got it, and us saying, we didn't get it from a State. Then, there's hacking of various systems that has occurred — a leading way to get intelligence: the Israelis do it, the Russians do it, the Chinese do it, the French do it, every year, every election cycle, to understand what policies are. So it's no surprise at all that there's record of Russians or others hacking all of these systems."