Washington Free Beacon reporter Lachlan Markay described Julian Assange as "anti-American" in a television appearance Tuesday evening, adding that nothing the WikiLeaks founder says should be trusted.
Markay was discussing Assange's newly aired interview with Sean Hannity as part of a panel discussion on the Fox Business show "Kennedy" alongside Andy Levy and Kirsten Haglund.
To start off the segment, host Kennedy played a brief clip from Hannity's exclusive interview with Assange in which the WikiLeaks founder vehemently denied that hacked emails his group released from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign did not come from the Russian government. Kennedy then asked the panel if Assange should be believed.
"I don't trust a word he says," said Markay, who spent much of the last weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign reporting on the hacked emails distributed by WikiLeaks.
The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia was responsible for the hacks into American political networks during the election, including the WikiLeaks releases, although President-elect Donald Trump has disputed that claim.
"Julian Assange is explicitly anti-American in his views," Markay said. "He has stated his goal is to render the U.S. government completely inoperable by making internal communication impossible."
Before releasing emails relating to the Clinton campaign, Assange in 2010 obtained and released confidential files pertaining to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I think his motives on their own, especially for people on the right, should be at the very least wary and at most just don't believe a word he says," Markay continued.
Haglund, a former Miss America contestant, and Andy Levy, co-host of Fox News' "Red Eye," both generally agreed with Markay's distrust of Assange's denial of connections to Russia.
To finish off the segment, the panel briefly discussed the premiere of the new season of "Celebrity Apprentice," which is being hosted by Arnold Schwarzenegger.