Undeterred by his inability to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, on Thursday Julian Assange followed through on his plan to enter Australian politics. On Thursday, he formally announced his candidacy for the Senate and started a new WikiLeaks party, which will have another six candidates running in the September 14 election. “My plans are to essentially parachute in a crack troop of investigative journalists into the Senate and to do what we have done with WikiLeaks, in holding banks and government and intelligence agencies to account,” he told the New York Times.
Though it’s still unclear if Assange is legally qualified to run, he had total confidence in his ability to run a campaign while several contents away. “It’s not unlike running the WikiLeaks organization,” he said. “We have people on every continent. We have to deal with over a dozen legal cases at once.” And since he’s suddenly in the headlines again, and happens to be the subject of a major film coming out in October, he shouldn’t have a problem with name recognition.
