Look, there's a lot of questionable activity around Ecuador, Assange and Wikileaks. Follow the money.
Ecuador has been in difficult financial straits for decades. They got saddled with a lot of IMF loans thanks to the Freshwater Econs in the Reagan administration. When Correa became president in 2007, they were paying 6% of their annual GDP in interest payments. In 2000, their internal economy went into tailspin, and they had to adopt the US dollar as their currency to break out of the hyperinflation. And they're trying to ditch a lot of that debt. (I don't disagree with this, as it happens; the IMF has caused more anguish than it has ever improved.) They seem to be in an intermediate step towards de-dollarization right now; in 2015, they introduced a digital cryptocurrency -- it's more Paypal than Bitcoin, but they're definitely trying to control their own money. (At this point, it's not clear if their digital currency is useful for money-laundering, but it's far from transparent, and any financial system without transparency becomes a means of money-laundering.)
During that same time, Assange self-imprisoned himself rather than meet with Swedish law enforcement. (July 2012) After that, Wikileaks got relatively quiet. Their major dumps were fairly minor, as these things go. Until about 15 months ago.
What happened? Well... the Ecuadorian economy has been in recession, because they're getting hit with the same low oil prices that are aimed at Russia. Ecuador's single largest export is oil -- 1/3 of their public sector revenue and 40% of their export earnings. (See also, Venezuela.) For the past several years, they've had major protest movements that have resulted in numerous deaths and imprisonments, some highly questionable media closures and controls, and at least one attempted coup.
Then they had an earthquake in 2016 that killed 800 people, injured 16,000 and caused about $3B in damages, especially to their (already fragile) infrastructure. If a similar event were to happen in the US, it would have to kill 20,000, injure 335,000 and cause about $500 billion in damage. For a country of 16 million people, with a $109B in annual GDP, that earthquake was devastating.
They've already got a difficult relationship with the United States, because it was the Milton Friedman asshats that extracted billions from them and put a majority of their population into a form of debt-serfdom. The drug war has not helped. Extractive industries have not helped. And in 2016, it's not like our Congress was in a mood to help anyone but their corporate masters, so there was little recovery help from the US, and almost none that didn't come with more IMF loan terms. (This is why foreign aid matters -- when a country is in existential crisis, they will find the money somewhere, and it's in our best interest that they think of us as good neighbors.)
They've been selling (mostly oil) land leases to and accepting loans from China for years, on better terms than the IMF offers; but they've also got common cause with Russia because they need oil prices to rise. And sitting in their embassy, eating their food and using their wifi, is a plausibly deniable malignant boil who has never once released a single document on Russia's intelligence or corrupt practices. A few hundred million in untraceable money is nothing for the oligarchs, and it means a lot of road work, electrification and water treatment for Ecuadorans. They've got a money system that can be diverted into money laundering.
Documents aren't that hard to create. The templates are fairly easy to replicate and there are a lot of well-educated, underpaid people in Russia who would like to keep the heat in their apartments and food on their plates and have watched their savings evaporate as the ruble has turned back into toilet paper. Wikileaks and Assange have a vested interest in causing US chaos, because Assange personally believes himself persecuted (and his personal economy runs on entitlement and martyrbation, and as a self-imprisoned political prisoner, he's not subject to pesky things like child support and handling personal relationships like an adult), and Wikileaks appears to have become a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB. (Note that Novaya Gazeta, the "opposition" Russian language newspaper, founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, is now owned by an oligarch, and while it had a "partnership" with Wikileaks in 2010 to disclose Russian malfeasance, not a single article has ever been published. It's been hit with major DDOS and malware attacks, and its journalists have a nasty tendency towards Sudden Putin Death Syndrome. They appear to be allowed to exist as a pressure valve and when they become too uppity, someone dies suddenly.)
Given all of those connections -- why would I trust anything from Wikileaks? Documents are easy. Digital documents are easier.
I am not saying our government is at all innocent -- it's not. And INTEL got way too much unsupervised access to the national credit card after 2001. I'm well aware they've been doing massive black budget bullshit. But I'd put it on the Rummy-Cheney-Poindexter bill, not the Obama Administration's bill, if for no other reason than the 2009-2010 congress was busy trying to undo the fuckery of 2008, and since 2011, Congress has done its best to deny the Obama administration anything.
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Enough already!!! 
