With the US election campaign at an end, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied that his group has "a nefarious allegiance with Russia" and said he had come under "enormous pressure" to halt publication of a trove of emails pirated from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

In a statement published on the group's website, Assange said efforts to discredit him by linking him to Russian President Vladimir Putin were reminiscent of the "red scare" tactics used in the 1950s to hunt down communists. He did not explain, however, how he obtained the emails.

US officials have accused Russia of the hack that captured the emails and have said their publication by WikiLeaks was part of a plot to influence the US election. WikiLeaks has published tens of thousands of emails in the past month taken from the Gmail account of John Podesta, the Clinton campaign's chairman. So far, WikiLeaks has released 35 batches of the emails.

"The real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work," Assange wrote. "No one disputes the public importance of these publications. It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election."