Donald Trump: ‘I Know Nothing About WikiLeaks’
Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign openly appreciated WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange for publishing thousands of hacked Democratic emails, many of them damaging to Hillary Clinton.
However recently, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that, “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing,” when asked if he still loves the organisation.
The US president added that he has “been seeing what’s happened with Assange” and said that what happens next is up to Attorney General William Barr.
“I love WikiLeaks”, President Trump was reported saying at an October 2016 rally in Pennsylvania.
“Getting off the plane, they were just announcing new WikiLeaks, and I wanted to stay there, but I didn’t want to keep you waiting”, he (Trump) said later in November. “Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks”.
Speaking at an event in New York City on Thursday, Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that, “The bottom line is that he (Assange) has to answer for what he has done, at least as it has been charged.”
“It’s not about punishing journalism, it is about assisting the hacking of a military computer to steal information from the United States government, and look, I’ll wait and see what happens with the charges and how it proceeds,” she added.
The US wants the 47-year-old to be extradited and tried for allegedly conspiring with American whistleblower Chelsea Manning in her leak of classified government documents a decade ago.
After leaking information about US atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and stayed there for seven years until he was arrested by UK police on the embassy’s premises on Thursday and forcefully dragged out of the building.
According to a report by The Hill, soon after his arrest, the US Justice Department unsealed an indictment accusing Assange of conspiring with former US intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning to break a computer password in order to access classified government materials.
