‘I know nothing about Wikileaks. It’s not my thing,’ says Trump following Assange’s arrest — RT USA News

US President Donald Trump, who said he loved WikiLeaks during his election campaign, tried to distance himself from the arrest of Julian Assange, which was carried out by Britain on the request of the US.

Speaking to journalists in the Oval Office on Thursday, hours after the arrest of Assange in London, Trump said:

I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing.

Trump was far less reluctant to speak about the transparency site in 2016, when it played a major role in the US presidential election after it published a number of documents leaked from the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Then-candidate Trump called the work of the site “amazing” and said he “loved” what it was being doing.

Ironically, those statements were used against Trump by proponents of the now-debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory, which said his campaign colluded with the Russian government to steal the election. Russia was accused of hacking into DNC computer networks and releasing stolen documents via WikiLeaks – an allegation that both Moscow and the website deny.

Trump officials at one point were accused by the US media of having foreknowledge of the contents of one of the batches of documents published by WikiLeaks. The story soon flopped after it turned out that several outlets, which claimed to be reporting separately, based their reporting on a mis-read date of a tweet, which was actually sent by a random person to the Trump campaign to draw attention to a fresh release of leaked materials.

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Via RT. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.